Richard Florida's "The rise of the creative class" (2002) delivered a strong wake-up call to higher education institutions worldwide. By linking creativity to technological innovation and economic prosperity, Florida argued that universities and colleges should nurture creativity in their students. But for many years, the higher education…

Today's students are the first generation to grow up with computers, cell-phones, video games, music and video players, and other digital technologies. As "digital natives", a new term coined by Prensky (2001), they spend more time reading text messaging lines than lines from books, and they spend more time on Facebook than putting their energies…

What recent research has been conducted about gifted and talented students and their learning experiences in school? As we complete the first decade of the new century we are entering a time when much attention is focused on remediation and test preparation; it only seems appropriate to reflect upon what has been learned about gifted education…

This article offers an analysis of community arts to develop an argument about the power of vernacular literacies. We draw on Paul Willis' work about grounded aesthetics and everyday symbolic creativity in common culture, and Scollon and Scollon's notions of geosemiotics, to analyse a community play written and performed in a council estate in…

Contact improvisation (CI) is a form of dance based on motor creativity, improvisation and the physical contact between different improvisers dancing together. This will generate different ways of moving and a varied use of motor creativity depending on the dancers involved. This study aims to observe the differences in movement generation…

Theories of categorization need to account for ways in which people use their creativity to categorize things, especially in the context of similarity. The current three-phase study is a preliminary attempt to understand how people group concepts together as well as to explore the role of similarity between concepts in creative categorization.…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ateleological moment of learning through imitation. In general, we can learn something new through imitating models we are given, which embody the values of our own society, culture and institutions. This means that imitation is understood in terms of the representation or reproduction of original…

This paper investigates the interactions between design students' cognitive styles, as measured by Riding's Cognitive Styles Analysis, and performance in 2D drafting and design tasks in digital media. An empirical research revealed that Imager students outperformed Verbalisers in both drafting and creativity scores. Wholist-Analytic cognitive…

Profiling may be a viable means of identifying those creative adolescents who can benefit from specialized guidance and exploration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, arts, and human services. The experimenters developed 1 general and 5 specific profiles including interest, personality, and achievement variables…

Informal learning practices, based on Lucy Green's research into how popular musicians learn, offer students in the music classroom the opportunity to explore collaborative, aural-based learning that is guided, rather than directed, by the teacher. Over a period of five years, informal learning projects were included in the music curricula of two…

The vision and mission of Universitas Terbuka (UT) is to become a highly qualified open and distance education institution and to provide higher education access to all communities. Graduates of UT are expected to acquire adequate knowledge, hard skills and soft skills. Soft skills play important roles in the world of work. The aim of this article…

For girls there is a distinct loss in interest, lack of confidence, and decline in positive attitudes toward STEM subject areas that begins early on in their academic experience and increases with age. According to the National Academy of Engineering, students need to begin associating the possibilities in STEM fields with the need for creativity…

The 21st century demands the explicit integration of learning strategies, digital competences and career abilities. Schools in general and EFL classrooms in particular should provide students with practices and processes focused on acquiring and developing, among other things, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, self-direction, and…

In this paper we explore how the "employable" student and "ideal" future creative worker is prefigured, constructed and experienced through higher education work placements in the creative sector, based on a recent small-scale qualitative study. Drawing on interview data with students, staff and employers, we identify the…

In this article we discuss dilemmas and paradoxes in the use of learning resources and the need to list sources when writing, issues that are relevant for students as well as for teachers and authors of textbooks. We draw on experience from a Norwegian research project investigating students' writing in two subjects: physics and Norwegian in…