The creator culture is creating over consumption, that is user generated videos, self-published books, personalized domains and platforms is seductive. This shifts learning environments to align with the creator-student and offers the great promise for fostering critical thinking skills and interdisciplinary learning (media, design and entrepreneurship). In art education here at the University of Florida our program push the limits of hybrid platforms to engage with students as creators of educational content and processes. Higher education will continue to search for a global focus specifically strategies that provides a strong foundation on which a university or institution can build long-term, sustainable partnerships. With increased global co-operation comes competition with understanding and need for clarity in a university’s global role in creative innovation.

Creativity, Technology, Art, and Pedagogical Practices

Abstract: As I started preparing and writing this article, a colleague inferred that everything to be said about creativity had been said 10 years ago. In the shadow of such preconceptions, I want to organize some thoughts on the relationship of contemporary technologies and creativity. I start by considering various definitions of creativity along with underlying questions of how we live, how we think, and how we learn with new technologies. I soon realized that the relationship of the expressive nature of new technology with creativity is complex and requires a renewed examination of how these apply to art education.

Tillander, M. (2011). Creativity, technology, art, and pedagogical practices. Art Education, 64(1), 40-46. Link http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ935015

Multimodal Conversations: Digital Interfaces as Synergy for Creative Narrative Strategies (SEF Grant)

Abstract: Current communication technologies can form a powerful alliance with educational practices in design and the arts to establish new domains and creative practices. Today’s technologies motivate and offer opportunities to engage with systems and an array of objects to think with, and as a medium to elucidate multiple possibilities dynamically. In these contexts engagement is not with a material object in the traditional sense but with a technological process acting as an object of interest and play, as well as an interface that moves beyond the computer to a culture encoded in digital process and form. This shift is most evident in the emerging multimodal interface tools (e.g., SMART Boards, SMART table screen, Windows 7 touch features, DiamondTouch multiuser touch table screen, Flip Video, Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, etc.). As communication technologies become pervasive, portable, and accessible, they are reshaping narrative and creative expressions embedded in the surrounding culture. Multimodal Conversations is a research project that investigates multimodal digital interfaces as a way to explore innovative narrative strategies for exploring the synergy between image, text, and sound to bridge the world of digital media conversations within K-12 art and technology education practice. New digital resource and multimodal text engage representational meaning. Key components of educational environments will be knowing how to communicate and imagining new ways of envisioning assemblages of knowledge and representations through multimodal interfaces.

• What are practices of knowing and representation in an age of digital epistemologies?
• What are the abilities and literacies will we need to learn in a range of digital learning environment?
• What combination of mind-machine synectic and analysis skills will we need to negotiate digitally information interfaces, database-searches and patterns, as well as visual organization system?

Art educators need opportunities to designing for their own needs so they can use digital interfaces effectively in their own teaching. This process will require direct experience with transforming digital information into things that work where knowledge is multimodal, co-constructed, and performed.

2010 Scholarship Enhancement Fund, Multimodal Conversations: Digital Interfaces as Synergy for Creative Narrative Strategies. College of Fine Arts, University of Florida. ($700)