December 20, 2022
This year’s international symposium on Creativity, Learning & Technology focused on the complexities and possibilities of technological progress. Ingunn Johanne Ness, Senior Researcher, and Vlad Glaveanu, Professor at Dublin City University and Professor II at SLATE, organized the event, with support from the SEIS project.
The symposium on Creativity, Learning & Technology is an annual international event, which was held for the first time in 2017. This year, the symposium was held on December 7th – December 9th in Dublin. Ingunn Johanne Ness, SLATE's Theme Leader and Senior Researcher, and Vlad Glaveanu, Professor at the School of Psychology at Dublin City University and Professor II at SLATE, have organized the event for the sixth time—but for the first time in Dublin.
This year’s theme was “Technologies for Learning, Creativity, and Well-being: The New Science of the Possible”. The symposium in Dublin was dedicated to examining how we can harness technological development ‘for good’, while at the same time being mindful of the complexities and ethical dilemmas associated with this kind of progress.
One of the main questions being discussed this year was: How can technological advances be used to enhance learning, creativity, and well-being in education, work, and society as a whole?
This question is a key interrogation within Possibility Studies, an emerging and transdisciplinary field of research that is concerned with how individuals and communities become aware of, explore, and enact possibilities in psychological, social, material, cultural, and political terms. Technology has a crucial role to play in these kinds of explorations. We need to be reminded, however, that the use of technology both opens and closes spheres of possibility, and that, sometimes, it presents us with possibilities that are best avoided.
Also attending the Dublin event from SLATE, were our Director, Professor Barbara Wasson, Researcher Fride Haram Klykken and PhD Candidate André Rabello Mestre. They were there to discuss important questions about our technologically mediated engagement with the possible, and its impact on key aspects of our lives, such as learning, creating, and experiencing well-being. In addition, Mestre presented his PhD research, Singing Rooms: Creative Becoming in Virtual Learning Spaces.
About the Co-organizers
This year’s event was co-organized by the School of Psychology at Dublin City University and SLATE at the University of Bergen, under the auspices of the Possibility Studies Network with support from the EU SEIS project. The event continues a series of successful symposia on topics related to creativity, learning, and technology. These past reunions have led to the publication of two special issues, in Creativity Research Journal (2020) and Creativity: Theory – Research – Application (2021), and a co-edited book, Creative Learning in Digital and Virtual Environments: Opportunities and Challenges of Technology-Enabled Learning and Creativity (2021).
Professor Vlad Glaveanu is Full Professor at the School of Psychology at Dublin City University, and Professor II at SLATE at the University of Bergen. Trained as a social scientist and educator at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK, Vlad is an international expert on topics related to creativity, learning, technology, collaboration, migration, and culture. He is the author of Creativity: A Very Short Introduction and The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory (2021) and Wonder: The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience (2020), as well as over 200 chapters and scientific articles. Glaveanu has been a consultant or invited expert on creativity and innovation for organizations and companies such as OECD, UNESCO, the Lego Foundation, the International Baccalaureate, and Climate KIC, among others. Glaveanu is also the founder and President of the Possibility Studies Network.
Dr. Ingunn Johanne Ness is a Senior Researcher and leader of the theme Creativity, Learning & Technology at SLATE at the University of Bergen. She is an expert on learning and creativity in the field of education and business, with a particular interest in dialogical pedagogy and the sociocultural approach. Ness works with the University of Cambridge and the DEFI group (the Digital Education Futures Initiative) on dialogue, creativity, and learning. Previously, she has worked with one of the world’s leading environments on sociocultural theory, the Oxford Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research (OSAT) at the University of Oxford. Ness collaborates closely with the Possibility Studies Network, is a member of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI), and she has a number of publications in international journals and handbooks in the areas of creativity, learning, and technology.
Mr. Patrick Boylan is a Senior Technical Officer at the School of Psychology at Dublin City University. He has a broad experience in the areas of technology and psychology, with a focus on Virtual Reality and its applications, including those related to the management of pain.
