Useful URLs for August 5th through September 28th

These are my links for August 5th through September 28th:

• The Future of Learning | Startl – Draft discussion paper come essay on education in the 21st century. Pretty much ticks every box that I aspire to in my curriculum design, teaching practice and the honours model we are developing.
• Course search – Research methods subject at Deakin.

The Future of Learning

Startl.org is one of those exciting North American (well, U.S of A really) public private startup things that manages to get real dollars to innovate. This time at the intersection of tools, learning and technologies. The Future of Learning is a draft essay that I think outlines well (and in a very readerly way) all of the key values and ideas informing the pedagogy that underwrites the honours redevelopment. Well worth reading. The question it raises very strongly for me is that if we are an honours program in media and communication then to what extent should new communication technologies and practices be front and centre (or rear and periphery) to what is done? Should every graduate of an honours program be capable of being a peer in the sorts of networks that will be relevant to them academically and professionally? (Yes, my answer to that is obvious, but what about everyone else?) [Thanks to Jeremy Y for bringing this to attention.]

LTIF (3)

This is what it ended up as in the wash:

Research Becoming a Tacit Knowing — the Honours Studio as an Enabling Interdisciplinary Experience

A School wide honours program is being developed for 2012. A feature of this program is an interdisciplinary, research driven studio model for student engagement, research training and the integration of School research into the curriculum. This studio model is innovative in communication and media education in its desire to align research to research training in the school, in its move away from a traditional humanities ‘solitary’ scholar model, and its desire to engage seriously with interdisciplinary research and practice.

However, this raises problems for teaching and learning due to the disciplinary mix that the studio needs to support and nurture, learning outcomes that the studio needs to achieve and their assessment. To date the use of the studio has been limited to cohorts containing cognate disciplines. However, within our studio students could come from media, journalism, public relations, communication design, creative writing, music, games and animation, advertising and photography. What sorts of research problems does the studio need to frame to ‘work’ for such a diverse group so that legitimate and significant research outcomes can be achieved for all students, in the honours context? What sorts of skills does a studio leader require to be able to manage such a diversity? What, should be assessed within the studio? How can this be done when students may be trained within, and be working from, distinct disciplinary and professional practices? What is required for such an experience to become a research studio and not merely a mixture of students undertaking individual and divergent research journeys? How can a research studio allow research, in all forms to become tacit knowledge for its members?

A studio based honours program has the potential to integrate industry based projects, and to be a model of communication and media education that is international in its impact. The aim of this project is to undertake research in best practice for studio teaching and the evaluation of a trial interdisciplinary studio in 2010 as the first stage to the implementation of a program and school wide studio research model in 2012.

LTIF (2)

Slightly pared down version of the first draft, with also a one sentence conclusion saying what we actually want to do (always useful when applying for project funds to mention what you might actually do!). It is currently 354 words, they are asking for 300, I’m intending to add 350 and if the system truncates it then I’ll carve it down, otherwise they can just read the lot. Questions for me: do we need to say more at this point about what we would do? How we would do it? Reading the call for proposals we need to do this in the final one, but I don’t think it is necessary at this stage. Opinions?

A new School wide honours program is being developed for 2012. A feature of this program is an interdisciplinary, research driven laboratory model for student engagement, research training and the integration of School research into the curriculum. This laboratory model is innovative in communication and media education in its desire to align research to research training in the school, in its move away from a traditional humanities ‘solitary’ scholar model, and its desire to engage with interdisciplinary research and practice.

However, this raises problems around teaching and learning. These problems derive from the disciplinary mix that the laboratory will need to support and nurture, the learning outcomes that the laboratory needs to achieve and how these may be assessed. To date the use of the laboratory or studio model has been constrained to cohorts containing cognate disciplines. However, within a laboratory students could come from media, journalism, public relations, communication design, creative writing, music, games and animation, advertising and photography. What sorts of research problems does the laboratory need to frame to ‘work’ for such a diverse group so that legitimate and significant research outcomes can be achieved for all students, in the honours context? What sorts of skills does a laboratory leader require to be able to manage such a diversity? What, should be assessed within the laboratory? Collaboration? Peer participation and critique? How can this be done when students may be trained within, and be working from, distinct disciplinary and professional practices? What is required for such an experience to become a research laboratory and not merely a mixed collection of students undertaking individual and divergent research journeys?

A laboratory based honours program has the potential to integrate industry based projects and outcomes within a single laboratory, and to be a model of communications and media education that is international in its impact. To be able to do this properly, and with relevance and rigour in a manner that provides a model that can be applied to other disciplines and programs, is the aim of this project through the development and evaluation of a trial interdisciplinary laboratory with honours candidates in 2010.

Some Visitors and an Opportunity

This is from Laurene Vaughan, not sure of what exactly this day will entail.

As part of our ground work for the new honours and master of design narratives development, we have organised (through Loupe research funds) for Anne Burdick, Chair of the Graduate Media Design program at the Art Centre College of Design (California – http://www.artcenter.edu/mdp/) and Cameron Tonkinwise, Chair, Design Thinking and Sustainability, School of Design Strategies, Parsons (http://www.newschool.edu/facultyexperts/faculty.aspx?id=23672) to come and be part of a one day workshop exploring:

Educating the future media, communication and design practitioner.

