Distributed Creativity Within a Community of Student Instructional Designers

Abstract

This study explored the development of a Communities of Innovation (COI) framework for understanding distributed creativity within a community of graduate student instructional designers. After presenting distributed creativity as a theory of collaborative creativity based on established principles of distributed cognition, I present the Communities of Innovation framework as a potential representation of distributed creativity. I then discuss a study where phenomenological interviewing (Seidman, 2006) and Critical Incident Technique (Flanagan, 1952), were used to explore the experiences of four members of a graduate community of designers with many characteristics emblematic of COIs. Findings included evidence for the inclusion of some aspects of the proposed COI framework. In addition, I identify challenges and recommendations to establishing a COI within a graduate educational setting and possible new directions for research using a variety of different methods to better understand the nature of COIs and how to effectively develop them.