Creative online collaboration: a special challenge for co-creation

The special section in Education and Information Technologies has been published now in print and online.

The trend towards digitally facilitated collaboration is irreversible. Basic tasks comprise communication, sharing of documents and documentation of the working process. Technical solutions that enable collaborative work exist aplenty and are constantly evolving. However, the main challenges involved in digitally facilitated collaborative work that includes elements of creative co-creation—typically found in the area of higher education or professional settings that involve creative and design tasks—can be found in the facilitation of creative environments in “virtual space”. Online collaborative creative processes comprise all such activities which aim to solve in a group problem that do not have standard solutions, mediated through web-based tools. Typically, such problems require interdisciplinary, lateral thinking, social empathy and extensive ideation with the aim of mutual inspiration. The processes applied are often nonlinear and rely on multimodal means of synchronous and asynchronous communication, with a special focus on visual tools.

This special section explores the emerging socio-technological platforms for creative collaboration for both team-work in business settings as well as in educational environments.