Creativity in the Digital Forensics Curriculum

Tom Drange

1,2

, Alastair Irons

and Kari Drange

Noroff University College, Elvegt 2A, 4608 Kristiansand, Norway

University of Sunderland, St Peters Campus, Sunderland, SR6 ODD, U.K.

Keywords: Teaching Creativity, Higher Education, Digital Creativity.

Abstract: Creativity is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as "The use of imagination or original ideas to create

something". This definition is easy for students studying topics commonly recognised as creative, such as

animation, drawing, photography and design, to put in context and understand. However, when studying

topics commonly recognised as technical, such as computer science and digital forensics, it's not as easy for

students to relate to this definition. One of the affiliated universities offers bachelor programs in several

disciplines and through the first course, the university is trying to establish a common ground of studying for

all students regardless of the program they are attending. One of the modules in this first course is called

“What is Creativity?” but the digital forensic students do not seem to relate creativity to the topics contained

in their own study program, and it has been challenging to get these students to see the relationship between

creativity and the work situation they might find themselves in after they graduate. This paper will discuss

the challenges of teaching creativity to students in perceived technical programs – and try to highlight the

challenges experienced from both students and staffs point of views.

1 INTRODUCTION

There is a general conception that creativity is now a

necessary part of learning outcomes in higher

education, not just as part of “artistic” subjects, but

as a general attribute expected to be included in any

higher education degree (Pollard, 2012). It has been

claimed that one of the reasons for this eager

approach to implementing creativity in education is

driven by an increased capitalism across the globe

(Craft, 2006), a view also supported by Pollard (2012)

who states that "…creativity has become central to

the effort to increase economic productivity…" Other

reasons are the fact that for instance technology is

being developed at such high rate that what we buy

today, might very well be totally outdated tomorrow

(Csikszentmihalyi, 2006) and the best diet of today

might be claimed unhealthy tomorrow

(Csikszentmihalyi, 2006). In addition, Amabile

(1988) suggest that there is a strong correlation

between creativity and innovation.

This paper will discuss the challenges

experienced when teaching creativity to Digital

Forensics students. Students in Interactive Media and

other perceived artistic study programs, of course,

find it easy to grasp the concept of creativity – as they

are studying subjects that most people perceive as

creative. The situation is very different with the

Digital Forensics students and other perceived

technical study programs, who seems to fail to see the

need for creativity in the very technical industry they

will be entering after graduation. It will also consider

the reasons and explanations for this difference.

2 THE FIVE FUNDAMENTAL

INSIGHTS

The basis for the discussion in this paper will be the

five fundamental insights that Ronald A. Beghetto

and James C. Kaufman published in February 2013 in

order to help educators incorporate creativity in

academic learning (Beghetto and Kaufman, 2013).

2.1 Creativity Takes More than

Originality

In order to teach creativity, educators must know

what creativity actually is. Beghetto and Kaufman

(2013) states that there is a general agreement that

creativity is a “combination of Originality and task

Drange, T., Irons, A. and Drange, K.

Creativity in the Digital Forensics Curriculum.

DOI: 10.5220/0006294101030108

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2017) - Volume 2, pages 103-108

ISBN: 978-989-758-240-0

103

appropriateness.” This definition is supported by the

National Advisory Committee on Creative and

Cultural Education, led by Professor Ken Robinson,

who provided the following definition of creativity:

Creativity is an imaginative activity fashioned so

as to produce outcomes that are both original and of

value.” (National Advisory Committee on Creative

and Cultural Education, 1999)

Plucker et al (2004) provide an interesting

definition, suggesting that creativity is “the

interaction among aptitude, process, and

environment by which an individual or group

produces a perceptible product that is both novel and

useful as defined within a social context”. Others such

as Salgian et al (2103) consider that “creativity in

Computer Science is different from creativity in the

arts”.

One challenge with this is the obvious

contradiction that something must be original but at

the same time fulfil requirements to be deemed of

value or appropriate (Beghetto and Kaufman, 2013).

