"Lets mix my jelly with your eggs" metaphors

[Zoidberg is trying to attract a mate]
Dr. Zoidberg: [screeching] Craw.
Female: Keep your jelly away from my eggs.
Dr. Zoidberg: [screeching] Craw.
Female:  I'm SO not interested.
Dr. Zoidberg: [screeching] Craw?
Female: I've heard THAT line before.

I don’t know about you but recently I find myself dusted with metaphorical male gametes several times each day  – the dusting comes in emails, phone conversations, and when attending workshops and meetings. 

Seems there is a new metaphor let loose in the educational landscapes of the wobbly isles.  And as befits Gladwell’s  “tipping point” its distribution has reached that point where everyone I nudged up against this week introduced it into the conversation.

The ab/use of the metaphor for normal sexual connection in the plant kingdom has reached a critical mass in educational conversation – so much so that that the next person who invites me to a  “cross pollination meeting” will be told in normal invertebrate sex talk to “Keep your jelly away from my eggs”

Tom Kelley, author of "Ten Faces of Innovation" talks of the cross-pollinator, who "can create something new and better through an unexpected juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts".

It seems that the cross-pollinate metaphor  is intended to capture a sense of Koestler’s (1970) argument that creative activity, be it in humour, discovery or art is the result of a bisociative act. These are acts that juxtapose two ideas that normally do not get thought of together.  Bisociation demands flexibility and establishes an unstable equilibrium that leads to creative originality. 

But I don’t think the "cross pollination metaphor" works well with respect to Koestler’s thinking.

The botanist in me rejects the notion that an unstable equilibrium and innovation could result from a metaphor for a biological system that is so cleverly designed to go together.

Pollination – the transfer of male gametes onto the sticky stigma of the female carpel is all about sexual connection.  Pollination occurs within the same flower (self pollination - pollen dusting onto the stigma of the same flower ) and between different flowers of the same species (cross pollination – pollen dusted onto the stigma of a different flower of the same species).  Cross pollination within the same species is common within the plant kingdom and does not conjure up images of two things that do not normally get together. 

“Lets hybridise” might be a better catch phrase – but even hybridization (pollination between flowers of different species of the same genus) does not occur between two widely different species. 

My argument is that cross pollination does not capture the extraordinary connection – the association of two things that do not normally get thought of together.  The metaphor lacks that sense of dislocation that creative originality requires. It is like an invitation to mix my jelly with your eggs.

Rather than an opportunity to bring ideas from widely different fields together cross pollination makes me think of the reverse situation – an invitation to “cross pollinate” is an invitation to bring a whole load of similar thinkers together so we can reinforce each others beliefs, maintain the status quo. 

We’ve got another cross pollination event coming up at next week’s Home Group Meeting – the focus on "New ways of Assessing for New Learning Environments".  I have offered to run a session on “A provocative look at the MoE ms response documents as tools for assessing new learning.” But have yet to hear whether it will be accepted.

Thinking about these Home Group Meetings is why I enjoyed Teemu’s post on No one ever got fired for buying LMS this week. Teemu looked at the research around group thinking and how although groups might make good decisions about already created solutions in a bewildered herd like way they are rubbish at finding problems or creating solutions

This interested me because there has been a great wave of Kanagawa like surge in education related online learning communities in New Zealand.  Everyone has their own online group/learning community space. Yet if you check out how many people actually belong to these groups, look at the discussion threads or even the edit history they don’t really qualify as participatory - there is little sense of a group or even community in the usual sense of the word.  More individual than communal.

Even more disappointing is the evidence of thoughtful discussion when these online groups meet face to face. In face to face meetings group members seem to be looking for ideas to assimilate rather than ideas they might have to accommodate.   Teemu’s “Because, everybody is having Learning Management Systems, we must have one, too” conversations are rife. The exchanges awash with self approbation and the flotsam and jetsam of  constructivist learner centred rhetoric about authentic tasks mixed with Prentskyisms about engage me or enrage me and digital natives. They are in truth face to face conversations about the importance of change that inhibit change, reinforce the status quo and seek reassurance rather than challenge.

I enjoyed Teemu’s analysis of this effect whereby “People seem to end-up to some same decisions because everybody else is taking the same decision.”

Back to the topic: Now we know that crowds are not good at setting problems. How could we teach, guide or help people to learn to ask good questions? When there are good questions it is much easier to come-up with good solutions.
To work with real problems and solutions you need close peer-groups. You must feel free and comfortable to ask naïve and hard questions So, from whom to do you ask these questions? With whom do you come up with possible solutions to the problems?

(1) From your mother and father, from your best teachers, your close friends; or

(2) from the feeds in your PLE and the blogosphere?

To put it in the fashionable terms of “networks” you basically ask (good) questions from and with the people with whom you have strong links. In his theory of social ties, Granovetters (1973) gives the following factors for strength of a tie: amount of time spent, emotional intensity, intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal service associated with the tie.

