Co-Creat Research Report: A summary of research carried out during out during 2010-2013 in fulfilment of Work Package 8 of the multilateral CoCreat Project funded by the EACEA under its Lifelong Learning Programme

This report presents an overview of the work of the international collaborative project CoCreat which aimed to enhance creative collaboration in technology enhanced learning. It outlines the five projects (‘collaborative spaces’) in which the research took place, provides a summary of the project’s review of literature on creativity, collaboration and technology, and then describes each research project in further detail, highlighting the pedagogical models used, the technological solutions, the participants’ views on what was important to creative collaboration and the outcomes. Findings and results are then discussed and recommendations presented. Successes in stimulating creative collaboration stemmed, in all collaborative spaces, from effective preparation of the groups for their shared, creative tasks. Lessons were learned from collaborative spaces where participants were asked to collaborate at a distance when participants could not easily share initial ideas through difficulties with establishing a common ground
for their discussions. The role of the digital tools chosen to support the collaborative task was central to managing creative collaboration. Particular successes were having mobile devices that enabled creative activities at authentic locations or at those that had particular meaning (such as virtual support groups, and places that triggered poetry) for the participants.