Winter 2006

The ICT agenda

Unlocking creativity with ICT

Paula Christophersen believes that part of the challenge for teachers today is to explore and promote creative processes in the use of ICT to support the development of imagination, problem-solving, risk-taking and divergent thinking.

Creativity is no longer viewed solely as the province of the arts—it is now generally viewed as central to children’s learning and treated as an ‘across the curriculum’ ideal, just like information and communication technology (ICT).

Creativity involves applying knowledge and skills in new ways to achieve a valued goal or objective. Creativity is being imaginative. It’s being original, tackling questions, solving problems and having ideas that are new to the learner. Creativity is being purposeful; this involves undertaking authentic projects that are directed at achieving a specific objective. Achievement of this objective is value-adding, an important aspect of being creative. Creative thinkers do not just repeat others’ ideas.

Creativity can be learned and ICT can play a role in this process.

How can you identify creative students?

Creative students are the ones who question and challenge ideas—Why? What if? How could I? Such questions are commonly associated with inquisitive and creative students who make connections and see relationships that aren’t always obvious. This involves exploring patterns and challenging conventional classifications.

Creative students envisage solutions by applying their imaginations. A range of ideas are explored, none are immediately dismissed and these ideas are represented in a variety of forms such as symbols, sounds and movement. Creative students also evaluate the impact of their ideas on their intended audience.

How can teachers support creativity in all students?

It is a misconception that creativity is innate and cannot be acquired. Creative thinking, like other forms of thinking processes, can be learned.

Creative thinking is an attitude. Such thinkers have learned to respond to problems and ideas. For example, creative thinkers take time to play with new ideas and experiment with possibilities before focusing on a final approach. They are comfortable with uncertainty and risk because they are accepting of change. These dispositions must be identified and nurtured in our learning programs.

Creative thinking is a skill that requires practice. Just as gaining fluency with ICT requires time and effort, so too does creative thinking. It typically requires both divergent and convergent thinking. Key creative skills include generating ideas, making connections, altering perspectives and applying imagination.

Creative thinking is a process. There are a number of standard process methods but they typically involve identifying an idea or problem; generating alternative ways of achieving an objective; applying a range of knowledge and skills to transform the preferred idea into a product, performance, system or set of procedures; and evaluating how well the outcome achieved the objective. Alternatively, this could be expressed as to prepare, incubate, illuminate and verify.

The identifiable stages of creative thinking can be applied as a non-linear, iterative process. The starting point for one person may not be the same for another; the creative journey may be sequential for some and not for others. Most States and Territories include a process fashioned around creative thinking in their curriculum documents. For example, in the Victorian Essential Learning Standards http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au a design process structures the knowledge, skills and behaviours underpinning the design, creativity and technology domain.

How can ICT support creativity?

What does ICT bring to creativity that is not afforded by traditional technologies? ICT is a powerful tool that is portable and can be customised—ring tones and wallpapers on mobile phones and screen savers on laptops are creative expressions in their own right, and for many students these define their identity.

ICT has the potential to engage learners through its immediacy, its interactivity and its multimodal forms. Hyperlinking supports the multi or parallel processing that today’s students are comfortable with. Marc Prensky (author of DigitalGame-based Learning, Paragon House, 2004, and Don’t Bother MeMom—I’m Learning! Paragon House, 2006) contrasts this with the ‘digital immigrants’ (people who have consciously learned to use ICT), who prefer linear or singular processing. Connectivity is important to younger learners and mobile tools create new opportunities for meaningful interactions between known and unknown communities (see figure 1).

Ways in which ICT can support specific creative thinking skills

What is a motivating climate for creativity?

ICT is only one agent for sparking creativity. School leaders and teachers must develop a social and cultural context that acknowledges interesting ideas, questions how conclusions were reached, prods for alternative thoughts, provides constructive feedback (using contemporary communications tools such as blogs where appropriate) and allows adequate time for the incubation of ideas. Join in with your students and model creative thinking and behaviours—it is important that we acknowledge that we are all learners and teachers. This fosters a sharing of attitudes and successes. Within this secure and positive environment, students can become experimental. This means being curious, confident, speculative, independent, playful, risk-taking and flexible.

As educators, we should develop programs and learning environments that imbed the use of contemporary processing and communications devices to achieve a goal espoused by Piaget; namely, ‘to create people who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done — people who are creative, inventive and discoverers’.

Figure 1: Some features of ICt that support creativity

Figure 2: Visualising thinking software designed to support making connections

Paula Christophersen is ICT curriculum manager at the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au