CAL 2009: Rethinking educational digital tools as means for fostering student creativity

Live(ish) blog from #cal09

M. Ott, F. Pozzi (Presenter), Istituto Tecnologie Didattiche - CNR, Italy

Is it possible to foster creativity through an educational activity? One model of learning puts creativity at the top of a hierarchy and so there was a desire to develop and test a model for evaluating creativity.

How do we define creativity? No agreement and multiple views of what it means. Some aspects this research group thought were important care illustrated by Archimedes and Alan Turing because they were creative in different ways. Archimedes has the flash of inspiration where as Turing reasons, links and assembles. Revolutionary creativity verses evolutionary creativity. A creativity of product rather than creativity of process. There is also a distinction between individual and social creativity. However, these terms should not be seen as dichotomies but rather aspects that interact with each other.

The model they came up with concentrates mostly on the creativity process and divides into three dimensions:

• Affective
  - Involvement /immersion
  - Satisfaction
• Meta-cognitive
  - Self-evaluation
  - Process monitoring
  - Awareness of Outcome
• Cognitive
  - Generation
  - Plan
  - Production

The model was tested in two contexts:

• School education - Children in a school involved in game based learning over three years to promote logical skills but the desire was to see if the logic games also promoted creativity. Children worked as individuals.
• Lifelong learning - An online course where people worked collaboratively to perform role playing activities.

They found that the model could be used to investigate the creative process and can shed light on the creative process both at individual and group level but it needs further refinement, for example the indicators are not yet stable enough.