Blog Three

Change This

            Three of the Seven Layers that spoke to me were Be Generous, Make Art, and Acknowledging the Lizard. Be Generous stood out to me because it talked about the importance of sharing ideas and how those who are creative respect the creativity of others with the spreading of creative ideas. Make Art also stood out to me because it was discussed that art has the potential to be anything. It doesn’t have to be to set standards and that anything interactive and creative can be considered art. Acknowledging the Lizard was interesting as well because of the concept that we need to acknowledge the resistance it creates in order to ignore it and be able to create art.

            While these exercises are interesting and the purpose is understandable, they limit the creative abilities of students. With having to stick with specific criteria students feel pressured to produce a project rather than create one that fits within their creative ideas and allows them to express those ideas. The deadlines as well make students feel pressured to produce their creative work in a quick manner due to the stress of all the work piled onto students in college today. This limits their ability to create creative pieces because they would rather create work that meets the guidelines so they can work on other pieces of class work rather than the creative pieces that they are asked to produce. By doing this students aren’t reaching down into their deepest potential for creating their creative masterpieces. In class it may be more beneficial to reduce some of these guidelines so that students have room to express their creative abilities more. Having more creative blog ideas rather than discussing articles and stories would achieve this. By allowing students to analysis different videos, songs, video games, and write about them would be one way to achieve this. By being able to analysis other’s work, that can make another’s creative work better because they understand the creative process behind other’s work. It would also be interesting to have the opportunity to blog about creative pieces in media that students discover that are not mainstream, such as youtube videos, indie artists, independent films, and small game developers. This would allow students to share creative work that inspires them as well as promote creative work that they enjoy. While I do not find these exercises in class pointless and a waste of time, I do feel that alternatives to assignments would help for students to explore their creativity by having a chance to enjoy what they are writing about. When projects are more enjoyable students will be more likely to explore their creativity more in depth and potentially could find ideas that will inspire them in the future. By loosening the guidelines I feel that students will produce better products and gain more knowledge about their creative processes rather then be dragged down by constricting guidelines. This will help to make their creative process develop as well as have gained more from the class.