Week 5 Response: How Remix Culture Fuels Creativity & Invention: Kirby Ferguson at TED

The article “How Remix Culture Fuels Creativity and Invention” really made me rethink copyright laws and challenge where creatively truly comes from.   The video talked about Bob Dylan and flirts with the idea that a lot of his songs were copied.  Does this happen?  I looked back at my life for the past year.  Most creativity has been started off an idea of someone else.  For example, in our classrooms we have our students look at other “exemplary” work and get ideas from it.  Is that coping?  In my personal life, my husband and I drive around to get ideas of different things we can do to our house when going through renovations.  Is that coping? Or is that form a collecting of information to make the best informed decision at hand.  The article states creativity and invention is simple coping, transforming and combining them with your own ideas. To contemplate the idea of coping work and developing your own based on another person's idea is a strange thought.  Throughout my schooling I was taught coping work was unacceptable. To me, recreating work into the development of your own ideas is simply an invention of collaborative work.  As mentioned in the video, Picasso said, “good artists copy, great artist steal.” As a teacher I do not think I would go as far as saying stealing work.  But it is interesting to think about when it comes to coping work and what it means.  The important thing to remember when having students develop work is this, one can look at ideas to shape their own innovative response.  When students hear the word copy and its ok in the same sentence it might become a word for word redo.  Teaching students what it means to look at ideas and recreate them into your own idea is very different form of”coping”.  So is this an idea schools should adapt or have they already been adapted?