Creative (Approaches to) Education

Washington, D.C.
The next session at Creativity & Cognition continues the focus on education. Su Zheng and Martin Adam are the first presenters. Their focus is on producing interactive exhibits for children in the 7-11 age group, who are in a 'concrete' cognitive stage in their interaction with technology - not uncreative, but engaging mainly with the existing affordances of technology rather than exploring its possible extensions. They point to a number of recent exhibits in UK museums which largely failed in their aim to get children involved; in particular also because they did not provide sufficient potential for social interaction.

Solutions to resolving such problems combine constructivist learning theory and the philosophy of interactivity: use familiar everyday objects, incorporate familiar and/or traditional child's play experiences, use embedded technology to sustain engagement, and provide problematic situations which cannot be accommodated in the child's existing knowledge. The key aspects of such approaches consider the process of creativity, the products of creative practice, and motivational factors for participation. Surprise turns out to be a key stimulus for creativity here; the motivation in the individual is to find the reason for an unexpected phenomenon. Su and Martin have developed a complex Creativity Surprise Model (CSM) to drive such processes; this model harnesses and magnifies the effects of the surprise event in order to encourage creativity.

The next presenters are Ellen Do and Mark Gross. Their presentation is about "a lab for making things", and asserts that everyone can be creative. To create is to make, to make is to create; 'creativity', however, is a highly loaded term, and so 'making' may be the better concept to work from. Creative design builds on a number of bases: a knowledge of materials and processes, a studio laboratory environment, and the 'Leonardo model' involving the creative inventor themselves, working across a wide variety of disciplines. (The present-day disciplinary system, however, works strongly against such divisions.)

Motivating students to engage in creative work, then, relies on their own passion for a project (owning the problem), their play instinct (tinkering with projects and playing within existing constraints, thereby allowing the problem and its solution to co-evolve), and the development of tools to make things.

Up next are Johann Sarmiento and Gerry Stahl, who have worked in virtual maths teams - teams which place mathematics as a social practice - and use the group or team as the unit of analysis. Interactional aspects of creativity exist here at the micro-level co-construction of problem-solving resources, and the development and evolution of approaches over time. The virtual maths team approach combines students in geographically distant locations into unified teams, and provides an online collaborative environment for their collaboration; this involves shared whiteboard space, tools for annotating the whiteboard, and general chat capabilities. This space, then, provides for the creative construction of a joint problem space, for interaction and semiotic association in group cognition, and for the interplay between synchronic and diachronic interactions.

Johann and Gerry studied the interactions in a number of teams using this framework. They found that indexicality is primordial in this context (but they don't define 'indexicality' here), that there is a process of collective remembering (creatively reproducing their past), and a phenomenon of 'bridging' between episodes of collaboration and individual team interactions (sharing knowledge across time and teams). Such phenomena, then, must be recognised in developing the tools for collaborative practice.

Finally, we're on to a team comprising Elif Ayiter, Selim Balcisoy, Murat Germen and Selcuk Artut from Sabanci University, Istanbul. Their goals were to develop a common language and transdisciplinary discourse between computer sciences and art and design, in pursuit of an integrated syllabus. The aim was not to remove disciplinary differences altogether, though, but to develop interdisciplinary teams including equal numbers of computer scientists and designers. Such teams were formed by lottery rather than by student self-selection, to model team formation practices in the workplace.

Amongst the challenges for students were the creation of collaborative mindmaps and problem-solving scenarios related to specific problems; in this context, each team member focusses on aspects related to their specific disciplinary strengths. (They now show some of these projects, which look very exciting.) The course is now in the process of being broadened out to wider disciplinary involvement beyond those disciplines currently involved.

Technorati : C&C 2007, cognition, creatvity, design, education, mathematics, motivation, surprise
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