Volume 8 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

This article offers a brief introduction to the special issue ‘New frontiers in creativity, learning, and technology research’ by situating the topic and explaining the events and previous publications that led to this new edition. It then gives an overview of the 12 papers included in the present collection and groups them under four main themes: a) conceptual overviews and ongoing research; b) teaching online in times of COVID-19; c) online platforms and virtual environments; and d) digital tools for creativity. It ends with final reflections about the value of exploring new frontiers in the emerging, interdisciplinary field of creativity, learning and technology studies.

How might technology mediate the transition from primary creative expression to secondary creative contributions? In this paper, we address this question by expanding upon recent conceptualizations of primary and secondary creativity (Runco & Beghetto, 2019) and offer a new way to understand how technology can support creative learning and creative expression. We open by providing a conceptual overview of how technology can serve as a mediator between primary and secondary creativity. We then provide a concrete example of how material artifacts of students’ creative expression (primary creativity) were digitized into artifacts, and in turn, transformed again into material creative contributions in the form of narrative volumes (secondary creativity). We also discuss how technology can be used to mediate continuous creative contributions beyond primary and secondary creativity and how creativity researchers can (re)conceptualize the role technology can play in supporting indefinite cycles of creative learning and expression from material to digital and back again.

This paper examines three ways that robots can interface with creativity. In particular, social robots which are designed to interact with humans are examined. In the first mode, human creativity can be supported by social robots. In a second mode, social robots can be creative agents and humans serve to support robot’s productions. In the third and final mode, there is complementary action in creative work, which may be collaborative co-creation or a division of labor in creative projects. Illustrative examples are provided and key issues for further discussion are raised.

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, creativity, learning, and technology became guiding lights for the debate on transforming conceptions and practices within education systems around the world.

Given creativity’s intersubjective and agentic nature, it can work as an invaluable resource when promoting learning in formal and informal educational settings. Notwithstanding, these same features make it a challenge to know the conditions under which creativity development can be propelled through technology in educational contexts.

Moreover, the technological revolution seems to have accelerated the pace of contemporary societies, often demanding rapid responses to creative challenges. Yet, from a developmental and constructivist standpoint, creativity is embedded in an intricate matrix where individual and sociocultural influences interact to help construct new ways of “worldmaking”. Thus, it can be envisioned as an attribute of the complexity of a psychological subject’s sociocognitive-emotional structures, whose development occurs in the interstitial space between self, others and the world, requiring time to manifest.

Considering that technology modifies the person’s relation, action, construction of world(s), of others and self, we intend to discuss the mode and extent to which it can effectively be inscribed into education to promote the development of creativity. In this conceptual paper, we explore the impact on the continuous process of worldmaking (from where creativity blooms) of moving towards an ever-growing technological society, capable of innovative answers to the pandemic (e.g., distance learning) and other unpredictable challenges. We conclude by discussing how the so-called (re)constructive exploration pedagogies can be aligned with technology-based educational programs – capitalizing on their potential to transform human thinking, (inter)acting, and experiencing-, to nurture the development of creativity in education.

Creativity is agentic, and so is learning. People create and learn new things most effectively when they are convinced that they can respond appropriately to the task (creative confidence) and value the activity at hand. This investigation explores the role of the relatively understudied aspect of creative agency: self-regulatory strategies. In a longitudinal study, we tested whether self-regulation strategies, previously found to be essential drivers of academic achievement and learning in general (rehearsal, elaboration, critical thinking, and metacognition), might also support creativity in learning. Specifically, we tested sequential mediation, where creative confidence and self-regulation longitudinally mediated the relationship between creative potential (divergent thinking) and effective application of creative skills to solve problems embedded in school subjects. Our findings confirm that self-regulatory strategies predict providing creative solutions to school tasks (a proxy of creative learning) and mediate the relationship between divergent thinking, creative confidence, and creative learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed a new agenda for humanity. In a very rapid and improvised way, we were invited to give new answers to everyday practices and experiences, challenged by a context of social isolation unprecedented for a globalized world. The resources that allowed us to build and innovate in the face of such a scenario were mostly derived from communication technologies. In a very short time, the contexts of work, schools, social practices migrated to computers’ screens, cell phones, and so on, transforming them into learning tools mediating social relations. People have long used technology to study, to work and to relate to each other. With COVID-19, we need to face unpredictable situations, requiring rapid adaptation, and the urgent creation of remote relational contexts as a way to respond immediately to the challenges and problem situations emerging from the pandemic. In this article, the remote teaching experience of an undergraduate class at a Brazilian university will be discussed, considering the students’ self-perception about the dynamics of their creative processes in this period. Through a “Free Talk” session carried out in an undergraduate class, we will discuss technologies and teaching, differentiated educational practices and their impacts on the learning processes and, in particular, we will reflect on creativity, the fragility of its development in difficult times and its power to deal with unpredictability, transforming human paths into new possibilities.