This will happen on October 22. We are hoping to organise some lunchtime presentations by Anne and Cameron on the developments and challenges they have been facing in this space for the School and broader community. We also thought it would be appropriate for them to meet you, if it is possible with your diaries.

The times for the workshop so far are: 10 – 3.30pm with 60 -90min of presentations in the middle of the day.

Vertical scholarship

a diagram of research led scholarship

So in the last mtg I had a diagram showing my understanding of the vertical scholarship model.. I’ve attached that sketch to this post with some thoughts based on our discussion:

This is similar to the traditional science model, but it neednt be overly prescriptive with respect to research topic..

The key factor to success (imho) is developing what I’ve labeled ‘ability to translate’ research issues into the lab driven pedagogy we’re discussing.
It’s important to nite that this diagram privileges the research project a lot. It’s drawn with that in mind, and doesn’t represent that the labs are just one part of a larger pedagogical ecosystem

LTIF (1)

Jeremy Yuille has proposed we put in an expression of interest for the current Learning and Teaching Investment Fund. He then had the temerity to suggest I do the first rough and dirty draft of it. What follows is it. We need this done and dusted by the end of Friday. As far as I can see we put in an expression of interest and then a much larger document needs to be done by October.

All that follows is for y’all to negotiate/change. If people prefer a googledoc let me know, otherwise use comments here, copy and paste into comments to see where we end up. It is currently too long, and misses the point in a few places, but in my experience much easier to see this when got some words to react with and to.

Project title: Interdisciplary Research Labs in Honours Education: Out of the Silo and into the Swamp.

Project Description (please indicate relevance to selection criteria, max 300 words).

A new School wide honours program is being developed for delivery from 2012. A key feature of this program is the use of an interdisciplinary, research driven laboratory model for student engagement, research training and the integration of School research into the undergraduate curriculum. This laboratory model is innovative in the context of communication and media education in its desire to align research to research training in the school, in its move away from a traditional humanities ‘solitary’ scholar model, and its desire to genuinely engage with interdisciplinary research and practice.

However, this model raises a number of important questions around teaching and learning. These problems derive from the disciplinary mix that the laboratory will be required to support and nuture, as well as the sorts of learning outcomes that the laboratory, in itself, needs to achieve and how these may be assessed. Within the laboratory students could come from media, journalism, public relations, communication design, creative writing, music, games and animation, advertising and photography. What sorts of research problems will ‘work’ for such a diverse group so that legitimate and significant research outcomes can be achieved for all students, in the honours context? What sorts of skills does a laboratory leader require to be able to manage such a diversity, particularly when their existing training may depend on an individual supervision model? Students in the laboratory will produce work that is examined in the usual way for honours, but how, and what, should be assessed within the laboratory? Collaboration? Peer participation and critique? How can this be done when students may be trained within, and be working from, distinct disciplinary and professional practices? What is required for such an experience to become a *research* laboratory and not merely a mixed collection of students undertaking individual and divergent research journeys?

A laboratory based honours program has the potential to integrate industry based projects and outcomes within a single laboratory, and to be a model of communications and media education that is international in its impact. To be able to do this properly, and with relevance and rigour, in a manner that provides a model that can be applied to other disciplines and programs, is the aim of this project.

Teaching Propositions

These are my notes from the meeting, they are some key ideas come BIG wooly words that came out of Rachel and Yoko’s discussion documents and what was said. Think of them as an ideas cloud.

Playful, ludic.
Liminal, the swamp.
Enabling.
Outside, open.
Disruptive.
Transformative.
Laboratory as being research centred.

Student centred models weave through all.

Meeting Notes, September 20

Lost count of which meeting this one was. In attendance we had Karen Trist, Jeremy Parker, Jeremy Yuille, Yoko Akama, Catherine Cole and Adrian Miles. Adrian showed the cost projections spreadsheet that shows how much money the proposed program, in its current format, would cost. Be good to meet with the financial analyst to go through a couple of other scenarios to be able to determine what the largest impacts on cost are. (For example does adding two students make a big or trivial difference, moving from four to three labs, what about group supervision?)

Then discussion turned to the teaching and learning ‘vision’, which went round in the usual circles and ended up becoming more detailed commentary on the lab model, assessment and how we might be able to turn this into a Learning and Teaching Investment Fund application to do some applied work come problem solving around our labs. More work to write up, apply for and so on, but potentially very useful for honours.

What Should Honours Do?

I wrote this months ago in a different place. Be good to have it here, in an abbreviated version.

Here we go. (Insert sound of tentative rolling up of academic sleeves.)

• honours should always have research outcomes
• honours research requires the investigation of a dense or messy problem
• a dense problem is something that you don’t already know the answer to yet
• a dense and messy problem requires you to change your understanding to address it
• a successful honours outcome requires the student to experience qualitative change, in themselves (in their understanding of) as a consequence of investigating this messy problem (by way of contrast, a PhD requires the student to realise a qualitative change in their disciplinary domain)
• such problems can be theoretical writing, they can be about practice, they can be about making, they can also arise in doing each of these things
• the investigation of this dense and messy problem can be via thesis, project or via practice
• the investigation will produce outcomes that can be in the form of a thesis, a project and exegesis, or a portfolio and exegesis
• all honours students are expected (and required) to be able to write to their work
• all honours students are expected to read, and utilise in their practice, relevant theories
• a theory is a proposition that is grounded in, and arises within, an informed practice of thinking
• this thinking might not only be in words, but the exegesis requires you to use words