165,301 research outputs found

    A new approach to collaborative creativity support of new product designers

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    Bitter-Rijpkema, M., Sloep, P. B., Sie, R., Van Rosmalen, P., Retalis, S., & Katsamani, M. (2011). A new approach to collaborative creativity support of new product designers. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 7(4), 478-492. DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2011.042992Effective collaborative creativity is crucial to contemporary professionals who have to continuously produce innovative products and services. The technological nature and complexity of the innovations require team work, among specialists from different disciplines. Often these teams work in a distributed fashion, across boundaries of time and place. Therefore they need electronic “spaces” that support (‘afford’) their creative collaboration. Co-creativity support is not only a matter of making appropriate groupware spaces available but also of providing concurrent support in all these dimensions. These considerations inspired the development of the idSpace platform. idSpace is a collaboration platform integrating a variety of creativity tools with pedagogy-based guidance. It aims to optimize both the use of creativity techniques themselves and of the supporting processes of team collaboration and knowledge creation. In this paper we zoom in on Knowledge-sharing Strategies for Collaborative Creativity (KS4CC). We show how collaborative creativity can be enhanced via integration of pattern-based pedagogical flow support, including suggestions of optimal use of creativity techniques. The KS4CC strategies consist of a merger of learning and collaboration flow patterns with support for the application of creative techniques

    Dr. Inventor, Promoting Scientific Creativity by Utilising Web-based Research Objects, FP7

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    Scientific creativity and innovation represent the beating heart of European growth at a time of rapid technological change. Dr Inventor is built on the vision that technologies have great potential to supplement human ingenuity in science by overcoming the limitations that people suffer in pursuing scientific discovery. It presents an original system that will provide inspiration for scientific creativity by utilising the rich presence of web-based research resources. Dr Inventor will act as a personal research assistant, utilising machine-empowered search and computation to bring researchers extended perspectives for scientific innovation by informing them of a broad spectrum of relevant research concepts and approaches, by assessing the novelty of research ideas, and by offering suggestions of new concepts and workflows with unexpected features for new scientific discovery. Dr Inventor is an attempt to understand the potential of technology in the scientific creative process within current technology limitations. It represents a sound balance between scientific insight into individual scientific creative processes and technical implementation using innovative technologies in information extraction, document summarization, semantics and visual analytics. The outcomes will be integrated into a web-based system that will allow evaluation in a selected research area under real-world settings with carefully designed metrics, benchmarks and baseline for creative performance, leading to tangible measurements on the performance of the technologies in enhancing human creativity and a blueprint for future technologies in computational creativity. Dr Inventor has huge implications for scientific innovation in Europe, as it has the potential to change the way in which scientific research is undertaken. The acceptance of the system by general research communities will open opportunities for many industrial sectors, leading to reinforced leadership of European industry

    The Web 2.0 as Marketing Tool: Opportunities for SMEs

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    The new generation of Internet applications widely known as Social Media or Web 2.0 offers corporations a whole range of opportunities for improving their marketing efficiency and internal operations. Web 2.0 applications have already become part of the daily life of an increasing number of consumers who regard them as prime channels of communication, information exchange, sharing of expertise, dissemination of individual creativity and entertainment. Web logs, podcasts, online forums and social networks are rapidly becoming major sources of customer information and influence while the effectiveness of traditional mass media is rapidly decreasing. Using the social media as a marketing tool is an issue attracting increasing attention. The hitherto experience is that large public corporations are more likely to make use of such instruments as part of their marketing and internal operations (McKinsey, 2007).The paper defines the Web 2.0 phenomenon and based on the experience of large corporations examines how SMEs could engage the various Web 2.0 instruments in order to efficiently market their products, improve customer relations, increase customer retention and enhance internal operations

    Getting In On the Act: How Arts Groups are Creating Opportunities for Active Participation

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    Arts participation is being redefined as people increasingly choose to engage with art in new, more active and expressive ways. This movement carries profound implications, and fresh opportunities, for the nonprofit arts sector.We are in the midst of a seismic shift in cultural production, moving from a "sit-back-and-be-told culture" to a "making-and-doing-culture." Active or participatory arts practices are emerging from the fringes of the Western cultural tradition to capture the collective imagination. Many forces have conspired to lead us to this point. The sustained economic downturn that began in 2008, rising ticket prices, the pervasiveness of social media, the roliferation of digital content and rising expectations for self-guided, on-demand, customized experiences have all contributed to a cultural environment primed for active arts practice. This shift calls for a new equilibrium in the arts ecology and a new generation of arts leaders ready to accept, integrate and celebrate all forms of cultural practice. This is, perhaps, the defining challenge of our time for artists, arts organizations and their supporters -- to embrace a more holistic view of the cultural ecology and identify new possibilities for Americans to engage with the arts.How can arts institutions adapt to this new environment?Is participatory practice contradictory to, or complementary to, a business model that relies on professional production and consumption?How can arts organizations enter this new territory without compromising their values r artistic ideals?This report aims to illuminate a growing body of practice around participatory engagement (with various illustrative case studies profiled at the end) and dispel some of the anxiety surrounding this sphere of activity

