EDUsummIT (International Summit on ICT in Education) is a global community of researchers, educational practitioners, and policy makers committed to supporting the effective integration of research and practice in the field of ICT in education. The theme of EDUsummIT 2015 (held in Bangkok this year) was Technology Advanced Quality Learning For All. At the meeting there were 9 thematic working groups, focusing on everything from mobile learning to educational equity; computer science to digital citizenship. I along with Punya Mishra and Petra Fisser led Thematic Working Group 6: Creativity in a technology enhanced curriculum.

The document below is the Summary Report on EduSummIT 2015. It includes an overall summary of the conference, reports from each of the working groups (including the one on creativity), with recommendations for researchers, policy makers and educational practitioners.

The next article in our series on Rethinking Technology, Creativity and Learning for the 21st Century just came out. Written with Liz Boltz, Punya Mishra and the Deep-Play Research Group, this article focuses on the creative skill of empathy. Empathizing as we write in the article is the ability to identify with and understand the feelings and experiences of another, or to imagine what it would be like to view the world from another’s perspective. In particular we focus on the affordances of videogames for fostering empathy. To illustrate these affordances in greater detail, we explore two different games and discuss the ways that these games can expand or alter empathetic thinking skills for leaners. Complete reference and link to the article below.

Boltz, L. O., Henriksen, D., Mishra, P., & the Deep-Play Research Group (2015). Empathy through gaming—Perspective taking in a complex world. TechTrends (59) , p. 3-8.

I’m happy to say that the special issue I co-edited for the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (JTATE) on the topic of creativity has just been published. We were thrilled to get a number of great authors and scholars working at the intersection of creativity, technology, and teacher education. The issue features articles that examine these broader themes from a range of lenses and perspectives, and is available online through JTATE here:

http://www.editlib.org/j/JTATE/v/23/n/3/

The article series that Punya Mishra, the Deep-Play Group and I have been working on for Tech Trends, has recently concluded its coverage of transdisciplinary thinking skills. So we’ve begun to branch out and explore more interesting new topics, ideas and examples around creativity and technology into this Tech Trends column series.

Around these lines, we have just published a piece with guest authors John Lee (North Carolina State University) and David Hicks (Virginia Tech), around the idea of teaching history through the sensory experience of sound. At the most recent SITE conferences, John gave a truly fascinating presentation about his creative use of technology, to teach history through the idea of soundscapes. It was such an engaging, fresh and aesthetically appealing approach to the content, that we asked him, and his collaborator David Hicks, to work with us and share this idea in our Tech Trends column.

For anyone interested in social studies, history, education, creativity, technology, the sensory experience of sound, or any one/combination of the above topics, you may be interested in checking out this short piece. It’s available here:

Lee, J., Hicks, D., Henriksen, D., & Mishra, P. (2015). Historical soundscapes for creative synthesis. Tech Trends (59)5. 4-8.

After Teachers College Record published my study of excellence in creative teaching (coauthored with Punya Mishra), it’s been nice to have received some press and media interest. Most notably it was a thrill to have the study featured in the National Education Association (NEA) Magazine, as their online presence neaToday wrote about our work in an article titled:  How Teachers Stay Creative In the High-Stakes Testing Era.

And additionally, below are some of the other links to media reports and related publications:

• A media release prepared by Michigan State University that got the ball rolling (Thanks to Andy Henion for all his help with this):  America’s Best Teachers Get Creative. This was also posted on the College of Education’s website here.
• MSU Today, at the same time posted a profile of Dr. Henriksen: Learning from best
• An article in Quartz magazine: America’s best teachers use theater and rap to make kids like math
• A blog post on Science20: How exceptional Teachers use Creativity in the Classroom
• A blog post on Ed Week: Creativity and Making Great Teachers

For those interested in this line of work – here are a couple of other related articles that arose from this line of research:

• An article in Educational Leadership (Henriksen & Mishra, 2013): Creativity Now! Learning from Creative Teachers
• An article in the STEM Journal (Henriksen, 2014): Full STEAM Ahead: Creativity in Excellent STEM Teaching Practices 

In recent years, I’ve been working with a phenomenal group of faculty and students at Michigan State University (The Deep-Play Research Group), to build a research program that centers around creativity, technology and 21st century education. So it was quite a nice opportunity to get the chance to co-author a chapter for the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education in the Digital Age, that details the development of a series of projects and a whole line of thinking in our work. In a sense, this chapter not only examines the findings of some of our research and teaching, but it also takes a meta-level look at the development of a line of research. For those interested, the full citation is available here:

Mishra, P., Henriksen, D., & Mehta, R. (2015). Creativity, Digitality, and Teacher Professional Development: Unifying Theory, Research, and Practice. In M. Niess, & H. Gillow-Wiles (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Teacher Education in the Digital Age (pp. 691-722). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. [Download PDF of the article].

My study of creative teachers, which I conducted a few years back as my dissertation, has finally published as an article in Teachers College Record (these things can take a while to make it to publication). 🙂 My excellent coauthor was writing/research partner-in-crime, Dr. Punya Mishra.

Doing this study put my in a position to speak to some of the best and most noted teachers in the country, which was not only a privilege, it was inspiring and fascinating. Their work was cross-disciplinary, rooted in real world applications of learning, innovative and effective, and it spanned a variety of contexts and types of students and settings.

The article can be found via TC Record here (though to get the full version beyond the abstract, you have to go through an institutional subscription, or at least signup for the free online subscription):

Henriksen, D., & Mishra, P. (in press). We teach who we are: Creativity in the lives and practices of accomplished teachers. Teachers College Record Volume 117 Number 7, 2015, p. 1–46. http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 17947

A full PDF version can be found here: We Teach Who We Are.

My dissertation work is soon to be published as an article in Teachers College Record. And I was excited to have the opportunity to be interviewed and talk a bit more about the work, in an episode of Vialogues (a video series that Columbia University does to feature the work of authors in the Teachers College Record journal). Feel free to check it out in the link here…https://vialogues.com/vialogues/play/22566/

Much of my work in recent years has focused around creativity and trans-disciplinary skills (or cognitive skills for thinking creatively across disciplines). Around this I’ve been working on a column series for Tech Trends with Punya Mishra and varied guest co-authors, each of which covers a different trans-disciplinary skill for creativity, as framed by teaching and technology. I’m happy to say that we have now covered each of the seven skills (perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modeling, play and synthesis), and all of those columns have been published over the last year or so by Tech Trends. Additionally, the citations and PDFs can be found here: Read more…

I’m pleased to share an article about a couple of case studies of blended doctoral learning, in a special issue of Tech Trends focused online-hybrid doctoral programs, edited by Cara Dawson and Swapna Kumar. This special issue focuses on a variety of unique and interesting approaches to doctoral learning in online and blended environments. I co-authored this with Punya Mishra, Christine Greenhow, Cary Roseth, and William Cain (all of whom have extensive experience in online/hybrid doctoral teaching and learning design at MSU).

In this paper we suggest: Read more…