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Interested in the practical applications of serendipity? In the 2024 series of online monthly seminars, we focussed on how to educate for and with serendipity. Special thanks to Wendy Ross and Sabrina Sauer for organizing these! Please check out the abstracts and videos below.
Guided surprises and unguided surprises. An example of using creativity and serendipity in higher education.
Monique van Hest & Chris Gibling (February 2024)
Creativity has been central to our education since the inception of Fontys Academy for the Creative Economy. For the communication course, since two years, we have been experimenting with a non-guided form to work with the unexpected. During so-called Press & Play sessions, we try to prepare the student minds to be open for serendipity by offering a choice program that revolves around inspiration, incubation and creation. The goal is to get students out of the mode of result-oriented work, to allow serendipity and chance. Besides Chris Gribling developed the module 'From Fascination to Concept'. In this module of seven meetings, he learns undergraduate students through guided creativity to an idea or concept to be implemented, using techniques where the unexpected or the accidental is sought. During our talk Monique will tell more about the why of the unguided program while Chris will explain and demonstrate the series of meetings for 'from fascination to concept' with examples. We will be accompanied by one of our students who will share her experiences and learnings. After this there will be room for a dialogue.
Monique van Hest Coincidence and wonder is central to my entire life. Opportunities float by, a train ride leads to a story for a children's book and new projects arise during a conversation. Since working at Fontys, I've noticed that in education there is often a return to methodologies. Useful and nice to learn something, and then to be able to let go. But students find it hard to let go of methods, and often want to go straight from problem to solution. They (and we) go from deadline to deadline. Partly because of corona and the enormous rush to know the answer, a need arose in me to pause and go back to the essence. From that thought came the mission to give incubation and the unexpected a place in our education. A thought that fortunately was recognized and picked up by colleagues with whom we further developed Press & Play together. It is a road of trial and error, because not everyone recognizes and acknowledges the importance.
For Fontys I work as a lecturer and member of the research group Designing the Future that - among other things - researches the importance of silence in creativity and therefore experiments with ways to streamline incubation. In addition, I still write children's books.
Chris Gribling From 2000 to 2015, I was a cowboy. A Tilburg Cowboy to be precise. Now I am a cowboy at rest. Tilburg Cowboys is an artist company focused on community art with a touch of rock and roll. During my life as a cowboy, I have embraced coincidence. Coincidence leads to a good story. And good stories need to be told! One way to lead coincidence were our swap projects. Swapping objects created new encounters with unexpected connections. I traded in my cowboy hat for being a teacher. But I took the experience with me to develop module "from fascination to concept." In this module of seven meetings, I lead undergraduate students through guided creativity to an idea or concept to be implemented. For this I use techniques where the unexpected or the accidental is sought. Here I try to show students the surprise. This surprise is often recognized retrospectively and then results in an outcome where personal gain is experienced. During our talk, I will explain and demonstrate the series of meetings with examples. Following these examples there will be room for dialogue.
As a teacher of creativity, I have developed and implemented creativity education for Fontys Academy for the Creative Industries. Press and Play is partly an example of this.
Search and serendipity: Teaching Digital Humanities students how to catch serendipity and information encountering in digital search environments
Sabrina Sauer (27 March 2024)
How often do you search and browse information online and by chance find something you did not even think you were looking for but that you find useful, inspiring, or surprising? This kind of information encountering (Erdelez & Makri, 2020) is at the basis of my talk. I will present the details of a pedagogical practise that taught master students of the Digital Humanities (DH) programme at the University of Groningen how to research their peers’ experiences of serendipitous information encountering as they explored a large digital audio-visual archive for materials to create audio-visual stories.
DH is a field that works at the intersection of humanities disciplines and digital technology and computation. As part of a course about computational tools and methods, DH master students were offered theoretical, technical, and experiential teaching modules about digital search and serendipity, information encountering, and how to set up user studies primed to “catch” serendipity as part of creative retrieval practices. These modules taught them how to map information encountering, and let them reflect on what these maps indicate about the role of serendipity in digital (re)search practices.
After presenting the developed teaching modules, I compare the insights gained about serendipity as part of search practices in the classroom with earlier research about how search professionals (such as journalists, image researchers and archivists) see “searching for serendipity” as part of their professional skillset (Sauer & De Rijke, 2016). I hope to then open the floor to a discussion about how recognizing serendipitous information encountering is a skill. Ideally, I also want to discuss how teaching students about serendipity encourages them to embrace uncertainty and the unforeseen, thereby opening their research to improvisation and unexpected discoveries.
