Quoting Einstein on Imagination

During the past week I have been catching sight of fragments of a quote above the door to one of the many box offices at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival. Finally on Friday 21.08.09 I walked passed to take a closer look and they are the words of Albert Einstein. The quote is wonderful

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited while imagination enriches the world.”

I found these words especially poignant as for the past ten days I have spent a lot of my free time recovering work that I did about fifteen years ago. Being unable to access the material I had assumed it was because of the age of the files. I had tried using data recovery programmes, but with no luck. Then the other week clicking about with the toolbar I discovered that I could access them via note book possibly as the result of a recent Vista upgrade. I discovered that many of the files were empty except their names, victim of some type of virus one supposes so I went into my collection of old 3½ discs and found 3 with the corresponding file names.

The following day I went to the internet café and used an external floppy disc reader which until then didn’t know existed. And voila in front of my eyes were my old files. There followed a personal marathon of several hours over four days between the library and the internet café converting all my files manually one by one into word 2003 which I can read on my latest computer without difficulty. It has been a wonderful sensation after months searching for old documents trying everything I could think and click. I’ve moved on a lot since all this work was created some of the developed concepts have appeared in other work so one wants to go back and track down the original ideas which until last week I have been unable to do. However the mere thought of having to either scan the documents or input them again had me well and truly blocked the relief is most uplifting. It has been a fun refreshing and curious visit down memory lane. The original floppy records are also safely in the hard disc, memory stick and read only CD. What I did find amazing was the files that had been wiped clean were all creative teaching work, publication proposals, manuscripts and teacher training sessions, strange how virus work. All ideas are fodder for the creative mind though the investigation of the type of virus and if in fact it was something other I’ll have to leave for my amateur detectives who belong to another time in my imaginative space.

To celebrate the recovery of this material and in line with fantasy and fairy stories I’m publishing in this blog some of the theory and principles of my teaching ideas. The introduction to an infant course on the use of fantasy in the classroom and the introduction from Playground One @ Julie Ann Thomason 1996.