Article in Thinking Skills and Creativity · February 2019 doi: 10. 1016/j tsc

Key Words 
Collaborative Creativity; Interactive Technology; 
Dialogic Education;
Multimodality, Interthinking; Secondary Education. 
 
1. Introduction 
The term “Homo Connectus” (as an evolution of “Homo Sapiens”) was first 
coined by some creative and innovative brands as a metaphor to visualize the power of 
the impact of interactive technology on humans’ behaviour (e.g. consumption, 
leisure…) and creative thinking. This metaphor encapsulates the idea of humans 
connected with others, sharing and externalising their ideas in open spaces, interplaying 
with others’ voices expressed through different and multiple multimodal channels. As a 
result of this active on-line dialogue, new, dynamic and co-created knowledge emerges. 
Although many qualified voices have stressed the potential benefits of interactive 
technologies in engaging people in co-creative settings (Wegerif & de Laat, 2011), 
little is known about what collaborative creative processes are triggered when 
interacting with digital technologies and what mechanisms elicit the students’ 
engagement in co-creative actions in technological environments (Davidsen & 
Vanderlinde, 2016; Hennessy, 2001; Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Viilo, & Hakkarainen, 
2010). The research in this paper aims to fill in those gaps in our knowledge and 
discusses the potential of interactive technology as a means of promoting a dialogic space 
for co-creation because it has affordances that can open up, widen and deepen the 
learners’ opportunities to generate, modify and reflect on new ideas through multimodal 
interaction along with talk.
To focus this discussion and examine the emergence of collaborative creativity 
processes supported by technology in real-classroom settings, this research describes 
an empirical study with secondary-age students who followed a technology-enhanced 
dialogic pedagogy for finding, in small groups, creative solutions to one real-life and 
social challenge. This paper focusses on small-group work around and through 
technology to capture the emergence of co-creative processes in a multimodal interaction 
supported by technology and understood as “multimodal ensemble” of communication 

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(Goodwin, 2000) which can include different modes such as gaze, movement, gesture or 
talk. The data obtained have made it possible to develop a characterization of co-
creative processes as a psychological inter-mental phenomenon 
(Glǎveanu, 2010; 
Palmgren-Neuvonen, Korkeamäki, & Littleton, 2017).
Additionally, the paper highlights the importance of the dialogical use of technologies 
in supporting the emergence of a dialogic space for creating collaboratively which 
implies mutual attunement and mutual understanding. Finally, the paper presents the 
educational implications of designing a more effective technology-enhanced dialogic 
pedagogy to connect learners with their creative potential.