Group Creativity in Interaction: Collaborative Referencing, Remembering, and Bridging

Abstract

Understanding collective creativity is crucial for advancing the general study of human creativity as well as for guiding the design of creativity support tools for small teams and larger collectivities. In this article, we present a qualitative case study of collective creativity online, derived from an analysis of collaborative interactions of virtual teams of students working in the field of mathematics. We examine group creative activity broadly, ranging from the micro-level co-construction of novel resources for team problem solving to the evolutionary reuse of ideas and solution strategies across teams. Our analysis focuses on describing the relationship between the dynamics of creative work present in a single collaborative episode of an online group and their evolution across time and across collectivities. Our analysis indicates that the synergy between these two types of interactions and the resulting creative engagement of the teams relies on three fundamental processes: (a) indexical referencing, (b) group remembering, and (c) bridging across discontinuities.

Acknowledgments

This research is part of a collaborative effort of the Virtual Math Teams project, supported by the NSF NSDL, IERI and SLC programs.