Recently, the importance of creativity in society has been clearly recognized. Furthermore, educational practices through art, such as the STEAM paradigm, are being implemented gradually. However, the framework of how creativity should be fostered through art has not been sufficiently discussed. Based on studies of artists’ creative expertise, this study proposed a framework for fostering creativity through art. In addition, we conducted a year-long art program based on this framework in an online environment and investigated its effects. As a framework, we proposed the importance of long-term support for the dynamic development of participants’ creativity. We mainly focused on the following four components: active interaction with objects and the environment through bodily action, active interaction with others and their works (inspiration), exploration in creative processes (exploration), and promotion of intrinsic motivation and decrease in creativity anxiety (motivation). After a total of eight workshops over a year, we observed improvements in the participants’ creativity anxiety, divergent thinking skills, images of art and creation, and openness to others. We discussed the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the advantages and limitations of using an online environment.

Digitalization, underpinned by the ongoing pandemic, has transferred many of our everyday activities to online places. In this study, we wanted to find out what online outlets people use to share their creative work and why they do it. We found that most people posted creative work online at least a few times per year. They especially shared creative content related to creative cooking, visual art, and literature but hardly related to performing art. YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram were the three platforms with the highest familiarity and usage rates; among these, YouTube was most strongly used passively (i.e., to view creative content), while Instagram was most strongly used actively (i.e., to post one’s own creative content). We could further differentiate platforms that were domain-specific (e.g., Stackoverflow for scientific/technological creativity) from platforms that offer a broader variety of creative content (e.g., Reddit, Blogger). The reasoning behind posting one’s creative work online resembled a mixture of technological facilitation, alongside heightened accessibility that allows for feedback and bringing pleasure to one’s followers and friends. All in all, this study provides a first overview of where and why people share their creative products online, shedding light on timely forms of creative expression.

Social media have been increasingly used by youth to communicate with peers, access information, share creations, and express themselves. As a result, educators and researchers have recognized the potential for using social media to enhance teaching and learning experiences. Some scholars have also identified a relationship between social media integration and promoting student creativity. However, as with any educational technology, using a tool, such as social media, does not automatically increase creativity. In other words, the specific methods used to integrate social media as part of a learning experience affect the tool’s influence on the learning process. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to review literature considering the use of social media in formal learning environments and examine their relationship with enhancing student creativity. We conducted a search to locate empirical studies (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed method) published between 2010 and 2020 from the Academic Search Premier, Education Full Text, Education Source, ERIC, and PsychINFO databases. In the results, we describe how social media were used for instructional purposes in the selected studies and discuss the social media affordances that lead to fostering students’ creativity. Additionally, we provide recommendations for educators interested in integrating social media into their teaching practice, specifically to boost student creativity, and we offer suggestions for future research.

