To where should creative educators look to find the keys to successfully preparing students for the 21st century? Probably not in education literature - but by watching how 2.0 transforms business. Clay Shirky has been focusing quite a bit in the first chapters of Here Comes Everybody on how 2.0 has already changed societies and how business world. Creativity is a key word to the new models. He suggests that creativity has been squashed dormant in our larger corporate systems because of the voracious resource drain required to keep all of the employees moving in the right directions (Shirky, 2008). Creative repression exists in organizations everywhere and of every kind. Every teacher has felt boxed out of their best creative confections because of some unfortunately necessary politic. But this constraint certainly is not the province only teachers. All creative people can benefit by watching these changes in society and business unfold. 

Daniel Pink, in A Whole New Mind lays out evidence that embryonic new organization models that encourage creativity will prosper. (Pink, 2006) These organizations are less based on trading payment for service because their currency is in shared interests and expertise - but profitability may be in their futures. Since the 'creativity problem' we experience is not limited to education (it is a long way up to the top of Bloom's pyramid!) and we're all bozos on the same bus, the organizational solutions 'out there' can be applied 'in here'. Teachers can learn from how new systems develop or die and use what they've learned into the classroom. They can no longer afford to find refuge in an ivory tower. They've got to get out of the school (literally and virtually) and become involved in as many creative and business circles as possible to stay relevant. There they will mine the gold that their students need. The walls that separate school life from the real world are getting thinner and thinner; and in some subjects they will vanish. Our brightest students can see through those walls now.

Most stories about successful people revolve around their single-minded industriousness. And, there is the old saying "jack of all trades and master of none". People often suggest that young people should focus on one or two areas of expertise so they can outshine their competition. Does 'going out of the box' really work - isn't it a dipsersion of energies? There is ample evidence that expertise and familiarity with very diverse subjects provides the raw material for new ideas. Connections are made through the diverse subjects that could not be made by a specialist in one area. One of America's most creative men was a 'classical' composer named Charles Ives (1874-1954). He did not seek refuge from life in an ivory tower like most composers of the 20th Century. He also did not water-down his talent to the masses for fame and celebrity. He decided to write music that interested him at that moment, without the need to justify it to scholars or to the public. He chose to become an insurance man (!), back when that industry was young. Ives grew wealthy by applying his creativity in that business. He said that his work life fed his music and vice-versa. In his preface to his Book of 114 Songs, Ives states that "an interest in any art-activity from poetry to baseball is better, broadly speaking, if held as a part of life". The great free-jazz legend, Sam Rivers, suggests that music business people are people who couldn't cut it as creative artists and the artists usually have better ideas of how to make their living but don't have the freedom to do it. Creativity is a natural function of the healthy mind. And since learning takes place everywhere, not just in a school, it also should not be confined. In the same way Ive's life was richened by embracing as much as he could outside of his art, so should teachers constantly be active outside of the classroom. And Web 2.0 blogs, social networks and communication tools are some ways they can afford to do it.

Pink, D. (2006) A Whole New Mind. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group.

Secondary 

Sam Rivers Interviews: 1999 - 2007, Keith Lay interviewer and videographer

Charles Ives: Postface to 114 Songs http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Postface_to_114_Songs.djvu