References
Erdelez, S., & Makri, S. (2020). Information encountering re-encountered: A conceptual re-examination of serendipity in the context of information acquisition.
Sauer, S., & de Rijke, M. (2016, July). Seeking serendipity: A living lab approach to understanding creative retrieval in broadcast media production. In
Biography: Serendipity and improvisation, especially in creative practices within media production and social innovation processes, fascinate me. While working on my PhD in Science and Technology Studies (2009-2013) which focused on socio-technical innovation facilitated through public-private-civic partnerships in Living Labs, I stumbled on the idea of technological artefacts prescribing particular (use) scripts. With a background in acting, I reinterpreted the idea of a script as something to play on or improvise with. This research into improvisation led me to a postdoctoral project that sought to understand creative retrieval of media professionals: how do “creatives” search in archives to create new media content? To me this hinged on the idea of searching for something you know is in an archive but that seems impossible to find. It was while researching this topic that I encountered serendipity research. Ever since, I have looked at practices of media production, interdisciplinary collaboration and social innovation through the lens of serendipity, because drawing attention to what is considered unforeseen in these practices opens up discussions about what is actually at stake in these practices.
I work at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), where I am an assistant professor of Media Studies. I teach courses in Media Studies and Digital Humanities on topics that include creativity, and software and data culture, and I encourage students to engage in user research.
Creativity and Serendipity in STEAM Education
Ronnie Videla (29 May 2024)
From the 4E Cognition approach, creativity in technological educational environments is conceived as an emerging phenomenon and historically condensed in skillful practices of material engagement, which opens up unprecedented possibilities during the coupling of person, materials and tools. In this presentation, the case of STEAM education is presented to students who attend a summer school for two weeks to address the generation of a smart garbage dump through project-based learning. Through an ethnographic design, descriptions of the process of change in the creation of personal artifacts are reported, in which each boy and girl follows their own route of inspiration to create prototypes with the available materials and technologies (AI, 3D Modeling and Printing, Programming with arduinos and Scratch) your own smart trash can. The findings show that the synergy between people, materials and technological tools enriches the ways of thinking about things, generating collaborative and challenging educational processes that give way to more robust techno-scientific notions, performatively translated into new prototypes as a result of distributed creativity in dynamic sociomaterial environments. We consider that exchange of ideas, the use of digital tools and technologies generate a fertile field to cultivate creativity from the traces, footprints, and materials that emerge from intuitive notions captured in initial sketches to minimum viable prototypes that integrate digital technologies.
Ronnie Videla has a Bachelor in Education, Master in Psychology (University of La Serena, Chile) and Doctor in Education from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. He is a researcher at the Faculty of Education of the Santo Tomas University, Chile. He has specialized in cognitive science and educational innovation, particularly with the 4E Cognition approach and the Maker movement for STEAM education. He is the founder of InnovaSteam Lab for the design of interdisciplinary and embodied educational environments with creative technologies. He has been trained in the fundamentals of cultural biology with Humberto Maturana and Ximena Dávila at the Escuela Matríztica.
Le Grand Jeu and the potential of money games for exploring economic possibilities
Marcus Petz and Federico Bonelli (26 June 2024)
This talk focuses on a case study of the game Le Grand Jeu (LGJ), which extends into a general analysis of the potential of games in the diversification of the economy, in particular with regard to money. Further, we explore LGJ’s capacity to expand the horizon of the possible, as is often called for in theories of degrowth and related literature. Le Grand Jeu is a game, developed via community arts, used for the introduction of cryptocurrencies. We explore the development of that game and how it can be used as a tool that allows the utopian propensity to be explored and purposed to our own reality. We discuss the role of money, or more appropriately, monies, in generating social change, and locate this discussion in the context of degrowth literature. Practical degrowth alternatives to current mainstream economic approaches are needed. We argue that money games are a practical approach to fostering political imagination and are real-life versions of economic modelling. Furthermore, the ‘open world assumption’within some games adds personal presence and mutual reflexivity to the general understanding of an economic model. We show that the use of games in workshops and real-time play allows a more realistic, integral economics to be explored.
