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As 700,000 children head into six weeks of Scottish summer, finding any and every opportunity to get back online, are you ready to dive in and see exactly what they're doing?

One could argue that it's the first time a veritable deluge of research can be found on what British tweens and teens do online, after a series of high profile research launches throughout Spring. If you have a passion for reading over 400 pages of the stuff, be my guest. I did and have lived to tell the tale, and the tale is indeed a fascinating one, providing plenty of ammunition the next time I hear from yet another keynote speaker how 'creative' our young people are online, and how much more 'digitally native' they are than us old crusties (yes, at 30 I am considered already rather crusty already by the followers of Marc Prensky's brigade).

Don't get me wrong: children can be and often are incredibly creative, particularly in school with an enigmatic teacher and clear learning goals. After a year spent in and out of primary schools in East Lothian I was ready to get my transfer to teach with those students. Without wanting to malign my delightful secondary students, who have exhibited spurts of creative passion of which Sir Alan would be proud, I had come to the same conclusion as Sir Ken Robinson made in his 2005 Scottish Learning Festival keynote: somewhere along their school careers children have every last ounce of creativity knocked out of them. Though I'm sure it was never in S2 French with Mr McIntosh.

Robinson's was a brash statement for some, probably the same teachers who will be angered to know that he still makes the point in speeches today (a keynoter's way of telling us all: "could do better"). , probably the world's most hankered after conference by and for really clever people, which is why you probably want a $6000 ticket out of next year's professional development budget, have published which has now been viewed millions of times, on every continent, and continually pops up the educational blogosphere, with ever-more desperation and enthusiasm in equal measure to "do something about the creativity problem" in our schools.

With such a worldwide uprising calling for more creativity, whatever it looks like, are all those keynote speakers, whom we can expect at this year's in America, the in September and in January next year, just plain wrong? Like teens around the world, apparently, are Scottish kids actually, well... really dull?

suggests that online creativity is, in fact, quite limited. It's limited to mostly girls, mostly through social networks. Creating a profile, uploading a picture, leaving comments on your mates' profiles... that's about as creative as the average British teen gets. Making a movie on a mobile phone or camcorder, publishing whole photo albums or writing on a blog all strike a creative chord with less than a fifth of our teens. It's long confirmed what I've witnessed in thousands of Bebo profiles, and what is suggesting: social networks are used for coordinating activity (read: nights out, skipping a lesson, gossiping about Jane and her new beau), rather than anything particularly creative.

But before we go and pull the plug on our kids' net access this summer, here's the caveat: what did youngsters do in their summer holidays three years ago, before social networks existed? What about 30 years ago? Or 50?

I'm not convinced that we were all painting, creating wicker baskets or painting blown out eggs (the latter reserved for really rainy days in Dunoon, circa 1983). I have a hunch that all this creativity - or lack of it - is relative. What I remember of summers at home back then was going for walks, playing football and, yes, playing Jet Set Willy and Horace Goes Skiing on the ZX Spectrum. Football and walks would entertain me (just) for a few hours. Computer games kept me going all day (and into the evening when it was too light to sleep). I wasn't alone - all my friends did the same, boys and girls. We even coded our own things on the Spectrum, and later created printed documents on the first Apple Macs to hit our neighbourhood.

So what's the difference between those who play creatively and those who don't? I'm not going to try to answer that yet, but I like that Stephen Heppell has started to push again and again. It's not creativity that's important - we can all "be creative". Rather, that we should be concentrating on. Sounds great, but how on earth are you going to teach it in the last week of term?

The research reports:

A summary of all four reports will be published on Learning and Teaching Scotland's this summer.

Comments

I think we certainly achieved your aim today Ewan with a Global Citizenship Day! Tomorrow Euro '08 day. I also returned home to find my son designed a computer game on paper today called 'Doggie Island'. I particularly liked the golden kibble reward pile! No basket weaving for us this summer! :-)
Lynne
Tue Jun 24 22:37:42 2008