A more specific challenge in our case is the different

perceptions an animation artist and a digital

investigator have on the word creativity, and

therefore the different attitudes they have towards a

learning journey involving creativity. The value and

appropriateness of the learning activities and lectures

is of the utmost importance to engage both cohorts of

students, primarily make the digital forensics students

see the importance of creativity without losing the

interest from for instance interactive media students.

2.2 There are Different Levels of

Creativity

Beghetto and Kaufman (2013) describes different

levels of creativity, from everyday creativity to life-

changing creativity, and this is perhaps the first thing

that we need students to realise. Creativity does not

have to involve becoming the next Picasso or Da

Vinci, in fact, it does not have to do with art at all.

Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) divides creativity into

the four levels mini-c, little-c, Pro-C and Big-C and

describes them as:

Mini-c: interpretive creativity (for example a

Digital Forensic student discovery of how to use an

acquisition tool)

Little-c: everyday creativity (for example Digital

Forensics class doing a project that combines learning

about interpreting traffic in a network analysing tool

by collecting network traffic from the local network)

Pro-C: expert creativity (for example Digital

Forensics students creating a new tool for data

acquisition)

Big-C: legendary creativity (for example teachers

revolutionising the implementation of learning

creativity in all study programs in higher education)

Getting the Digital Forensics students to see the

relationship between what they do as forensic

investigators and interpretive and everyday creativity

is essential to get them motivated enough to

participate and engage in the creative learning.

Motivation has been shown to play a major role in

students’ willingness to learn technical subjects such

as programming (Jenkins, 2001), but it would be

equally important for us to create academic emotions

(Pekrun et al, 2002) that promote motivation among

several cohorts of students.

2.3 Context Matters

Earlier research has shown that creativity will not be

at its best when under pressure. Rewards, conditions,

competitive circumstances or personal stress

(Amabile and Pillemer, 2011) are all elements to

create pressure. Personal experience of the authors

indicates that tasks and assignments given in

educational settings are often set in order to achieve

the learning outcomes of a course. The prize, in the

end, could be a good grade, and it may also involve

criticism and social comparisons among the students.

Even so, it is possible for the students to look at

assignments and tasks from a point of view that does

incorporate their own interest and engagement,

making the assignments meaningful and joyful for

each individual student, since this is the situations

where people are most creative (Hennessey and

Amabile, 2010). This is also in line with Beghetto and

Kaufman (2013) who states that “teachers should

help students focus on the more intrinsically

motivating and personally meaningful aspects of the

work by discussing how students might incorporate

their personal interests into the tasks”.

2.4 Creativity Comes at a Cost

If you do a search on Google for creativity (Figure 1)

you will get a lot of pictures with colours and playful

images.

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Figure 1: A google search for pictures of creativity.

However, academics in a survey spanning three

countries and thirty participants claimed that they

aimed for students to go beyond their own

boundaries, taking risks and experiment (Morgan,

2012). This is also the experience one of the authors

has had undertaking a BSc program in Product

Design, where the students throughout the three years

of study were pushed outside their comfort zone by

sharing their project results for peer assessments and

critiques. The risk of having something one have

worked on and developed a personal ownership for,

be assessed, evaluated and possibly dismissed,

misunderstood and ridiculed by peers and teachers,

can be devastating to a student. This is, therefore,

something the students must be made aware of

(Beghetto and Kaufman, 2013). Getting the students

in both perceived artistic study programs and

perceived technical study programs to feel the

necessary comfort to allow themselves to step out on

a limb, take some risks and experiment, is important.

It certainly also complies with the earlier mentioned

survey, where stimulating motivation and enthusiasm

among the students so they become willing to take

risks and to know it is looked upon as positive to fail

as long as one learns from it (Morgan, 2012).