Teemu’s post makes me realize that invitations to cross pollinate in home group meetings are probably completely appropriate for the expected thinking outcomes of groups who have not spent much time together, groups who lack an emotional intensity, an intimacy and the reciprocal service associated with the tie.

“Lets mix my jelly with your eggs” metaphors - inappropriate for innovation but completely OK for group think.

Comments

[robertogreco]

As usual, you've nailed this one. Boy, I wish I got around to commenting more often, if nothing else but to reinforce how much I value your posts. It's been a long week, but I'm going to have a go at this one anyway.

This "cross pollination" business (aside from issues of metaphors) is rarely sincere. Just as the jargon is largely passed around, so are the few prescribed solutions to the issues we face. Having a committee meeting to cross-pollinate is an easy way to claim that multiple points of view were considered before a plan of action is chosen.

I am more inclined to recommend that professionals (in education and otherwise) spend a good portion of their time interacting with those who work in much different fields than their own. By listening to the processes and goings-on in these other walks of life, we can often stumble upon solutions for the problems that we are attempting to solve. It's not that we are handed neatly packaged solutions, but that new perspectives pull us off of the well worn rails that we have such a hard time jumping. This hopefully occurs during one's daily life, something along the lines of how Gladwell summarizes Jane Jacobs when he writes:

"Jacobs argued that when a neighborhood is oriented toward the street, when sidewalks are used for socializing and play and commerce, the users of that street are transformed by the resulting stimulation: they form relationships and casual contacts they would never have otherwise."

Since our neighborhoods and the circles we run with are too frequently "cocoons of the like-minded where all they hear is echoes of themselves," we must seek out opportunities to listen to these outsider stories. With the web this is easier than ever to do and subsequently it offers us a way to break out of the group think if we truly want to do so.

On a related note, I have been reading too often (in many of my edublog feeds, but not here) about how important it is for everyone to blog (students and teachers alike). I'm a bit tired of the hypocrisy: a silver-bullet solution from those that are quick to condemn one-size-fits-all solutions in education. Mind you, I have no problems with blogs and feel that they along with all of the other emerging online tools are quite valuable. It's just that I don't agree they are the only way.

[nix]

Great post and ideas.

The underlying problem is that we are all too steeped in our own world of assumptions. I went to a day long workshop with Edward de Bono recently and other teachers there were surprised that there were lots of business people in the session.

We think that we have some sort of monopoly on all sorts of 'new' and 'creative' stuff. What we don't realsie is that the rest of the world is just getting on and doing 'it'.

[Artichoke]

I love that sense of becoming a "seeker of outsider's stories" and hearing only "echoes of yourself".

And sometimes Nix it is particularly delicious to think that what we are trumpeting as new and innovative is just recapturing something old that we have lost - check out Douglas Adam's on Hw to stop worrying and learn to love the internet"

He has some lovely insights on how our claims about uncertain futures are in truth initiatives that are recapturing the past, for example
Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they're just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd they always know where it's moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind's history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn't even know to have names for them.

[cj]

I'm more of a fan of the selfish meme, i.e. we are being used by memes. Our sole purpose (or is that soul purpose?) is to be good little meme carriers. Now, for my part, I'm a tad fussy about the memes I choose to carry around, and this meme aside, am always wary of biologically inspired metaphors. But I suppose there are some peskier memes that are not as silly as the ones you so Artifully describe and which colonise without the poor old meme carrier noticing. And I prefer my eggs with a little hollandaise sauce or, failing that, a grain or two of salt.

[Artichoke]

So many visitors to Artichoke are googling for artichoke recipes (or frottage) that I have in the past felt guilty at the "gift of disappointment" that my posts must bring.

With your "I prefer my eggs with a little hollandaise sauce or, failing that, a grain or two of salt." you have changed this - realise that in one rash post about invertebrate sex I have opened the floodgates for culinary comment along the lines of take 6 md Artichokes 2 tb Olive oil 3 Garlic cloves, peeled, -minced 3 sm Red potatoes (about 1/2 -pound), grated 8 Eggs, well beaten 1/2 ts Salt 1 ts Freshly ground black pepper 1 tb Chopped fresh oregano 1 tb Minced fresh chives 1 ts Minced fresh rosemary ... Just watch my technorati rating take off

[Artichoke]

Thanks for the comments Roberto, I do believe that seeking the ideas and thinking of people quite different from ourselves is a powerful catalyst for understanding and that we "too often cocoon ourselves" in communities of like minded and like experienced individuals - seems especially true in education.

We become vulnerable, as Nix has noted, to valorising activities that are in truth common place.

