Creative Learning Theory

I will be working on a paper on Creative Learning Theory soon.

Why creative learning?

In this article on wikipedia on Creative thinking:

Some see the conventional system of schooling as “stifling” of creativity and attempt (particularly in the pre-school/kindergarten and early school years) to provide a creativity-friendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children.^[88][89][90] Researchers have seen this as important because technology is advancing our society at an unprecedented rate and creative problem solving will be needed to cope with these challenges as they arise.^[90] In addition to helping with problem solving, creativity can also helps students identify problems where others have failed to do so.^[88][89][91] See the Waldorf School as an example of an education program that promotes creative thought.

Promoting intrinsic motivation and problem solving are two areas where educators can foster creativity in students. Students are more creative when they see a task as intrinsically motivating, valued for its own sake.^{[89][90][92][93]} To promote creative thinking educators need to identify what motivates their students and structure teaching around it. Providing students with a choice of activities to complete allows them to become more intrinsically motivated and therefore creative in completing the tasks.^[88][94]

Teaching students to solve problems that do not have well defined answers is another way to foster their creativity. This is accomplished by allowing students to explore problems and redefine them, possibly drawing on knowledge that at first may seem unrelated to the problem in order to solve it.^{[88][89][90][92]}

Several different researchers have proposed methods of increasing the creativity of an individual. Such ideas range from the psychological-cognitive, such as Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, Synectics, Science-based creative thinking, Purdue Creative Thinking Program, and Edward de Bono‘s lateral thinking; to the highly-structured, such as TRIZ(the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving) and its variant Algorithm of Inventive Problem Solving (developed by the Russian scientist Genrich Altshuller), and Computer-Aided Morphological analysis.

The MOOC and many other network learning based on Web2.0 experiences reveal the importance of creativity as a pedagogical framework, where teaching and learning is based on the creation of networks and artifacts, and the subsequent remixing and re-purposing of artifacts, and the adoption of tools and technology to aid in communication and learning.

I have been thinking about the title:

A theory on Creative Learning at a digital learning era.

I would like to consider research into the creative learning that relates to past MOOCs, the present eduMOOC and Mother of MOOC that is forth coming.

I would likely start with a Google Document or wiki for documenting the research and writings.

This would be an open research project, and I hope any one interested in this would build on the theory.  Creativity is all about us, not just the creator of the theory. That is my proposition.

More to come at a later stage of my writing.

Advertisement