2.5 There is a Time and a Place for

Creativity

In this always available, always online world where

things happen with increased speed followed by an

increased need for “quick fixes”, governments have a

mobilised interest (McWilliam and Haukka, 2008)

and teachers perhaps feel the pressure to include

creativity in all aspects of teaching (Beghetto and

Kaufman, 2013). Even so, do we want creativity in all

situations? The authors would rather that pilots flying

us to holiday destinations follow all common

procedures for that task than trying out some new

creative moves. If something goes wrong, however,

creativity to get us safely on the ground would be

much appreciated. In addition to teaching creativity

to digital forensics students, we should also teach

them when creative solutions are appropriate,

although it is difficult to justify including more

elements in an already heavy curriculum when

professional bodies such as BCS/CSOFS do not

include standards covering creativity in their

accreditation schemes (csofs, 2016).

3 TEACHING CREATIVITY TO

DIGITAL FORENSICS

STUDENTS

The easy part in teaching creativity is to make

students in perceived artistic study programs

understand the importance of creativity. They already

perceive what they do as creative topics. The

challenging thing is to clarify for the students in

perceived technical study programs that it is equally

important for them to be creative. Creativity has in

fact been mentioned as a "necessary requirement for

United States prosperity and security" by the National

Science Foundation (Karpova et al, 2011) (Schunn et

al, 2006).

Again, there are different levels of creativity, and

it does not all have to be life-changing events or even

industry-changing events. But it does promote the

opportunity of challenging two different type of

student cohorts at different levels. In one of the

courses focusing on creativity, two cohorts of

students from an interactive media study program and

a digital forensics study program are assessed through

the same assignments:

 Reflective Journal: A blog (or similar) that

describes their individual learning journey,

interaction with other students, reflective

thinking and progression.

 Mind Map: Showing an understanding of

any chosen subject related to their field of

study. The Mind Map is to be presented

before fellow students (Figure 2 and 3).

 Research Article: Producing a professional-

level article based on the Mind Map

This allows us to promote the motivation needed for

both cohorts of students, interactive media students

are given the opportunity to use colours and shapes to

suit their perception of creativity, and the digital

forensics students are given the opportunity to

explore things they feel are appropriate to their field

of study.

The pressure to achieve good grades, and perhaps

also being compared with the other students during

the presentation of the Mind Map (Figure 2 and 3)

will, of course, be present, but the students are

Creativity in the Digital Forensics Curriculum

105

encouraged to choose a topic of interest to maintain

motivation throughout the process.

Figure 2: Mind Map from a Digital Forensics student.

Figure 3: Mind Map from an Interactive Media student.

In another course that is also delivered to both cohorts

of students, we focus on creating an environment in

which the students feel comfortable enough to take

the necessary risks to explore things in a manner they

might not do otherwise. In groups, they are to choose

a project of their interest regardless of their study

program, and this project is carried out throughout the

whole semester. Presentations of project proposals

and work in progress are carried out at appropriate

stages in the project period, in addition to the final

result. The focus, however, is on the process along the

way. With the knowledge that one can get a good

grade in spite of a failed final result, will hopefully

create the necessary "safety net" the digital forensics

students perhaps feel they need in order to dare to take

risks and put themselves "out there". Another way of

comforting the students to believe in the projects is to

point out that even the ideas not used – is an important

building block towards the end-product. When

several experiments had failed in Thomas Edison's

quest to develop a commercially viable light bulb –

he is said to have claimed that “I have not failed

10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded

in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work.

When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I

will find the way that will work.” (Furr, 2011)

In another effort to expand creativity skills, a

special event was developed for the students in the

Advanced Cybersecurity module at the University of

Sunderland. They were given access to the FabLab

and the time and space to be creative and create a

Cybersecurity “artefact”. Students were given a very

open brief asking them to use their knowledge of

cybersecurity and their imagination to be as creative

as they liked. Students were given the task a week in

advance of going to the FabLab. At the FabLab

students had three hours to develop their ideas into an

artefact.

