Meeting Notes 02-11 (March 1 2011)

Here: Adrian Miles, Cathy Greenfield, Yoko Akama
Apologies: Karen Trist, Karli Lukas

Update: revised academic package has been returned to College, so we are waiting for what’s next. Arranging a meeting to get a bit more information about the Comm Des honours proposal, partly for clarification and partly to get a better sense of what the imagined relation to the M.Comm honours is.

Today: last session we built a map of the outcomes for the research strategies subject. We now want to:

1. define assessment outcomes
2. develop an assessment matrix
3. define assessment timelines
4. develop and describe a learning roadmap for the subject

Excellent discussion about the strategies subject. It will begin from a constellation of questions:

• what is your discipline?
• what counts as a proposition in your discipline?
• what is a discipline?
• what counts as (professional) knowledge in your field?
• what is knowledge?
• what is the difference between information, data, knowledge?

Around or arising from this are a cluster of related questions and problems. We discussed the ‘roadmap’ of the subject as like a guide, where there are, say, three key things to be seen, but how you get to them will vary, but you really need to see these three things. So, the assessment is a way to focus this stroll so that students are to make a response to:

• what questions matter?
• how do you do research?
• what do you do as a researcher?
• how is it done?
• how is it presented?
• what methods are used?
• why does this matter?

A version of this of around 2000 words will be assessed half way through semester. Critiqued/assessed and then further developed and submitted at the end where it will be between 4 and 5000 words. These are the only assessment tasks, they are iterative, and a mix of formative and summative. It is also to build the ‘bedrock’ for their second semester research task.

A research proposition, which is also an outcome of this, will be assessed by the honours committee, but will be ‘attached’ to the research subject as a hurdle assessment, come satisfactory progress requirement.

In addition we talked about ways (and the value of) an ongoing mapping come visualisation task in the workshop that maps the different discsiplines/fields/methods being used, where you place yourself, as a way of making visible respective research specificities and differences. This would be a key outcome of the strategies workshop, not assessed, but useful in showing what has been done, where we’ve been, and will inform their responding to the main assessment task. The aim is to start broad, and spend the semester focussing ti down.