ROLE: Social Creativity and Meta-Design in Learning Communities

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Whereas much of teaching in our educational culture presumes an omniscient teacher transmitting knowledge to unknowing learners, most learning that takes place outside of the classroom is based on breakdowns in the context of real-world activities leading to reflection and learning. The traditional approach has some validity for situations in which "basic knowledge" needs to be communicated, but it is not well suited to the highly situated nature of lifelong learning and design problem solving.Although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, the role of interaction and collaboration with other individuals is critical. Much of our intelligence and creativity results from exploiting the "symmetry of ignorance" (between different communities) as a source of power. Social creativity emphasizes that the heart of intelligent human performance is not the individual human mind but groups of minds in interaction with each other and in interaction with tools and artifacts. Meta-design characterizes objectives, techniques, and processes for creating new media and environments that allow users to act as designers and contribute to and benefit from the creativity of the group. The project will: (1) develop a theoretical framework and systems to support social creativity as a specific form of lifelong learning; (2) investigate principles of meta-design and how they support social creativity in the context of learning and working; (3) work with specific communities to demonstrate the scalability and sustainability of our approach; (4) focus on specific domains such as the collaborative design of course information environments; (5) explore the role of social creativity and meta-design in practice by changing classroom environments and undergraduate education; and (6) assess how our theoretical attributes of lifelong learning, social creativity, and meta-design map onto practice and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our approach in realistic settings.