Time is ripened to grow and develop a pedagogy that describes, explains and expands Creatagogy – how it has been applied in MOOCs and how it could be used to create future MOOCs. This requires a connective creativity with collective wisdom (Wisdom of the Crowd) and individual creativity and creative learning capacity connected to networks with technology affordance. We envision a direction based on connective and connective wisdom to inform Creatagogy.
In response to my previous post on Creatagogy, I have received some warm calls for its further development, by means of wikis or Google Doc.
Research question:
1. What are the principles underpinning Creatagogy?
2.How would Creatagogy create and enhance learning experience in a networked learning environment?
3. What are the values derived from Creatagogy – on learners, educators, community and institutions?
What could Creatagogy achieve?
Creatagogy would then become the basis of the creation of values, education and learning, and community. This would provide value and benefit to the institution, education and learning communities and most important of all, the learners, so as to enrich one as part of the creation of global learning community, embracing creativity as one of the core capability and a way of life.
I think some of the principles enlisted on paragogy (see this paper on Paragogy) – a learning pedagogy for peer-producing and self-directed learning would be very useful for reflection:
- Changing context as a decentered center.
- Meta-learning as a font of knowledge.
- Peers provide feedback that wouldn’t be there otherwise.
- Learning is distributed and nonlinear.
- Realize the dream if you can, then wake up!
In reflection, there are common threads in among the MOOCs created so far. Here Jim in his Ed Parkour critiqued on the values of MOOC. Here I would like to quote his view:
I can’t imagine we want to turn the potential of the MOOC into a market, we want to take education back from the markets. We want more “green spaces” for teaching and learning, to quote Brian Lamb. We need a form of open, online class expereinces that are free of venture capital and the next celebrity professor, a community of learning that leverages the resources we already have at publicly funded brick and mortar institutions and open them up to the world, and there is no reason the world can’t, in turn, directly inform what happens at institution.
I hope the development of open online learning environments (OOLE) would benefit and add values to professors, learners, communities and institution, extending the traditional values of formal education to a new level based on Creatagogy.
Here are some of the resources I have collected on Creative Learning and Creativity:
What is creativity?
This slideshare summarizes some thoughts about creativity:
In this article by Mihaly, Creativity consists of 3 main components:
1. Domain – which consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures.
2. Field – which includes all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain.
3. Individual – who using symbols of a given domain, comes up with a new idea or sees a new pattern. His or her thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain. There are lots of individuals who are well known to us – like Albert Einstein, and Issac Newton in Science, and Pablo Picasso in Arts.
There are certain claims by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that stimulates me to reflect on my perceptions and experience about creativity:
– How creative great scientists eventually became bears little relationship to how talented they were as children. This is especially true for great scientists like Albert Einstein, and Issac Newton.
– What makes creative people different from others is complexity. This is an interesting claim.
– Low intelligence can undermine creativity.
– Being intellectually brilliant can also be detrimental to creativity.
What is creative Learning? Steve Wheeler provides an excellent presentation here.
Can Only Intelligent People be Creative? Kyung concludes:
The negligible relationship between creativity and IQ scores indicates that even students with low IQ scores can be creative. Therefore, teachers should be aware of characteristics of creative students- this will enable teachers to see the potential of each child.
In this “What sort of Creativity support tools are useful in the development creativity skills?” the design principles for creativity support tools include:
– Support exploratory search
– Enable collaboration
– Provide rich history keeping
– Design with low thresholds, high ceilings and wide walls
These principles could then be further researched through application in the social media.
What is a theory of Creativity?
When it comes to theory of creativity, this Idea Generation in Groups: A Basis for Creativity in Organizations provide a grounded framework.
As highlighted by Toward a Theory of Organisation Creativity, to understand creativity in a social context necessitates an exploration of creative processes, creative products, creative persons, and creative situations. A useful theory of organizational creativity must provide a framework of sufficient complexity and richness to integrate these four components.
This Creative synthesis further reinforces the importance of creativity.
How would creativity relates to Complex adaptive system?
In this “A meta-analysis of 25 years of mood-creativity research: Hedonic tone, activation, or regulatory focus?” Activating mood states produce more creativity than deactivity mood states, and there were strong indications that this is particularly the case when mood states were associated with a promotion rather than a prevention focus. Bass et. al. (2008) suggested to frame the task as enjoyable and interesting to do. Also anger and happiness should be cherished, and sadness and relaxation should be frowned upon.
Creative Learning Theory
I am still formulating the principles and model of this Creative Learning Theory
I would explore these with others through this exciting MOOC on Creativity.
Cloud Computing and Creativity
Kop, R. and Carroll, F. (2011) Cloud Computing and Creativity: Learning on a Massive Open Online Course, European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, Special Issue on Creativity and OER (journal article)
References:
Baas, Matthijs; De Dreu, Carsten K. W.; Nijstad, Bernard A. (November 2008). “A meta-analysis of 25 years of mood-creativity research: Hedonic tone, activation, or regulatory focus?”. Psychological Bulletin 134 (6): 779–806. doi:10.1037/a0012815.PMID 18954157.
Kim, K.H. (2005). Can Only Intelligent People be Creative? – A Meta Analysis. The Journal of Secondary Gifted Education. Vol XVI, No. 2/3 Winter/Spring 2005, pp. 57-66
http://kkim.wmwikis.net/file/view/Can%20Only%20Intelligent%20People%20Creative.pdf
Csikszentmihalyi, M. Creativity – Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. Creativity
Idea Generation in Groups: A Basis for Creativity in Organizations
I am intending to create a wiki and or Google Doc to conduct research and to apply the principles at work in a few weeks time. These require the cooperation and collaboration of people who would like to explore together in our networks, including MOOCs of Change11, CCK12, Learning Analytics and the one that is forthcoming – a short MOOC for education developers as mentioned by Jenny Mackness. So let’s start using a Google doc or wiki to collect stories of creative learning, and research through Change11 and CCK12.
Are you interested in this joint project/venture of exploring into Creatagogy? I believe it requires some joint efforts like the MOOC BLOG CALENDAR.
I am intending to create and develop some papers on this Creatagogy basing on the wiki or Google research. Do these meet your goals and needs? Please tell me if you are interested in the conduction of research (a small group? or a number of groups?)
Postscript: This flow experience relates to creativity and creative learning.
Useful references here on Peeragogy by Howard Rheingold.
Learner Weblog 