How the internet can facilitate social change directly | Charles Leadbeater | The Observer

Author and social entrepreneur Charles Leadbeater says that new technology can give ordinary people the means to tackle social problems in direct, innovative ways charles-leadbeater-activisim-internet Charles Leadbeater, online evangelist, at home in London. Photograph: Sonja Horsman for the Observer Charles Leadbeater is an online evangelist. The former Financial Times journalist has moved away from politics into a world of social entrepreneurs, amateur activists and grassroots campaigners who are exploiting digital technologies to develop solutions to problems that lie outside the interests of commercial and state institutions. He believes that online tools can be used to organise and galvanise. He produced a call-to-arms in We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity (Profile), a book that documents the rise of amateur activism in a time of information revolution. His research with digital activists who work with people in some of the world's most impoverished places shows how the web can galvanise support from around the globe – using new applications, devices and social networks – and what needs to be in place for this to happen.

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The Creative Brain and How It Works - Applied Neuroscience: A New Workshop with Silvia Damiano and Ralph Kerle

There is a body of theories and papers starting to emerge in neuroscience around how our brain works creatively. This body of work suggests if you can be more aware of how your brain works in a context that calls upon creative endeavour, you will be able to alter your thinking or adjust your actions, in the process becoming more aware of your own creative praxis and how you can comfortably and confidently contribute your best to creative collaboration and awareness that can be knowledgeably sustained and improved over time.

In this highly experiential session, participants will

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Never-Ending Drawing Machine: MIT's Collaborative Creativity Station | Design for Good | Big Think

Whether or not there is a creativity crisis may be up for debate, but one thing is clear: Our current education system is failing to create an environment that truly fosters creativity and engages the various components of its making – play, collaboration, flexibility, multi-modal stimulation. Now, a new application out of MIT Media Lab is aiming to address some of these issues.

The Never-Ending Drawing Machine is a collaborative creativity station, aimed primarily at kids, that allows users to digitally edit each other's analog, paper sketchbooks. Collaboration can take place either locally or remotely, as the system lives on the cloud. Designed by MIT grad student David Robert and colleagues, NEDM offers a promising platform for virtual co-creation not only within the classroom but also between classrooms around the world, offering yet another tool in our ever-growing arsenal for global, cross-cultural collaboration.

NEDM is built on TouchDesigner, a visual programming environment by realtime animation software provider Derivative, available for free for non-commercial personal and education use.

Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine and Huffington Post, and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.

When ideas have sex | Matt Ridley Video

British author Matt Ridley knows one thing: Through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, the mating of ideas. The sophistication of the modern world, says Ridley, lies not in individual intelligence or imagination; it is a collective enterprise. In his recent book The Rational Optimist, Ridley (whose previous works include Genome and Nature via Nurture) sweeps the entire arc of human history to powerfully argue that "prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else." It is our habit of trade, idea-sharing and specialization that has created the collective brain which set human living standards on a rising trend. This, he says, "holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead -- because ideas are having sex with each other as never before."

There's A Flip Side to Everything - Derek Sivers.

A neat little take on our thinking process and how it is influenced culturally with Derek Sivers