ABSTRACT
How has creativity been made intelligible in the digital age? In recent years, creativity has been positioned at the centre of debates in areas as disparate as poststructuralist philosophy and literary theory; chaos and complexity science; cosmology; evolutionary biology and genetics; neuroscience, cognitive psychology and artifi cial intelligence; quantum mechanics and theoretical physics (Pope 2005). In the fi eld of education, creativity has been linked to a series of debates going back half a century to the birth of progressive child-centred education and, in a diff erent vein, to Raymond Williams’ ratifi cation of the everyday creativity of working class ‘lived culture’ in the 1960s (Jones 2009). It is now integral in research and debates on youth media cultures, where ‘creative production’ and ‘creative expression’ using social media have become part of a ‘common parlance and consciousness’ (Ito et al. 2009: 246), while ‘creative learning’ has itself gathered force and momentum within educational debates (Sefton-Green 2008). In the years that straddled the turn of the century, creativity became a central educational orthodoxy, with a kind of taken-for-granted privilege to access all areas of education. Creativity has been invoked by educational policymakers, by educational psychologists, developers and researchers of educational technologies, and deployed in relation to all manner of activities (Craft 2005).
