Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
(
1983
) has been talking about this for long, demystifying the idea that for people to
be brilliant they need to follow narrow and specifi c literacy scholarly paths. Gardner
defi ned human's performance within eight domains: “spatial, linguistic, logical-
mathematical, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and
naturalistic”.
School as we know it today still lives in the industrial revolution period. The
need for a massifi cation of societal behaviours and habits has developed large man-
ufactories that we now call schools. In this environment teachers have no time to
look for singular abilities in each student; they fi ght most of their time to communi-
cate the conventional knowledge and to achieve uniform “positive” results. Students
are taught to conform to norms and rules of the majority eliminating the possibility
to spot unusual manifestations, thus blocking expressive potential.
We believe it is our responsibility to fi ght to eliminate this misconception on
human normalized capabilities and to help strongly diminish the lack of opportuni-
ties of our students to manifest self-expression. Our answer is a new cultural move-
ment we call creative technologies, technologies that enable common people to
express themselves. People who had no opportunities to learn how to read musical
scores, to learn how to program a computer, and to learn how to sing, paint, dance,
fi lm, perform, and design are now given through these new creative technologies
new modes to participate, collaborate, and share learning processes which will lib-
erate creativity.
Obviously these persons, beginning new activities, will not produce outstanding
works immediately. The goal is not to outperform, but to fi nd the right element, the
vocational attitude. The aim is to free people to express, to let them exteriorize their
inner feelings though different creative possibilities. We believe that in opening and
bringing closer the entire set of creative domains, embedded in participatory cul-
ture, we'll be able to explore more fully human potential, because this impulse to
create together, helped by creative technologies, will be serving directly two of the
most important elements - socialization and self-realization - in the human quest
for happiness (Sheldon and Lyubomirsky
2004
).
1.3
Cultural State of the Art
The domain of creative technologies has been approached by other topics here and
there, like the domain of the “creativity support tools” well supported by Shneiderman
et al. (
2005
), as with all the most recent discussions on participatory culture subjects
like the Web 2.0, the user-generated content, the collaboration tools, or the social
networks and social media.
Shneidermans' (
1987
,
1999
,
2002
) work has always been around the enhancing
of human-computer interaction, through the easing of user interfaces; with that he
has been looking for ways to improve the access to technologies by more and more
