Raise Your Hands or Hands-on? The Role of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning in Stimulating Intercreativity in Education

Young people are often referred to as digital natives, who are familiar with digital technologies such as computers, the Internet and mobile phones for communication, entertainment and accessing information. As a result scholars have called for an educational approach that bypasses the traditional unidirectional lecture teaching style, and applies a more hands-on, learner-centered method, which includes information and communications technologies (ICT) environments and applications. Building on the outcome of expert interviews, focus group conversations and public test cases in two research projects, i.e., “Bewaring en Ontsluiting van Multimediale data in VLaanderen” (Archiving and Distribution of Multimedia in Flanders— BOM-VL) and “Multi-touch Multimedia Table” (MuTable), we want to reflect on the following questions by elaborating on the North Belgian (i.e., Flemish) context: How does the adoption of touch interfaces influence teaching and learning processes in classrooms and what are the implications for teaching models (traditional versus more interactive models)? Besides elaborating on the (attitudinal) bottlenecks and (pedagogical) opportunities of multi-touch displays in educational contexts, we discuss the implications for models of ownership of learning processes.