A social creativity app – Scoot & Doodle

Inside our first collaborative studio, Scoot & Doodle on G+ Hangouts, young people connect face-to-face, teaming up with others to tackle creative challenges, draw, tell stories, do homework and collaborate on projects in real-time. All this is done while naturally practicing the ‘Four Cs’: creativity,  collaboration, communication and critical thinking—which educators know are vital elements to a student’s future success in life and work.

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Toontastic – Play, Create and Learn

Designed in partnership with Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and Zeum: San Francisco’s Children’s Museum, Toontastic inspires the artist and writer in every child while teaching key storytelling principles that help to promote Creativity at a young age. Toontastic’s drawing tools bring kids’ wildest ideas to life alongside virtual playsets chock full of pirates, princesses, far away galaxies, and many other characters and settings to spark the imagination.

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Creativity and Distributed Intelligence

There is overwhelming evidence that research on creativity should be grounded in the basic assumption that power of the unaided individual mind is highly overrated. Although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, much of our intelligence and creativity results from interaction and collaboration with other individuals, with their tools and with their artifacts. In many traditional approaches, human cognition has been seen as existing solely “inside” a person’s head, and studies on cognition have often disregarded the physical and social surroundings in which cognition takes place. Distributed intelligence provides an effective theoretical framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts, tools, and socio-technical environments can be designed and evaluated to empower human beings and to change tasks.

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Read also: Distributed Creatyivity

Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation

The current mind-set about learning, teaching, and education is dominated by a view in which a supposedly all-knowing teacher explicitly tells or shows unknowing, passive learners something they presumably know nothing about. A critical challenge is to reformulate and reconceptualize this impoverished and misleading conception.

A culture-of-participation perspective for learning and education is focused not on delivering predigested information to individuals, but on providing opportunities and resources for learners to engage in authentic activities, participate in social debates and discussions, create shared understanding among diverse stakeholders, and frame and solve personally meaningful problems. It is grounded in the fundamental belief that all humans have interest and knowledge  in one or more niche domains and are eager to actively contribute in these contexts.

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Social Creativity – Exploiting the Power of Cultures of Participation

Social creativity and cultures of participation are facilitated by meta-design that allows stakeholders to act as designers, contributors, and decision makers in  personally meaningful activities.   This paper defines conceptual frameworks  and briefly describes  different applications  contexts  in gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges how to exploit the power of cultures of participation to enhance social creativity.

By studying  social  creativity in specific application contexts that foster and support cultures of participation, our research activities have contributed to and  enriched conceptual framework. Achieving and supporting social creativity is not only a technical problem; it requires new cultures, new mindsets, and socio-technical environments that provide people with powerful media to express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Research activities have only scratched the surface of exploiting the power of collective minds equipped with new media. The challenges of  the complex problems that we all face make this approach not a luxury, but a necessity.

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Are they Students or are they Innovators?

I’ve always been interested in inquiry based learning and the opportunities that providing different spaces or different tools can do for expanding outside of normative ways of classroom production.

What are the connections between social affordances and identity and learning? If we do bring tools into classrooms, it has to come from that angle first, because that’s the human angle.

If you change schools to emphasize youth as creators, you are going to see different kinds of products. If you allow youth to be genre creators and not just reproducers, I think you’d see a lot of innovation.

Youth and teachers have so many creative resources that they bring to these spaces that aren’t really valued or allowed…it’s like this stop gap — you’re not supposed to bring in the digital tools that you have, you’re not supposed to bring in your interests or relationships…these are incredible resources. I think it’s more dire that we’re not allowing those resources in.

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