ICT and Creativity

Creativity is often seen as a talent, or as a characteristic of eminent people. Distinctive personality traits have been identified to exemplify a creative mind. At the same time, a number of studies recognise that creativity can be enhanced and cultivated. How well are educational systems enhancing this transversal skill and promoting students’ creativity? Are schools creating the conditions for creativity to flourish? And, most of all, why should school address creativity?

Many of the core indicators of creative thinking and behaviour can be seen in individuals who enjoy the process of learning through experimentation and exploration. These processes employ elements of play, exploring alternative approaches applying imaginative thinking to achieve an objective, making connections with previous and new learning and thinking critically about ideas, actions and outcomes.

The use of ICT often exploits one of the best understood features of ICT, to increase the speed of the creative process, enabling the creative development in the digital medium to keep pace with the thinking and process of having ideas.

Specialist software has been developed to aid creative thinking and give substance to these ideas on screen and on paper, to communicate through presentations, to share with others via the web and in multi-sensory forms including visual image, sound and as three-dimensional product or installation. These processes all make use of another of the main features of ICT, provisionality.        Provisionality enables Young people to use ICT to develop partially formed ideas, to visualise and give substance to their thinking. It removes much of the fear of failure or loss of evidence of their efforts, so they can step-back to earlier ideas, re-visit and re-assess what they have done.

The four key features of Creativity:

• using imagination
• pursuing purposes
• being original
• finding value

Indicators of creative thinking and behaviour:
Young people may demonstrate that they can:

• generate imaginative ideas in response to a stimuli;
• discover and make connections through play and experimentation;
• explore and experiment with resources and materials;
• ask 'why', 'how', 'what if' or unusual questions;
• try alternatives or different functions;
• look at and think about things differently and from other points of view;
• respond to ideas, tasks and problems in surprising ways;
• make connections and see relationships;
• reflect critically on ideas, actions and outcomes;
• apply imaginative thinking to achieve an objective;

ICT provides a means by which any and all of these indicators can be realised in the context of the task or activity. Whether you are using creative software to design or create imaginative outcomes in the arts, modelling with a spreadsheet, refining performance using digital video or using the technology to share ideas and views with others over the Internet. The strong link between creativity and the arts is well documented and commonly understood as is the multi-sensory/multi-modality dimensions often exploited by 'creatives', particularly within the areas of computer gaming and the creative industries.

Many people see imagination as the key feature of creativity, but although creative processes are rooted in imagination they need to be much more than just imagining. They need to have substance, to be realized as a process of development, a full or partially formed outcome.

ICT provides a means by which imagining can be given substance (an outcome of value), and provides a means by which pictures and diagrams can be used to help young people think and learn, using for example, mind mapping software, graph functions, graphic tablets and tablet PCs to develop ideas visually and then share these ideas with others. Musicans, Film-makers, Artists, Designers, Engineers, Scientists and Writers, professionals from the worlds of health care and social welfare, commerce and manufacturing, all of whom use ICT creatively, can themselves provide models of use. It is also important to show pupils the potential for creative work and to enable them to make choices for their future careers.