Welfare professionals’ digital imagination and technological entrepreneurship

Nursing- and teacher students´ doings and sayings during educational designs aiming at empowering their digital creativity, so they are able to innovate on problems and opportunities in their practice with digital technology.

Which potentials and challenges can be observed when students go through the designed course aiming at their digital creativity?

In addition, we are curious about key-elements in the didactical design that trigger potentials and/or challenges regarding the students digital creativity.

Welfare professionals such as nurses and teachers do not necessarily learn to think and act with digital technology during their studies. Technology comprehension is not a part of curriculum. If it is, it is mostly instructive use of ready-made digital tools or solutions they need to master in order to practice their profession. A deeper understanding of digital technologies is not part of curriculum.

Both health and teacher professionals’ risk to experience that digital technology appears in their professions as top-down management decisions that lead to alienation and deprofessionalization (Giddens, 1991:150). To prevent loss of autonomy regarding to the digital development, we are looking for educational ways to encourage welfare professionals’ possibilities to act entrepreneurial and think innovative with digital technology in their professions.

Being an ongoing study, the results of the research described in the following are to be considered preliminary findings that will be studied further in the upcoming semester. Based on data from the first workshop, key-elements that seem to have an impact on students’ digital creativity are the following:

Imagination and language: We found that the students’ interactions with digital technology opened new ways of thinking and talking. Observations point to students using language that expresses their imagination of how technologies may open up for new solutions regarding their professional practice. In line with Seymore Papert (1980), we see how digital technology pushes the student’s creativity in new directions, and that language and imagination seem to play a role in the process.



Students with strong digital “techne” knowledge teaching other students become achievable role models: when students teach students, they become role models. They are not experts far from the participants, but within reach. Their ideas and skills can help to indicate the next steppingstone for the participants (Kirketerp, 2012).



physical placement in cooperation around the technology maybe affects the digital creativity

In the workshops students cooperated in pairs. The program CoSpaces, where they programmed and built their ideas enable them to work together on the same project from each of their computers – like Google docs. some of the pairs cooperate in this way. they sat on opposite sides of the table facing each other. In this way they discussed their project without touching or seeing each other's computer screens. Approximately the other half of the pairs sat next to each other with their own computers, which they both touched and looked at. Vi found that the pairs who sat next to each other had developed greater digital creativity.

the USE-MODIFY-CREATE approach to teaching and learning that we will define as an entrepreneurial approach in the full paper, seems to lead to a playful learning atmosphere with aspects of fooling around, silliness and having fun while learning.