In the Dynamic Creativity Framework creativity is defined as a context-embedded phenomenon requiring potential originality and effectiveness. This definition indicates that the environmental conditions embedding the creative process have fundamental impact on the process itself and its outcomes. In particular, Virtual environments (VEs) are emerging as everyday contexts for a large part of the world population, affecting behaviors and feelings. VEs have been demonstrated to affect creative performance in several ways, even if the psychological mechanisms at the basis of the different modifications in the creative behavior are far from being completely explained. The aim of this study was to explore the influence of different types of VEs on creative performance, with a specific focus on participants’ emotional reactions and on their individual differences in the Openness personality trait. A total of 22 participants were exposed to four different types of environments: a real room environment (RE), a control virtual environment (CVE) resembling the physical characteristics of the RE, a positive virtual environment (PVE) and a negative virtual environment (NVE). Participants were free to explore each environment for two minutes, then they were asked to perform an Alternative Uses Task for five minutes, to measure divergent thinking performance. Openness and affective reactions in each environment were measured in all participants. Results showed that Openness was associated with higher originality of responses and that this effect was particularly significant in PVE. Importantly, the type of environment interacted significantly with participants’ affective reactions in explaining their creative performance, revealing that an increase of ideas originality was associated with an increase of positive affect, emerging as a consequence of experiencing a PVE. Affective reactions to VEs, in combination with individual differences in term of Openness, thus emerge as one of the possible explicatory mechanisms of the impact of virtual reality on creative performance.

As communication technology capabilities have improved and the globalization of the workforce has resulted in distributed teams, organizations have been shifting towards virtual teams and virtual meetings over the last decade. This trend has been accelerated with current work-from-home orders due to COVID-19. Even though virtual collaboration has, in the past, been the focus of multiple studies, there are some surprising gaps in our knowledge. For instance, there are few empirical studies examining the impact of virtual devices and tools on creative problem-solving. While there is a substantial body of research on electronic brainstorming and the use of virtual tools for idea generation, less is known about earlier processes such as problem construction or later processes such as idea evaluation and idea selection. Furthermore, as a dynamic process, creativity and innovation is heavily influenced by the people engaged in the process and their collaborative environment, yet there is a gap in the literature regarding the type of virtual tools used in the process (i.e., audio + video vs. audio alone, or the use of file-sharing technologies). In this paper, we will review the current literature on virtual teams, virtual meetings, and creativity. We will then explore theoretical frameworks such as media richness theory that can help us understand how virtuality and virtual tools may influence team creativity across the dynamic range of the creative problem-solving process. Finally, given the limited research in the domain of virtual team creativity we provide questions to help guide future research. Research questions will help identify those areas where virtual teams may be beneficial for creativity and areas where virtual teams may be likely to perform less effectively on creative tasks.

Creative activities are becoming more and more necessary in professional areas, such as in design, towards the development of new products that should be adapted to current (or future) users and usages. In a competitive context, it is crucial, especially for companies, to face the challenge of coming up with innovative products. However, creative activities are particularly difficult to perform, and they are associated with important risks. In this context, we report on major findings based on the analysis of designers’ cognitive processes involved in creativity, which has led to the development of computational systems used in physical environments. We also present studies related to technologies that are used in virtual spaces in order to support creativity. This last kind of technology seems to be more and more promising in the actual societal context, which requires remote working, all the more so during the current health crisis. More specifically, we discuss how virtual environments, particularly those from multiplayer games, not only redesign the way individuals work but can also contribute to enhancing creativity. Finally, we suggest perspectives towards the development of innovative new tools that aim to enhance creative performance in individual and collective situations.

We approach creativity in educational design with teachers working together in interdisciplinary communities of practice to develop resources for teaching and learning about climate change in formal school settings. We address climate change as a socio-scientific ‘wicked problem’ and discuss the notion of creativity in educational design in a context of transformative intervention in education leading away from silo academic domain paradigms. We perceived the resources as boundary objects during the process of communication and joint design by the diverse community members. Our interest focused on studying the boundary crossing processes which facilitated creative ideas to come out, selected and transcribed into the actual resources designed. Critical episode analysis showed that boundary crossing mechanisms were employed in the interactions among the educational designers aided by and in interaction with digital media supporting collaboration. These socio-technical interactions functioned as an empowered professional learning and working milieu, within which creative processes and outcomes were nurtured. In particular, educational designers, along with trying to frame climate change as a wicked problem, attempted to address the challenging issue of designing a creative educational resource on this topic. Our research suggests that boundary crossing creativity in interdisciplinary teams of educational designers can be an answer to not only how to focus learning on addressing the grand wicked problems of our times, but also how to deal with the multiple challenges arising from educational design per se.