Virtual World Construction and The Relationship to Creativity in Art Education / Construction de mondes virtuels et lien avec la créativité en éducation artistique

This paper presents findings from a participatory observational case study with a perspective on creativity. In this research, high school students from Vancouver, Canada, worked in the virtual world of VCER (Virtual Commons for Education and Research), an Open Simulator, to create an ecosystem. The main research question of this study was: How can the virtual world creation process foster student creativity? The sub-questions were 1. How do students express their creativity through the virtual world creation process? And 2. What can teachers do to further student creativity?Keywords: Virtual worlds; Creativity; Technology. Résumé : Cet article présente les résultats d’une étude d’observation participative axée sur la créativité. Des étudiants du secondaire, basés à Vancouver au Canada, ont exploité le monde virtuel du VCER (Virtual Commons for Education and Research) pour créer un écosystème. Cette étude posait essentiellement la question suivante : en quoi la création de mondes virtuels favorise-t-elle la créativité chez les étudiants ? Les questions subséquentes étaient les suivantes : 1. Comment les étudiants expriment-ils leur créativité par la construction de mondes virtuels ? et 2. Que peuvent faire les enseignants pour promouvoir la créativité des étudiants ?Mots-clés : mondes virtuels, créativité, technologie.

The Role of Participatory Design in Constructing the Virtual Knowledge Commons

The main goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how purposeful participatory design can be used to construct a virtual knowledge commons that both serves and is defined by communities. Other than the proposition that participatory design is a technique to guide participation within a community, the chapter also explores how this technique can be used to nurture and sustain a shared knowledge commons in the virtual environment. To this end, the conditions and consequences of the virtual environment are discussed, illustrating how with participation, the virtual commons is possibly sustainable. The chapter also raises the role of cultural institutions and examines a number of contemporary examples, resulting in a preliminary spectrum of participation by which practices of participation in the virtual knowledge commons by cultural institutions can be mapped. More research and fieldwork needs to be done to refine this model and generate exemplary practices for policy development and best practices in cultural institutions.