FabLab is based on the outreach project from

Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT and incorporates

the same core capabilities – such as CAD tools, 3D

printers, sign cutters and laser cutting equipment

(FabLab, 2016). Students were able to work

individually or in teams and were supported by

module tutors and FabLab staff.

Students came up with a variety of creative ideas

ranging from devices to protect IT equipment

including webcam covers and locks for USB ports to

environmental control systems such as Wi-Fi

blocking signal devices. They were able to start 2-d

and 3-d drawings and use the facilities to “make”

prototypes.

Feedback from the students was mixed and almost

bi-polar in distribution. 46% of the students really

enjoyed the opportunity to be creative and be in a

different environment and make an artefact, whilst

42% didn't like the activity at all and didn't see the

point in trying to be creative and make something for

cybersecurity. The remainder were non-committal

and did not have strong opinions one way or the other.

From a teaching perspective, it was an interesting

way to introduce creativity into the cybersecurity

curriculum and the activity will be run again in the

future. However, on reflection, we should perhaps

have done more in terms of discussing creativity with

the students, given them more time to prepare their

ideas and longer in the FabLab to bring their ideas to

fruition and perhaps affect the negative attitude

towards the activity among the 42% that did not see

the point.

The fact that there is a time and a place for

creativity need to be emphasised in both the

preparations for a specific course or module and in

the assessments in these type of modules and courses.

We do not want the students to be creative in their

effort to minimise the necessary workload, so a

thorough specification as to what is expected of them

need to be included in any course descriptors and/or

assessment cover sheets.

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4 CHANGES

Technology is rapidly changing in terms of both data

storage, performance, shape and form. We see

implementations of smart TVs, smart cars, smart

homes, smart cities and a whole range of other smart

devices, but for IT security and digital forensics

students these things also present themselves as new

challenges, as many of these so-called smart devices

are not smart enough to stop cyber-attacks (Gail,

2016). Different organisations are trying to

accommodate these changes by providing guidelines

for educational programs within these fields, such as

the National Security Agency (NSA, 2016) and the

National Institute of Standards and Technology

(NIST, 2016) in US, the Government

Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, 2016) in UK

and the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in

Education (NOKUT, 2016) in Norway. Although

these are good initiatives, it seems that IT security and

digital forensics related education is becoming the

dog that is trying to catch its tail. When a new thing

becomes an issue, guidelines are changed, but by the

time the educational institutions have implemented

the new guidelines, the new thing – is something

entirely different. So, what to do when fridges and

such are attacking us (BBC, 2016)? The authors of

this paper are sure that it will come down to the

creativity of some sort.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Both governments and academics have realised that if

we are to base how we handle challenges on what we

already know, the future tasks may well be

overwhelming (Marquis and Henderson, 2015).

Teaching creativity to digital forensics student is an

important aspect of our universities’ philosophy as

the world is changing so rapidly that the technical

expertise students train for today might not be sought

after in near future (Csikszentmihalyi, 2006). We

have to take into account that the kind of creativity

that leads to life-changing innovations is more likely

to be a result of someone putting together already

existing thoughts and inventions in a new way rather

than a completely unthought-of idea that appears out

of nothing (McWilliam, 2007), and that we are

“moving away from isolated geniuses” as Pollard

(2012) put it. We feel that teaching the digital

forensics students to see the relevance in everyday

creativity, and to acknowledge that sometimes they

need to take the risk of thinking differently about

technical challenges in order to figure out new ideas

that have value to the digital forensics community

(Pollard, 2012) and that this will be a solid

competence to have after graduating. Lessig (2005)

called it digital creativity and claimed that technology

is “changing the way we remix culture, changing the

creative potential of that culture, changing the

democratic potential of that culture, changing the

freedom to speak, by transforming the power to speak

– making it different.” We feel that the only way of

teaching creativity to technical students in general,

digital forensics students in particular, is to create an

environment and learning activities where it is safe to

use the freedom and power to speak and think

different.

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