During the holiday season I did some research into creativity as part of the eLearning design process. As a result of this research I found there was not a lot of creative and experimental thought gone into this interesting subject.
I found that creativity appears to be thought of as a mysterious phenomenon, arising out of those ‘light bulb moments’. I remember, the late 80’s and early 90’s when we were taken over by ‘accelerated learning’. As a company we took AL on board and enjoyed the creativity, involved in making the learning process more engaging. We made card games, sang songs and created plays and the learning was great. The move to eLearning appears to have dulled the mojo of accelerated learning.
Is creative thinking under-discussed in the learning industry conversations today?
With all the complaints about unimaginative instruction, it’s time to investigate, examine and analyse creative thinking.
Creativity Defined
What do we mean by creativity?
A common definition is “Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas.”
What do we read into this?
- A solution or idea can rest on the shoulders of other ideas. It can be a special mish-mash of existing approaches and doesn’t need to be entirely original.
- Creativity is dependent on the culture one lives in. Not only do new ideas emerge from the culture itself, but they must be useful to that culture.
Creativity
Do our present eLearning design models leave room for creativity? I am not convinced, I think traditional models suppress and stifle creative solutions. To me they are too systematic and overly prescriptive.
However, it is still posssible to overlay creativity in on any eLearning design.
Next week we’ll talk about the stages of the Creative Project.