Input - Process - Output

March 05, 2024 by Mitch Whitehead

There is a big funnel.

A huge, great, hungry thing.

Being endlessly shovelled into one end of this funnel are lots of “things.” Books, films, music, TV shows, articles, websites, podcasts, activities, memories, jokes, conversations, meals, experiences, art.

At the other end of the funnel, there is a tiny, little trickle.

The trickle is orders of magnitude smaller than the great gouts of stuff being hosed into the big end of the funnel. That trickle is the work that we produce - the things we write, the lessons we teach, the art we make. Whatever it might be. That’s not to say that everything we do in our daily lives is the output of this great funnel, it is the distilled creative product that we make.

On notebooks

January 26, 2024 by Mitch Whitehead

Notebooks have been a huge part of my personal and working life for as long as I can remember. Almost everything I do, whether it’s writing, designing, planning, or thinking, begins on paper in some way or another. I find the immediacy and freedom of pencil and paper to be something that’s completely intertwined with the way that I think and see things.

On trusting the process

October 18, 2023 by Mitch Whitehead

I've been designing some 1 day online workshops lately and I've been having trouble with one particular workshop. It just wasn't clicking for me, and I couldn't "see" the design as I could with the others. I like to think about the workshops I'm designing for a little while and let my subconscious go to work until things fall into place - and usually, that works pretty well. For some reason though it just wasn't working for me this time. I spent some time noodling away at it but wasn't really making any progress.

On thinking on a bigger scale

October 16, 2023 by Mitch Whitehead

When I was a teacher, and had all the space of a classroom, it was very common for my students and I to be working away on huge sheets of A1 paper - drawing out some idea, or mindmapping a text we were studying, or collecting our thoughts together on some topic. We’d then tape them all up on to the way to have an even bigger frame of reference for our thinking.

On where I take my brain

August 07, 2023 by Mitch Whitehead

I am fortunate enough to have a home office in which I do most of my work. It’s set up to be a space that works well for me and that I like spending time in. It’s got 1000+ books on the wall, a sofa, pictures and art that I enjoy looking at, a big desk with a big monitor, lots of stationery tucked away in drawers, and lots of technology stored in nicely labelled crates in cupboards. It’s a great space for all kinds of things. Writing emails? No problem. Having Zoom meetings? Fantastic. Doing technical design work? Go for it! But it’s not a great space for creative thinking and for a long time I was struggling to figure out why.

New Forms of Learning: Lessons from the Strandbeest

June 08, 2023 by Mitch Whitehead

Skeletal, alien creatures roam wild on the beaches of The Netherlands. Tubular bodies and an array of legs skitter along the sand powered by great sails of white cloth and stomachs of plastic. These creatures have not come from some crashed meteor or alien spacecraft but from the mind of a Dutch inventor, artist, engineer, and creator - Theo Jansen.

Cumulative Gains at BETT

January 27, 2019 by Mitch Whitehead

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at BETT - the global Education Technology show in London. I was asked to speak on behalf of Google, as one of the educators speaking at Google’s Teaching Theatre. I’ve long been a vocal advocate of Google Apps for Education and have seen its transformational effect in my own teaching practice and in that of my friends and colleagues – at my own institution as well as on-line.

I gave a talk that focused on what might seem like a pretty dull aspect of education technology – being efficient. Being efficient is not exciting. Being efficient isn’t attention grabbing but, I hope I argued, everything that is exciting and attention grabbing becomes possible when you become more efficient.