Designing technologies to support creativity and collaboration
August 2004
Keri Facer and Ben Williamson, Futurelab
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Executive summary
The role that creativity plays in children’s learning has recently been acknowledged as important in a number of policy documents and initiatives. Creativity is no longer regarded as a discrete skill required for art, drama or music, but rather it is seen as central to children’s abilities to work imaginatively and with a purpose, to judge the value of their own contributions and those of others, and to fashion critical responses to problems across all subjects in the curriculum.
Increasingly, collaboration is seen as important in creative learning and to children’s abilities to evaluate and justify their opinions; to gather knowledge from others; to share their expertise with others; and to transform their existing understandings as learners in a constant process of personal and social development.
Research and prototype development at Futurelab and elsewhere would lead to the following findings and recommendations of the ways in which digital technologies could be designed and used to support creative collaboration in the classroom:
- Well designed digital technologies enable children to externalise their ideas in ways that allow them to share, develop and refine them in collaboration with other children.
- Multiple means of representing ideas through sound, image, colour, movement and simulation encourage children to develop ideas in ways that could not be done with pen and paper alone.
- In order to support creativity and collaboration, digital technologies should offer children multiple opportunities for changing and revising work in a low-risk environment.
- Digital technologies should be developed that allow children to work in a non-linear fashion, combining idea development, editing, refinement and presentation as parallel rather than sequential processes.
- The ability to personalise creations encourages a commitment from children to working through an idea, and enables them to explore aspects of their own lives and cultures.
- Digital tools can only support creativity and collaboration within classrooms in which these processes are valued. In order to be effective, these tools need to be supported by a classroom culture in which all contributions are welcomed and constructively evaluated.