About the speakers: Marcus Petz is currently at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Jyväskylä University. He is currently looking at community economics with the Credit Commons Society. He is engaged in working in community currencies and rural regeneration. Federico Bonelli (1969, IT/NL) is an independent researcher and a multimedia artist. Has a degree in philosophy of science, studied history of mathematics and practiced media arts. His research includes figurative arts, music, cinema and theater. His work has been seminal for the innovation of cultural formats. Explorer of aesthetic forms, but also a researcher. Prefers to work in collaboration and within circles of peers. Founder of the Trasformatorio Lab who also directs the foundation.
Thinkering as a Complement to Design in the Context of Technology Integration in Teaching and Learning
Emanuele Bardone, Pirjo Mõttus and Maka Eradze (29 October 2024)
This talk explores the integration of technology in educational settings, emphasizing the limitations of traditional design approaches. Pirjo Mõttus discusses how design has historically been viewed as essential for addressing technology integration challenges, citing its evolution from instructional technology in the 1970s to modern learning design (LD) frameworks. LD is characterized as a creative process involving the development of practices, plans, and tools to achieve educational goals.
Despite the focus on design, the authors argue that relying solely on structured design processes can overlook the complexities of real-world teaching environments. They propose "tinkering"—a more flexible, exploratory approach—as a valuable complement to formal design methods. Tinkering can be related to a constructivist learning approach (Willet, 2018) that prioritizes “activities where learners actively engage in the physical construction of artefacts” (Bardone et al., 2023). Tinkering encourages educators to experiment and adapt technologies in their classrooms, promoting a more responsive and personalized learning experience.
The talk presents case study insights that have helped identify four types of tinkering with educational technology. Ultimately, they will discuss the importance of considering both design and tinkering in effectively integrating technology into teaching and learning, advocating for a balanced approach that embraces spontaneity alongside structured planning. This perspective aims to foster a richer, more dynamic educational environment.
About the speakers: Emanuele Bardone is Associate Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Tartu, where he is the head of the Center for Educational Technology and the director of the International Master's Programme in Educational Technology. His research interests include tinkering with educational technology, sociotechnical imaginaries of education, uncertainty in technology use in education, critical studies of Artificial Intelligence and Education.
Pirjo Mõttus is a doctoral student at the University of Tartu where she is also working as a junior researcher. Her research focuses on tinkering with educational technology and exploring the concept of the postdigital classroom. She is engaged in exploring the adaptive and creative approach to teaching and learning in an era where digital technologies are no longer viewed as separate from everyday life.
Maka Eradze is a PhD in Technology-Enhanced Learning (Tallinn University, Estonia). Currently an associate professor of educational research and teaching methodologies at the university of L’Aquila (Italy), her research interests include educational technology and digital education, use of tools in education in higher education and school contexts and their theorization, learning design, design of educational innovation, and educational research methodologies and methods.
PhDs, creativity, serendipity and the iron cage of the future
Alistair McCulloch (26 November 2024)
The award of a PhD requires a doctoral scholar to produce something new. Most often this is couched in terms of making an original contribution to knowledge, something sometimes referred to as being the defining characteristic of a doctorate. Making such a contribution requires the student to engage in an act of (or in the process of) creativity. We know that, while creativity sometimes comes about as the consequence of a carefully planned process in a carefully planned setting, it can also be the result of serendipity – something that happens at the intersection of the coming together of chance and the prepared mind.
Alistair’s recent research suggests that serendipity plays an important part as doctoral students study for their PhDs. Graduate research education is, however, a level of activity that has been generally neglected in the histories of serendipity which have tended to focus on STEM subjects, on big science, and on the work of established scientists. This paper revisits Alistair’s research on the way serendipity is exhibited in PhD study, and its importance to that study, before moving on to look at the social forces and tendencies that are impacting contemporary doctoral education and their potential impact on the potential for serendipity and thereby the creative act that doctoral education demands.
Speaker biography: Alistair McCulloch is Head of Research Education at the University of South Australia having previously been Dean of Research and Knowledge Transfer at the UK’s Edge Hill University. A former Executive Committee member of the UK Council for Graduate Education, he has been Chair of the biennial Quality in Postgraduate Research conference (QPR) since 2012 and, in 2017, was awarded a Citation for an Outstanding Contribution to Learning in the field of research degree supervisor development as part of the national Australian Awards for University Teaching. His PhD was in political science although he now undertakes research and publishes in the discipline of Doctoral Education. His most recent work has been into orientation and induction into doctoral study and in the role of serendipity in the PhD.
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