Everyday creativity on a university campus: crafting a challenge to journey beyond the formal

Abstract

This paper reports on an initiative to encourage staff, students and the wider community of an Irish university to engage in open, daily creative challenges, mediated by technology. The aim was to encourage creativity as a ritual practice, and to develop digital literacy, in an open forum. We explore how the ideas and methods of DS106[1], a course in Digital Storytelling from the University of Mary Washington (UMW) and other accessible open courses on the web, were appropriated for use within a university campus. The project, known as Campus Create, became both a virtual space and daily practice, encouraging creative thinking across the campus in a fun and playful way. In this paper, we describe the approach taken towards building an open, inclusive online community of learners, with a shared intention to make creativity a more frequent habit.