As for the promotion of Web 2.0 blogs and wikis for all educators and all student rhetoric - it is alive and well in New Zealand - and it is frighteningly evangelical in tone (something I think Nix noted on her blog a while back)

Statements like the one that pinged in this morning

"Collaborative learning and the cauldron of blogs and wikis also begins this Monday.� Find out all about the why, the how and the effective use for yourself and your class.� By the end of this week, anyone who is anyone will have a class blog or wiki or both - so easy and so useful to your class programme.� Make the links between home and school.� Join the 21st century. http://time4online.org.nz

mean we are beginning to sound like someone "taking advantage of the ignorance of others" in the style of "those latter day christian pentaccosters who have discovered the lord and will tell you that He WANTS us to be rich" (off blog commenter)

[roseg]

why is it always "us" who don't have the problem? who know when, if and how to seek the advice and thinking of people different from us? who can tell the difference between bovine complacency and febrile anticipation?

i'm just asking - i really can't tell.

the metaphor i'm more reminded of when i think of genuinely new juxtapositions and creations is of the "anal probe" variety. and in my life i almost never (ok, never) appreciate the fecundity of the alien being/idea/influence at the time. i thought that was normal... :-)

[Artichoke]

Ahh Rose there is definitely a collision of dislocated ideas that creates my new thinking (trivial though it is) but I am not buying into your startle_ment of an anal probe analogy – I’d rather think of myself being dusted with male wazoo.

"When" "if" and "how" are all probably too contrived - read "artificial" - read "cross pollination meeting" - the "lets create a think tank" to solve this kind of ways to come up with entrepreneurial ideas - I reckon real dialogue/ exchange/ conviviality/ new thinking and wisdom is best unplanned - it comes from a curiosity about life - from valuing others in the diverse community for their own sake - not just those we think will advantage our thinking - nor just those in our walled garden

And how do we know if we are really valuing others - reckon Adam Fields comment below is one of the more sensible ways of looking at "community" that I have read recently

The first rule of community
There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this - in order to call some gathering of people a “community”, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.

If we don’t have the presence to find out these reasons, or even the capacity to tell when such an event has occurred, are we really building a useful analogue to the binding offline communities that exist, or is it all just a convenient fiction?

- so I guess if you make a list of the people you would miss and they are quite an eclectic bunch with experience in quite different domains then it is more likely that you will have many creative moments - then again maybe it enough to sit in one room and subscribe to 10 different magazines each week

[Bill Kerr]

It takes two to invent anything. One makes up the combinations and the other chooses from them. The two can reside in the one person.

Generate and test is only powerful if the generator is highly selective about plausible candidates for good ideas. It's not a matter of randomly putting things together and hoping for the best.

Creative people generally have no explanation about the origin of their great ideas. But one thing we know about creative people is that they have put considerable effortful study into their domain(s) of expertise

Koestler's bisociation idea doesn't really explain why some people are better generators of plausible candidates than others. It also misses out in that all ideas divide into smaller bits anyway, that bisociation is normal and everywhere, not special

I think Hofstadter is closer to the mark in explaining creativity, "that the crux of creativity is variations on a theme". It sounds more mundane than Koestler but IMO is deeper.

[Artichoke]

I like the idea that creativity and innovation is individual Bill– selfishly because I think better alone – I am rubbish in a group think situation - unless I manipulate the situation and take control

And I like your challenge to my thinking about Koestler whom I hold in almost god like reverence – you are good like that Bill -

Dunno Hofstadter – will have to do more reading so I can answer this better - but I reckon “Variations on a theme” thinking relies on the identification of a theme – which I think is the creative part of creativity that Koestler alludes to – that moment of intersection between two dislocated planes of thought is the identification of the theme/ the connection. You can use synectics to force fit creative thought but unless you know enough to intuitively feel/ see/imagine the theme or abstraction of ideas all you have are a lot of disconnected ideas

[SC]

Out of interest can everyone/anyone list the Top5 innovations they have witnessed, been involved with, designed, in a school? Explain the context and what made it innovative.
I read a report a few years back listing 120 innovative projects in Victorian schools- nothing bowled me over with 'newness' or 'bringing into relationship that, that otherwise may not be connected'. Seemed a whole bunch of 'projects'.

[Artichoke]

Try Geetha Narayanan on A Dangerous but Powerful Idea - Counter Acceleration and Speed with Slowness and Wholeness and tell me what you think

[SC]

I LOVE IT!!There's a blog for every occassion. How exciting. A colleague just came back from a Reggio Amelia study tour in Italy, and made an India connection: he keeps showing me these emails from India saying 'check this'.
Another collegue has a blog 'Slow Learning'- rip and remix personified!http://learningandknowing.blogspot.com/
I spent 20 years working in a small community school- 40-75 students. Then moved to a BIG school- 1000 students. i'm forever having 'why-do-they-do-it-like-that-?' moments.
Our chess program has tinkered away slowly- now overladen with bells and whistles- off to Scotland to presEnt a keynote!
http://mtalexandercluster.blogspot.com/
http://www.scottishjuniorchess.co.uk/cisccon/cisccon.html
It was such an exquistely simple project that just evolved SLOWWWWLY!