People, places and pasta or Uncreative explorations as collective intelligence

This creative collection emerged from the EDEN 2025 conference in Bologna as a collaborative exploration of GenAI in higher education. Blending field notes, reflections, and creative inquiry, this tapestry of collective thoughts was co-authored by five scholars from Greece and the UK. The resulting artifact offers a layered human–machine dialogue across prose, poetry, Socratic dialogue, visual metaphor, and conceptual synthesis, reimagining GenAI not just as a tool but as a collaborator and co-creator. Inspired by ideas shared during sessions, informal conversations in corridors, and over a plate of pasta, it invites educators, students, policymakers, and researchers to engage with its multimodal outputs—text, visuals, and audio—to spark critical discussion, curriculum experimentation, and creative inquiry into the ethical, cognitive, and cultural dimensions of GenAI. Drawing on themes of empathy, governance, agency, and collaboration, it provides tangible outputs, from a "pedagogical recipe" to metaphor mosaics, that illustrate how reflective co-authorship between humans and machines might look in practice. This work is not a traditional research report but an open invitation to rethink GenAI and its role in fostering critical creativity as well as creative inquiry. Readers are encouraged to adapt, question, and expand upon its provocations, and to get in touch with the contributors to continue the dialogue.

CC-BY-NC-SA

Version: 1, 2025

People, places and pasta or Uncreative explorations as collective intelligence as a whole and its sections are available under an open licence to enable wider re-use and appropriation. Please note, GenAI outputs are not included in the open licence. However, these outputs are based on what delegates shared generously during the EDEN 2025 Conference together with personal and collective reflections and thoughts by the collaborators of this collection and their ideas to put this collection together using a range of creative inquiry approaches supported by GenAI. We are not claiming any ownership of specific phrases or words used by other conference delegates or contributors and are using these as a source for uncreative writing and our creative inquiries as conceptualised by the collaborators of this collection.

Open licence for human created parts only and only these conceptualised and  articulated by the collaborators: People, places and pasta or Uncreative explorations as collective intelligence by Chrissi Nerantzi, Maria D. Avgerinou, Panos Vlachopoulos, Maria-Eleftheria (Marita) Galani and Irene Karayianni is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.

The images or other third party material including GenAI generated outputs in this article are not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence. If material is not included in the collection’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

If you’re reusing this collection or parts of it, please consider the following note:

[NEW TITLE] is a derivative of People, places and pasta or Uncreative explorations as collective intelligence by Chrissi Nerantzi, Maria D. Avgerinou, Panos Vlachopoulos, Maria-Eleftheria (Marita) Galani and Irene Karayianni, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. [NEW TITLE] is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA by [ADD NAME].