This document discusses how technologies can foster creativity. It defines creativity as creating something novel and valuable by transcending traditional ideas and rules. Creativity is important for dealing with today's complex world. Social and participatory media can promote creativity by enabling new forms of discourse, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. Technologies allow promoting creativity through open practices, aggregation and scale, and creative learning, teaching, research, and use of open educational resources.

1. Harnessing
technologies
to foster
creativity
Gráinne Conole,
Leicester University, UK
grainne.conole@open.ac.uk
ICDE Conference, Bali, 3rd October 2011

2. Creativity • Derived from Latin ‘creo’
to create/make
• About creating
something new (physical
artefact or concept) that
is novel and valuable
• Ability to transcend
traditional ideas, rules,
partners, relationships
and create meaningful
new ideas, forms,
methods, interpretations

3. Why is it important?
• Essential skill to deal
with today’s
complex, fast and
changing society
• Discourse and
collaboration are
mediated through a
range of social and
participatory media

4. Aspects
• Process: mechanisms needed
for creative thinking
• Product: measuring creativity
in people
• Person: general intellectual
habits (openness, ideas of
ideation, autonomy, expertise,
exploratory and behavioural)
• Place: best circumstances to
enable creativity to flourish

5. Stages
• Preparation: identifying the
problem
• Incubation: internalisation of
the problem
• Intimation: getting a feeling
for a solution
• Illumination: creativity burst
forth
• Verification: idea is
consciously verified,
elaborated and applied

6. Social and participatory media 6
Media sharing Blogging
Mash ups
Messaging
How are social and
Collaborative participatory media Recommender
editing systems
being used to enable
open practices?
Social Virtual worlds
networking and games
Social
Syndication
bookmarking

7. Technologies
• Can promote creativity in
new and innovative ways
• Enable new forms of
discourse, collaboration
and cooperation
• Access and repurpose
knowledge in different
forms of representation
• Aggregation and scale -
distributed and collective

8. The nature of community
• Complex, distributed, loose
communities are emerging
• Facilitated through different but
connected social networking tools
such as facebook, Twitter, Ning
• Users create their own Personal
Digital Environment
• Mix of synchronous and
asynchronous tools
• Boundary crossing e.g. the power of
retweeting
• Links between interests, rather than
places

9. Creative learning & teaching
• Open Educational
Resources
• Massive Online Open
Courses
• Learning design
• Immersive worlds
• Games

10. Creative research
• Digital scholarship
• Peer review
• Open publishing
• Collaborative research
• Distributed data
collection
Weller, 2011, The digital scholar

11. In terms of OER
• What is the relationship
between creativity and OER?
• How can creativity be used
in terms of the creation and
use of OER?
• What new creative practices
might result through effective
use of OER?

12. Key questions
• What is the nature of creativity?
• What are its key characteristics?
• What is the relationship between creativity and
general intelligence?
• How can creativity be fostered and supported?
• What is the nature of collaborative creative
practices?
• How can technologies be used to promote and
support creativity?

13. Limitless
• Unbounded
intelligence
• Unlocking
potential
• Distributed
cognition (people
and technologies)
Trailer

14. References
• Loveless, A M (2007) Creativity, technology and learning – a
review of recent literature Futurelab, http://
archive.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/lit_reviews/
Creativity_Review_update.pdf
• http://robwall.ca/2009/03/10/creativity-is-the-new-
technology/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvIQP-EBPqc
• http://vimeo.com/3365942
• http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2010/05/andrew-klavan-on-
how-21st-cent.html