    The Right Place at the Right Time: Creative Spaces in Libraries

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    Purpose This essay explores the recent trend in libraries: that of the establishment of spaces specifically set aside for creative work. The rise of these dedicated creative spaces is owed to a confluence of factors that happen to be finding their expression together in recent years. This essay examines the history of these spaces and explores the factors that gave rise to them and will fuel them moving forward. Design/Methodology/Approach A viewpoint piece, this essay combines historical research and historical/comparative analyses to examine the ways by which libraries have supported creative work in the past and how they may continue to do so into the 21st century. Findings The key threads brought together include a societal recognition of the value of creativity and related skills and attributes; the philosophies, values, and missions of libraries in both their longstanding forms and in recent evolutions; the rise of participatory culture as a result of inexpensive technologies; improved means to build community and share results of efforts; and library experience and historical practice in matters related to creativity. The chapter concludes with advice for those interested in the establishment of such spaces, grounding those reflections in the author’s experiences in developing a new creative space at Virginia Commonwealth University. Originality/value While a number of pieces have been written that discuss the practicalities of developing certain kinds of creative spaces, very little has been written that situates these spaces in larger social and library professional contexts; this essay begins to fill that gap

    Depression in Low-Income Adolescents: Guidelines for School-Based Depression Intervention Programs

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    Adolescent depression is growing in interest to clinicians. In addition to the estimated 2 million cases of adolescent major depressive episodes each year, depressive symptoms in youth have become indicators of mental health complications later in life. Studies indicate that being low-income is a risk factor for depression and that socioeconomically disadvantaged teenagers are more than twice as likely to develop mental illnesses. Only an estimated 1 in 4 children with mental illnesses receive adequate help and 80% of these resources come through schools. Thus, this study focuses on establishing the importance of depression intervention programs in low-income high schools and designing novel guidelines for effective protocols. A compilation of expert opinion on depression screening, education, and treatment, as well as analysis of previously implemented school screening and awareness programs, are examined in order to understand key strategies. The results of this study finds that a multi-layered approach with screening, universal education, and interventions for those identified as being high-risk is most effective in addressing the mental health needs of low-income adolescents. To ensure feasibility and efficacy, screening should be conducted with a modified PHQ-a test and followed-up by timely clinical interviews by school psychologists. All students should receive universal depression education curriculum consisting of principles such as: depression literacy, asset theory, and promotion of help-seeking behaviors. Extending universal education to teachers would also be beneficial in promoting mental health communication and positive classroom environments. It is vital that those screening positive for depression or suicidality receive protocols geared towards high-risk youths, such as group Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and facilitated mental health center referrals based on individual severity. Effectively addressing depression in school systems requires integration of mental health promotion, depression prevention, and psychotherapy—by taking this multidimensional approach, public health officials and school administrations can ensure that adequate resources are directed to those most in need

    Virtual Legacies: Genealogy, the Internet, and Jewish Identity

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    As Jewish identities become more hybridized in what Manuel Castells calls a "network society," genealogical research intensifies the questioning of how Jews identify and who identifies as Jewish. Jewish identities based on relation, location, and devastation develop out of genealogical research, especially when networks such as the internet increase access to information and communities of other researchers. Mining the internet for genealogical information and searching for heritage only add to the possibilities of Jewish identity, revealing Jewish kin, connections to a particular place, or the tragedy of the Holocaust--evidence of the ways in which the World Wide Web changes Jewish identity formation. The internet is a virtual gathering place for the commemoration and study of Jewish life and culture, even as its use challenges conventional modes of Jewish community and identity formation. Through its treatment of the internet and Jewish identity, this dissertation explores new media and their cultural impact, arguing that new media enable penetrable and osmotic identities instead of reifying delimited parameters. Using Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory," Hayden White's "emplotment," Vivian M. Patraka's "goneness," and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's "hereness" as critical lenses through which to view Jewish genealogical Web sites, I show how the narratives on Jewish genealogical research Web sites, cyber-shtetls, and personal genealogy Web sites and blogs reveal constructions of Jewish identity that have never before been articulated as viable options for forming Jewish communities. Jewish communities of relation, location, and devastation may resemble other Jewish communities, but they are unique in that they are virtual--their homes are online. The narratives found on each genre of Web site are functions of postmemory, in that they are the results of family lore, emplotted in order to tell coherent family histories. The "hereness" of postmemory confronts the "goneness" of much of the lives and times that compose Jewish culture, allowing for the creativity that emplotment requires. When Jewish genealogists search for their heritage online, they encounter communities of other genealogists who are just as eagerly emplotting their own genealogical narratives

    YouTube as a repository : the creative practice of students as producers of Open Educational Resources

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    In this paper we present an alternative view of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Rather than focusing on open media resources produced by expert practitioners for use by peers and learners, we examine the practice of learners as active agents, producing open media resources using the devices in their pockets: their mobile phones. In this study, students are the producers and operate simultaneously as legitimate members of the YouTube community and producers of educational content for future cohorts. Taking an Action Research approach we investigated how student’s engagement with open media resources related to their creativity. Using Kleiman’s framework of fives conceptual themes which emerged from academics experiences of creativity (constraint, process, product, transformation, fulfillment), we found that these themes revealed the opportunities designed into the assessed task and provided a useful lens with which to view students’ authentic creative experiences. Students’ experience of creativity mapped on to Kleiman’s framework, and was affected by assessment. Dimensions of openness changed across platforms, although the impact of authenticity and publication on creativity was evident, and the production of open media resources that have a dual function as OERs has clear benefits in terms of knowledge sharing and community participation.The transformational impacts for students were evident in the short term but would merit a longitudinal study. A series of conclusions are drawn to inform future practice and research
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