The resources and obstacles of creative collaboration in a long-term learning community

Possibility thinking: culminative studies of an evidence-based concept driving creativity?

“…In common with other creativity scholars (Moran and John-Steiner, 2003;Eteläpelto & Lahti, 2008;Rojas-Drummond et al, 2008), the PT work emphasises the influence of the social and cultural context in the construction of meaning and of creative endeavour. This contextual sensitivity encompasses the wider English cultural context in which this body of research has been located.…”

Networked Flow: A Framework for Understanding the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration in Educational and Training Settings

“…Both processes are regarded as situated activities that imply collaborative meaning-making and knowledge construction [10]. The Soviet psychologist, Vygotsky [13] suggested that when children are learning a new activity, they look up to those with more experience for guidance in a process called the Zone of Proximal Development, or ZDP.…”

“…In contrast to facile internalization, which leads to a limited combination of ideas, internalization that involves sustained social and individual endeavors becomes a constituent part of the interaction with what is known and leads to the creation of new knowledge" (p. 197). Previous research suggests that high levels of engagement, enjoyment and positive emotional states play a crucial role in fostering creative collaboration in the learning settings [10,15]. In particular, it has been argued that co-creation, sharing and transmission of knowledge inside a group can be fostered when its members reach a state of optimal experience, or flow [15,16].…”

“…Examples of such practices *Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Psychology of the Catholic University of Milan, at Largo Gemelli 1, 20123, Milan, Italy; Tel: +39 02 7234 3734; E-mail: andrea.gaggioli@unicatt.it include planning together, language play, musing, singing, humor, acting out, and role-playing games [9]. However, there is still limited understanding about the key aspects that facilitate (or obstacle) effective cooperation and creative engagement in learning contexts [10]. Recently, psychologist and educator Keith Sawyer introduced the concept of "group flow" as the key to creative collaboration, describing it as "a collective state of mind (…) a peak experience, a group performing at its top level of ability" [11, p. 43].…”

Collaborative 3D learning games for future learning: teachers’ instructional practices to enhance shared knowledge construction among students

“…As we can see, the teacher's instructional activities were grounded by intention to facilitate, channel, and monitor shared knowledge construction while he left the responsibility of solving the task to the students. Moreover, the reaction of students in the teacher's real-life based scenario [6] indicates an emotionally safe atmosphere of knowledge construction (see Eteläpelto & Lahti 2008). Thus, the teacher's role as a fellow collaborator was to activate productive knowledge construction processes, such as encouraging students to formulate hypotheses, providing explanations, conceptualizing his own experiences, and describing observations (see also Hämäläinen & Vähäsantanen 2011).…”