Paper Info
Title
Fostering creativity through cross-disciplinary collaboration in an online dance course
Abstract
This paper examines cross-disciplinary collaboration in an online dance course in the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. The course was delivered entirely online through the Lohn Lab, Centre for Distance Education at SFU. Students were from both the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, which allowed for cross-disciplinary collaborative work. Most course tasks required the students to create unique human figure animations using Life Forms 3-D human figure animation software and give aesthetic critiques on the work of others. To investigate how online collaborative tasks may foster creativity, we analyzed conference transcripts, interviews, and questionnaires. Transcript analysis showed that students actively collaborated. The message exchange also revealed that the environment functioned well as a means of promoting student-centered collaboration. The insight and creativity in using Life Forms that the non-dance students contributed helped dance students free themselves from their established conceptions of dance pedagogy and aesthetics. Issues that hindered collaboration were mostly related to students' particular preferences and software problems (downloading/uploading time). The majority of students interviewed supported the online collaborative Life Forms assignment tasks, but some were negative about collaborative assignments.
Year
Venue
Keywords
1999
CSCL
online collaborative task,dance pedagogy,cross-disciplinary collaboration,course task,fostering creativity,online dance course,cross-disciplinary collaborative work,life forms,life forms assignment task,online collaborative,collaborative assignment,best practices,qualitative methods,computer mediated communication
Field
DocType
Citations 
Dance,Distance education,Psychology,Discipline,Pedagogy,Computer-mediated communication,Dance education,Qualitative research,The arts,Creativity,Multimedia
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Iris Garland100.34
Lucio Teles211.03
Xinchun Wang312.78