Friday, May 2, 2008

Live from LOEX: "Creative collaboration: Setting the course for the future of library instruction"

This is the Friday morning plenary session, by Laurel Ofstein from the Department of Management at DePaul.
Roadblocks to creativity: "It's not in the budget.", "We've always done it THIS way."
Collaboration is here to stay. In order to collaborate, be open to possibilities, including many viewpoints, start with unusual ideas.
The climate for creativity: Challenge and involvement, freedom, idea time, idea support (resources vs. automatic no), degree of conflict, discussion, humor and play, trust and openness, risk-taking.
Dreaming of an ideal tomorrow: Opportunity statement should be broad, brief and beneficial, consider the outcomes: "wouldn't it be nice if..." (WIBNI).
How to improve the MBA program, use WIBNI to brainstorm. She picks the craziest one and looks at who would be affected, then look at In What Ways Might We...
We did activity where we did WIBNI for the future of library instruction. Our ideas tended to involve online learning, integration at the course or university level,
Assumption reversal: Make three basic assumptions and reverse one assumption.

This session provided some great ideas about ideas and creativity. It definitely got me thinking about how to start thinking about an ideal situation and work backward to a logical beginning step.

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