Improving your Creativity

Both Purging and Keeping Your Study or Thesis Paper Notes

2014-03-17

An easy and lightweight way to deal with the amount of paper that accumulates during your studies. You can carry it in your pocket when you are finished. Seriously. Even handwritten notes.
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“… because woman.” Seriously?

2014-03-16

A rant about a common reaction -- esp. on Twitter -- when something bad happens to a woman, it is frequently attributed to the fact that she is a woman. And that's a pretty bad default strategy. Turned into an interesting -- I would not call is discussion, but reaction -- on Twitter, which strongly supported my view.
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Discussing University Teaching With Colleagues: Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting or Quality Circle?

2014-03-14

Short comment whether courses for academics to improve teaching are AA meetings or quality circles.
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Using an iPad as short-term backup

2014-03-07

A cool way to make quick backups if you use a Pomodoro app connected to your Mac, so what you have written survives a notebook crash.
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When you need that certain push to get through your work day

2014-03-05

A nice solution when you have a pushing rope day. Yup it's Pomodoro, but with a nice app -- and what is often missed. Oh, and a line drawn around a prison beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot.
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“When all around is chaos, when everyone is driven to the brink of insanity … relax.”

2014-03-04

In a course we learned about internal hurriers and how to deal with them. More in the post, but it seems I use quotations to keep them in check.
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Using and abusing academic workshops

2014-03-03

Workshops and loyalty, esp. to supervisors if they are the problem you need help with. Also, sickness and ideology, but I repeat myself.
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Marketplaces of Ideas

2014-03-02

The Internet is a great marketplace of ideas. People can exchange their ideas in many forms and places. Sometimes, all it takes is a camera. Article contains a nice example and a question.
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How to deal with keynote files that crash when you try to open them (movie conversion error)

2014-03-01

Apple has dumbed down Keynote, resulting in a possible error when you open a keynote file with a video. If this happens, there's a workaround. It's not pretty, but you get your slides back.
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“Teaching” at the university, or: I am neither a, nor your, private teacher

2014-02-28

Clearing up a misconception in university teaching. At least in Germany, the ones in front of the class are not teachers, nor are they rewarded for teaching. Making this and a few other issues clear is really helpful. I think it led to students still knowing they could ask me, but stop wasting time on irrelevancies.
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A comment for those seeking to use this site for personal gain: Given the increase in requests, let me be clear. I write on this blog because I want to. It’s my hobby, my playground. Sometimes people point me to interesting products/services and I write about them. But any request regarding ads or sponsored placements ends up the trash without a reply. And if you think something would be of interest, differentiate yourself from the spammers by referring to a posting — in an intelligent way. (I get enough auto-generated mails to identify them immediately.)

BTW, posts can get updated after I published them if I spot spelling errors (not a native speaker) or think a different wording might improve precision and clarity.

This blog is not focused on a single topic, or method. As long as it is relevant to improving creativity (or allowing it in the first place), it's fair game.
Some postings on this blog deal with freedom, as I think that we need freedom of thought, of speech, of association, etc. pp. to solve mankind's problems. Thus, some postings may seem a bit remote when it comes to organizing creativity. Freedom is, however, the bedrock of creativity.
The heterogeneity of the postings can make reading this blog a bit cumbersome, at least if you are only interested in one topic. You can either use the search function (above), or use the categories or the tags to narrow down the postings you see.

ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

How to generate, capture, and collect ideas to realize creative projects.