Most Influential

My favorite lecture would probably have to be the lecture on divergent and convergent thinking by Blake Godkin.  The first aspect of his lecture that caught my attention was the fact that he used iTunes to create a revamped, media, PowerPoint like presentation.  I had never considered using a program such as iTunes for a presentation, but when finished, it is obvious how strong of a media it is.  Not only does it have a nice style creating an optimized environment for displaying media, iTunes forces the presenter to simplify, in turn, forcing the speaker to present instead of just reading  slides.

Also, the content of this lecture had the most impact on the development of my future abilities.  I had never thought about brainstorming as two separate tasks before, and since that lecture I can already tell that my thought process is starting to be more organized.  Another advantage to the information taught during this lecture is that it has helped me to figure out when to think without a bias and when to start being more critical.

Provocative Problem-Solving in a Global Context

To be successful and remain a competitor you must create and maintain a competitive edge.  The competitive edge comes from innovation which is more easily achieved by blowing out of the comfort zone.  It is difficult to get to this area because your mind refuses to think in an area that is beyond the zone of incompetence. 

A trick to break the comfort zone, when innovating, is to develop an impossible goal and do a short “brain storm” of ideas.  This method of impossible goals in a short time allows your mind to think effectively without realizing that it has left the comfort zone.  With a set of new and possibly outrageous ideas established, you can look at the aspects of each of them and back out the concepts that would feasibly make the impossible a reality. 

Create the outrageous, embrace the outrageous, and then create the possible.

The Singularity

Singularity was a concept that was eye opening.  I do feel that we as a society are heading towards the singularity, but I have not been able to yet formulate how strongly I believe in the theory.  The large take away from this lecture was the fact that the future is coming and we better be prepared or it will pass us by.  I am glad that I am now aware of this theory and I can start preparing myself to ride the wave in the case  it does occur and not allow myself to get be left behind the times.

From International to Local Entrepreneurship

Inspiration was the main point to be taken from this lecture.  I did not find a lot of the information useful to me because a vast majority of the lecture was discussing the startup of a business in another country, and I have no intentions of ever travelling overseas.  His message was good though, showing that just because you take one path in life does not mean that is the same path you are stuck on.  It was refreshing to know that after several years in schooling my opportunities are not limited.

The bit of information that I did find attractive was dealing with revenue.  I learned that you always want to look for multiple revenue streams especially when you can grab the same customer more than once.  It is cheaper to continue with a previous customer than it is to find a new customer.

InfoComposer

InfoComposer was an interesting concept.  This tool developed by Mr. Kerne and his team was taught to us as a means of developing a meaningful prior works collection.  I do agree that this tool has the great potential of making collecting and revisiting research easier and more effective by collecting metadata into the form of rich bookmarks

http://ecologylab.cs.tamu.edu/combinFormation/launch/index.html

Rick bookmarks lead to a potential method of brainstorming.   In lower level education   we were taught methods such as mind mapping which is helpful,   but InfoComposer has the ability to replace historic methods of brainstorming.  It is much easier to work with and manipulate changes then most of the other methods as well as resulting in a visually appealing final product.  I could defiantly see myself using this tool in the future for a variety of tasks.

Challenges and Entrepreneurship

“If you don’t’ quit, your never beat”

Gender and Creativity

I would have to say that is lecture probably provided the least benefit to me this semester.  I had no idea of how large the portion of the population was female, and was naïve about their current status in the work force.  The naivety in this area probably comes from the social media only reporting on how oppressed women are in the work force and never talking about how far they have come.

I say that this lecture was less beneficial than other lectures because although there were a lot of interesting facts and I learned more about the topic, I couldn’t figure a way that I could to bring the information forward.  As of right now, reflecting back on the semester, the only lesson that I could take away is the importance of incorporating women into groups for a variety of  reasons.    The lesson was presented in too broad of terms and I feel the point of the lesson would have come across better if the group was presented more diversely.

Personal Space and Creativity

This lecture provided a ton of food for thought.  Helping to understand how humans interact will be a useful skill from the aspect of being able to better read body language l which can be directly correlated to better individualized personal interaction skills.  Knowing what signs to look for will help me to interact better with other human beings both socially and in the professional world.

Divergent and Convergent Thinking

Right off the bat this lecture blew my mind.  To tell us that the way we learned to brainstorm is an ineffective method to generating ideas was uncomprehendable at first.  

After reviewing the concepts of divergent and convergent thinking, he explained to us that the school system teaches us how to think with convergence and in turn Americans are losing the ability to thinking divergently.  I believe this is when the concept sunk in for me… an “ah ha” moment if you will.  My first instinct when trying to generate ideas is to immediately stop and analysis an idea for validity instead of separating the two skills.  This has prevented me from effectively generating ideas.

His analogy of driving to   the two thinking skills really helped me understand the concepts.  Divergent thinking is like pressing the gas while convergent thinking is like pressing the brakes.  During the divergent phase you want to accelerate as many ideas as fast as possible.  Only once the ideas are maxed out do you start to stop and consider the pros and cons to each idea.