CCSTED 2012 - International Workshop on Creative Collaboration through Supportive Technologies in Education (CCSTED 2012)

The Workshop is organized in the frame of the 11th International Conference on Web-based Learning - ICWL 2012 (http://www.hkws.org/conference/icwl2012/)
The general topic of the workshop is oriented on how to support creative collaboration through various technologies, at different levels of education: pre-primary, primary, secondary, university and adult education.
Nowadays, creative collaboration represents a multidisciplinary process where different problems are explored taking into account new perspectives, based on the idea of developing and evaluating technology-supported collaborative spaces for different age learners. Collaborative space can be combination of real and virtual environment which enables group work. Generally, the process of designing a collaborative space involves: scripting collaborative learning (modeling how learners of different ages collaborate in those spaces) and developing technology enhanced spaces to support creative collaboration.
In this respect, the workshop deals with current research on creative collaboration, its aims being particularly directed to gather experiences on exploring:
- how mobile social media can enhance creative collaboration and collaborative learning;
- how collaborative spaces can be developed and evaluated;
- how to provide formal, informal and non-formal education based on collaborative learning;
- how to understand the collaborative learning concepts in order to support and enhance the process of creative collaboration.
The workshop concentrates around current research on computer supported collaborative learning topics leading towards the meaning of a learning environment which can support creative collaboration process.
Social software (e.g., blogs, wikis, other social media tools) can be one of the proper solution for defining the best environment, but other kind of applications can be explored and adapted to enhance the process of creative collaboration. For instance, affordances of emergent technologies (interactive whiteboards, tabletops, smartphones) combined with social software are opening new forms of interaction and can be used as integral part of pedagogical design consisting of individual and collective learning activities.
In this respect, the aim of the workshop is to provide a forum for discussing the trends and initiatives in promoting the creative collaboration using technologies, including research about the organizing, development and evaluation of the specific process.
The workshop is targeted at academic researchers, education stakeholders, academic staff, school teachers, educators and practitioners alike. The proposed area is interdisciplinary and tries to call the massive interest expressed by the education community on teaching and learning, using a web-based collaborative support. At the same time, the proposed theme is expected to draw the attention of researchers who are interested in the area of computer supported collaborative learning and creative collaboration, but also in educational technologies.