Creativity and ecofeminism in teacher training. Qualitative analysis of digital stories

Este trabajo investiga la autoevaluación de la creatividad de los docentes en formación, al tiempo que analiza cualitativamente las evidencias de trabajo que conforman un conjunto de cuentos digitales. Estos forman parte de una propuesta didáctica basada en la interdisciplinariedad y el ecofeminismo, entendido este como un sincretismo didáctico clave para asimilar el papel trascendental de las mujeres en la preservación de la naturaleza y contribuir a su difusión en su futuro quehacer profesional. La muestra se compone de 93 estudiantes repartidos entre una asignatura de Ciencias y otra de Letras de los Grados de Maestro Especialidad Infantil y Primaria. Los resultados del test de creatividad K-DOCS muestran que los estudiantes de Magisterio tienen una concepción elevada de su creatividad en los dominios cotidiano y académico e intermedia en el resto, y que los hombres tienen una mayor concepción de su creatividad que las mujeres excepto en el dominio artístico (con diferencias significativas en todos ellos, excepto el cotidiano). No se encontraron diferencias en función de los estudios de origen. El análisis mediante Atlas.ti de los cuentos digitales preparados con temática ecofeminista, sin embargo, muestra que la creatividad real de los estudiantes es baja y que además no existe ninguna correlación entre la autopercepción de creatividad y la creatividad de producto.This work investigates self-assessment of creativity in preservice teachers, while analyzing creativity in digital stories created by the same group of alumni. These were part of a didactic proposal based on interdisciplinarity and ecofeminism, a key movement to assimilate the role of women in nature preservation. The sample is composed of 93 students from the Grades of Teacher in Primary Education and Early Chilhood Education. Results obtained by completing the creativity test K-DOCS show that preservice teachers obtain high values in the self/everyday and scholarly domains, with intermediate values in the rest. Men show higher values than women in all domains except the artistic one. There are statistically significant differences between genders for all domains except self/everyday. There were no significant differences depending on secondary studies. The ecofeminist digital stories created were then analyzed using Atlas.ti and the results show that the real creativity of preservice teachers is low and there is no correlation between the self-perception of creativity and product creativity

A Contextual Approach to Real Time, Interactive Narrative Generation

Oral story telling has become a lost art of family histories because social media and technology have taken over the personal interactions that once passed on the important stories and facts from generation to generation. This dissertation presents and evaluates a method of generating a narrative with input from the listener without actually forcing him or her to become an actual character in the narrative. This system is called CAMPFIRE Story Telling System (STS) and employs a contextual approach to story generation. This system uses the Cooperating Context Method (CCM) to generate and tell dynamic stories in real time and can be modified by the listener. CCM was created to overcome the weaknesses found in other contextual approaches during story generation while still meeting the design criteria of 1) being able to plan out a story; 2) being able to create a narrative that is entertaining to the listener; and 3) being able to modify the story that could incorporate the listener\u27s request in the story. The CCM process begins by creating a list of tasks by analyzing the current situation. A list of contexts is narrowed down through a series of algorithms into two lists: high priority and low priority lists. These lists are analyzed and a set of context best suited to handle the tasks are selected. The CAMPFIRE STS was rigorously assessed for its functionality, novelty, and user acceptance as well as the time needed to modify the knowledge base. These evaluations showed that the CAMPFIRE STS has the ability to create novel stories using the same knowledge base. A group of 38 test subjects used and evaluated CAMPFIRE STS with respect to its use for children, story entertainment, story creativity and the system\u27s ease of use answering a extensive survey of 54 questions. The survey showed that CAMPFIRE STS can create stories appropriate for bedtime stories with some minor modifications and that the generated stories are novel and entertaining stories, and that it was an easy system to use

Evaluating computational creativity: a standardised procedure for evaluating creative systems and its application

This thesis proposes SPECS: a Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems. No methodology has been accepted as standard for evaluating the creativity of a system in the field of computational creativity and the multi-faceted and subjective nature of creativity generates substantial definitional issues. Evaluative practice has developed a general lack of rigour and systematicity, hindering research progress. SPECS is a standardised and systematic methodology for evaluating computational creativity. It is flexible enough to be applied to a variety of different types of creative system and adaptable to specific demands in different types of creativity. In the three-stage process of evaluation, researchers are required to be specific about what creativity entails in the domain they work in and what standards they test a system’s creativity by. To assist researchers, definitional issues are investigated and a set of components representing aspects of creativity is presented, which was empirically derived using computational linguistics analysis. These components are recommended for use within SPECS, being offered as a general definition of creativity that can be customised to account for any specific priorities for creativity in a given domain. SPECS is applied in a case study for detailed comparisons of the creativity of three musical improvisation systems, identifying which systems are more creative than others and why. In a second case study, SPECS is used to capture initial impressions on the creativity of systems presented at a 2011 computational creativity research event. Five systems performing different creative tasks are compared and contrasted. These case studies exemplify the valuable information that can be obtained on a system’s strengths and weaknesses. SPECS gives researchers vital feedback for improving their systems’ creativity, informing further progress in computational creativity research