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

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,

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
Recommende
Collaborative participatory media
editing r 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_revie
ws/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