Doing things differently
One of the best things about The Gateway project is the briefing document that was given to me by the university – to create a web based platform that encourages students to develop a sense of readiness for opportunity. This brief captures the central premise of my work, to use the WWW as a medium for reflection, self-awareness and discourse.
A fair amount of time has passed since that initial meeting and several key developments have taken place. We now have a small team in place – an wee army of enthusiastic people who are really committed to the project at an ideological level. There is also a consensus that in order to achieve what we have set out to do, we need to do things differently. So we are examining the various relationships that the website has to facilitate and eventually how the intended audience of students, academic staff and external agencies will use it.
Given my love to think in sets of 3 and equations (not sure why) I came up with a sitemap concept which was quite well received by everyone at the university. Why not make the intended relationship explicit through the primary navigation – students + businesses = opportunities, and then use the secondary level navigation to define the various levels at which we want this relationship to work. I really enjoy this sort of narrative building through navigation, and I’ve found that most people relate to it.
Anyway, coming to the point of doing things differently. When we sat down as a group and discussed the navigation framework, we started thinking about the actual relationships and trying to facilitate them through the website. This led to a very interesting discussion about sourcing content, which is where we came up with some very interesting suggestions. Now I cannot go into the details of what we discussed (for understandable reasons) but in brief, we have introduced yet another parameter – collaboration. Looking at the development and maintenance of the website as a collaborative effort. Of course there is tremendous precedence for such a concept, the entire social media movement. But given the fact that The Gateway is a university project and will be hosted on the university server, we definitely don’t have that level of freedom to just throw caution to the wind and ask students to take over. This is why we are currently working on a model of whereby we can come up with collaborative contracts – get students onboard and make them stakeholders, so they have a say in the important decisions related to the Gateway. Again, I shall not go too much into the details, but as you can imagine, this is quite exciting. I shall endeavor to keep you posted of any exciting developments.
28
Feb 10
Different routes into enterprise in education
Routes into enterprise
This past week I attended an event organized by Nybep on the theme of enterprise in education. It was very well laid out, starting with a series of inspiring presentations followed by an intense networking session that culminated in a group discussion. Despite the range of different activities the setting was quite relaxed and I had some interesting conversations with representatives from Yorkshire Forward, Business Link, The Prince’s Trust and so on.
The most interesting aspect of the proceedings was the group discussion that took place towards the end. We had to answer a series of questions related to enterprise development. As the people round my table were from different backgrounds, we ended up sharing some unique perspectives. This 20 minute discussion showed that the triggers of enterprise can be either objective or subjective. The latter aren’t necessarily any less pragmatic, but given their intangible nature, their benefits aren’t necessarily conducive to quantitative analysis.
This discussion confirmed my belief that there are a number of different routes into enterprise. Therefore, the process of embedding enterprise into students’ psyche should follow a more holistic approach.
One of the best ways to achieve this is by encouraging collaboration and dialogue. Not only should students work within their peer group, they should also be encouraged to interact with those outside their own disciplines. Consider the case of universities – it is natural for specialist groups and hubs to develop over time. There are a number of obvious benefits associated with these specialist clusters. However, there is also tremendous value in creating dialogue between them.
Fearless Entrepreneurs
Inculcating a tansdisciplinary approach to problem solving offers a number of benefits to students. For example, the ability to contextualize different perspectives and the ability to delegate responsibilities. These basic skills create entrepreneurs (and researchers) who are able to follow an intuitive approach, which in turn, is one of the best triggers of original thinking. The end result is that you get ‘fearless’ entrepreneurs who are comfortable with the notion of sourcing talent and ideas through collaboration with like minded people.
This resonates with the point of view expressed by one of the presenters at the event – it is not always the case of what you know, but who you know. My take on the ‘who’ is a vast and diverse pool of talented individuals who can make a positive contribution towards the realization of your goals. Collaboration in this way is also an effective combatant to nepotism.
Real time collaboration
Given the technology that is available at our fingertips, it is fairly straightforward to bridge the gap between the concept of ‘fearless’ entrepreneurs, which may appear to be idealistic at first glance, and the reality of mainstream education. With the ubiquity of social networks on the World Wide Web, it is easier than ever to share ideas beyond cultural and geographical barriers. Furthermore, there is the added advantage that most students are familiar with the mechanistic operation of these networks. They can setup individual profiles and navigate them to source information. What is lacking, is the ability to engage with them in the right context.
A blog is just a blog…
The blog is a good example of how a social media platform can become a valuable tool for communication and collaboration. Many people still prefer to think that a blog is a repository of discontinuous and jumbled narratives far too tedious to engage with. However, if you examine some of the features offered by popular blogging websites, the benefits become immediately apparently. For example, most websites allow you to add information through a content management system whose appearance is very similar to a word processing software. This does away with the need to know html/css. You can also change the appearance of a blog thanks to the large number of freely available themes or skins. Some of these themes can turn your blog into a website interface – with individual ‘pages’.
By simply registering for a blog and applying a theme you have a website to which you can easily add multimedia content – text/audio/video and so on. And as a consequence of the platform you have a number of powerful tools at your disposal to contextualize (tags) and syndicate (rss feeds) the information you upload. You can now invite meaningful interaction with your target audience.
The above approach is just one example of facilitating collaboration on the World Wide Web. Provided you follow some basic norms of creating and publishing information, there are scores of other platforms which offer varying degrees of flexibility and freedom to achieve what you want to do.
Safeguards
There are a number of issues related to facilitating engagement with social media. These include, protection of intellectual property, privacy, data protection and so on. I believe schools and HEIs are in a unique position to embed best practice by providing guided, hands-on experience to students as part of the mainstream curriculum and extra curricular activities. More about this in another post.