Presentation From Public Fail to Participation Prevail: Relational creativity and the global collaboration threshold in Japanese university EFL more

This pilot study begins with a familiar fail: digitally competent students engaged in group tasks still hesitate to participate visibly on platforms such as Padlet. It asks which creativity orientations are most closely associated with digital learning dimensions that support online participation and global collaboration. Ninety first-year students enrolled in compulsory English communication courses at a national STEAM university in Japan completed two self-report questionnaires via Google Forms in autumn 2025. The first was a creativity style questionnaire measuring internal thinking, expressive risk-taking, social attunement, and collaborative facilitation. The second was an ISTE-aligned digital learning questionnaire assessing digital citizenship, collaboration, communication, and responsible participation. Both used five-point Likert scales; data were analysed using descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, and correlation analysis. Findings reveal a digital citizenship–collaboration gap: students report confidence in responsible digital participation yet weaker readiness for outward-facing collaboration. Relationships between creativity and digital learning become visible only when creativity is disaggregated by quadrant. Relational orientations, social attunement and collaborative facilitation, show the strongest links to digital learning profiles, while expressive risk-taking shows weaker connections. These findings suggest participation in platform-based EFL tasks is a threshold shaped by the relational costs of visibility, with implications for scaffolding technology-enhanced collaboration.