Routes into enterprise

This post is part of the ongoing commentary on the workshops I am conducting with Media Studies students at York St John University. The workshops are based on the Digital Footprints programme I have developed for HE, FE and Secondary Schools. You can read more about it by clicking here.

What is the larger picture?
In case this is the first post you are reading about the project, I have included a brief description of what is going on. I am working with second year media studies students at York St John University to create a web-presence for one of their departmental magazines. The students have been divided into 7 groups and each will pitch their idea for the web-presence. Along the way, they are also required to define an identity for their group by establishing the context within which they are operating. They also have to create a chronological record of their work/thinking through a blog. This will have an impact on their pitch.

Week 2!
We are now on week 2 of the programme. The initial exercise of self-reflection and subsequent formation of digital identities through the use of keywords produced some interesting results. At first it was difficult for the students to take a step back and reflect on their strengths and professional aspirations. But after a lot of discussion most of them have achieved some degree of self-awareness. This has had an impact on the way they are communicating their ideas to other members of a group. When I walk around the room I am happy to see some engaging debates taking place.

One voice…
Although individual students are aware of their professional aspirations, some groups are finding it difficult to merge these into a single, coherent voice. There are a number of reasons that can account for this, but I would like to focus on one particular aspect. Let me take the example of a group that includes an aspiring business manager, artist, fashion designer and a public relations officer. When it comes to communicating their professional aspirations to the other members, each student has mentioned a very specific career that is based on their perceptions of it. For example, fashion designers are glamorous, public relations officers lead exciting lives and so on. Unfortunately, every other member in the group has a different perception of the career, which has created a lot of confusion. This issue has been conveniently side-stepped by clubbing all careers into an umbrella term – marketing. So the group decided to work as a marketing agency.

From Marketing to Trend Spotting
I know just about enough of marketing as a profession to realize that it involves a period of rigorous academic study accompanied by extensive field work. When I put this to the students they were a bit disappointed. So we started discussing other career options which could act as a conduit to their marketing career. Along the way the students began voicing their professional aspirations in more personal/subjective terms. It emerged that every member was quite attached to the idea of trend-spotting. This immediately opened a number of additional avenues – A&R professionals for music companies etc. Once again students were disappointed by the lack of immediacy. You cannot just become an A&R executive. So we started looking at entrepreneurial avenues. Since they were all interested in trend spotting, I asked them to have a look at whatFace Hunter does. The man has built up an international reputation for himself by obsessively taking photographs of people from across the world and cataloguing them on his website.

This struck a chord with the group who were able to see a tangible/credible career based on their personal aspirations that did not fall into a pre-defined category. All ideas about marketing agencies and such were abandoned and the group began discussing how they could contribute their individual insights to create a convincing online trend-spotting agency.

Enterprise Development – scaling professional aspirations
This brings me to the point that even though enterprise development has gained a lot of importance in HEIs there is too much focus on the end-result rather than the journey. In order to become successful entrepreneurs students don’t necessarily have to conform to pre-existing standards. There needs to be a greater focus on self-reflection and awareness. This coupled with flexible thinking can create a readiness for opportunity rather than a sense of expectancy. Realize what you are good at, think of ways through which you can achieve professional satisfaction and then go for it!

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.

Cover Art from the Solus 3 album

Time to take a break from educational projects and talk about other work. I am happy to announce that work on the Solus 3 project is going well. This time I am working with the very talented @hyggedesigns to create the album artwork and a website for the band which hails from London.

The album, The Sky Above The Roof, will be available for purchase on iTunes in a couple of weeks time and I strongly recommend you get a copy. Each track is packed with such wonderful tension, there is a story bursting to be told! Every track could very well be a unique voice in a complex tale. This is truly atmospheric music folks.

A few weeks ago on my way to Sheffield when I put the album on, the journey took on a very interesting hue. Everyone in the train carriage became a character actor with a bit-part. Anyway, that is enough from me. I will put out an announcement on twitter when the new site is up and running. In the meantime you can sample a track from the album:

Blow Harp from The Sky Above The Roof

@Solus3 are on Twitter if you wish to follow them.

The image used in this post is taken from the album artwork which has been created by Jan Dunning. The release will be available as a vinyl, a CD and through iTunes.

Notes on the OG

After a day of tussling with the intricacies of the Opportunities Gateway, I am happy to report that it is finally beginning to take shape – a fact confirmed by a member of the Learning Directorate who was pleased with the progress. Now that we have created a solid foundation for the Gateway, we will be opening it up for discussion. Over the next few weeks we hope to get a better sense of both staff and students’ expectations. I am slightly nervous when I think this exercise may result in having to go back to the drawing board. This is because since its inception the Gateway has been a repository of various ideologies, which means it probably means different things to different people.

The focus of my work has been to see how the main underlying principals – to encourage reflection on the student experience and create a readiness for opportunity – can be achieved through the Gateway web-resource. What makes this process tricker is that it has to run in tandem with the services offered by the Learning Directorate, which in turn face the common constraints of time, manpower and resources. I find this mix of functional and ideological aspects very exciting. It has been a very interesting experience to create something tangible after the dozens of conversations that have taken place over the past few months. Just a few weeks ago I was sitting in on a steering group meeting furiously taking notes as people defined their expectations from the Gateway. The tone of the meeting was such that when I had a look at it a day later, some of my jottings took me by surprise. For instance, I have absolutely no idea what the phrase ‘ideological extrapolation’ means. I went through the list a couple of times and then let the ideas settle at the back of my head – hoping for some problem solving to take place in the subconscious.

This morning, sat in front of a blank A1 sheet of flip-chart paper, there was only a slight moment of confusion on how to proceed. After a few false starts, I tried to define the Gateway through the relationships it seeks to promote. That is between the staff, students and the wider world. Fortunately, this approach was spot-on and within a few hours I went through a number of iterations of the Gateway framework. Obviously there still are a fair few loose ends which need to be taken care of. But I think that what we have is sufficient to create the first public face – a wireframe for the Gateway. The challenge is to see if this survives the first round of feedback.

We have a student focus group scheduled in a couple of weeks which will be followed by another steering group meeting. I shall post more notes on the development of the Gateway over the coming weeks.

Seeding collaboration

Increasingly I find that the focus of my work is shifting towards mainstream education. Having delivered several workshops to undergraduate students over the past few months I consistently find that there is very little dialogue between students across different disciplines or even different years in the same degree course. Everyone seems to be moving along a rather linear path. However, I feel that beyond the domain of essays, assignments and marks surely there should be some sort of impetus placed on collaboration, even if it is through the extracurricular.

The freedom to explore and exchange ideas can be a fantastic source of inspiration and development. It also engenders flexibility in thinking, which can have a long term positive effect. After all, who would you rather be in a professional setting – the insecure individual who is unduly attached to his/her ideas, or someone who has the confidence to draw from various sources to generate and express ideas freely and watch them take shape through discussion and debate.

This principal forms the basis of the Digital Footprints programme I have developed for students in HEIs. One of the primary objectives of this programme is to get them to reflect on their strengths. Then, using the concept of keywords as the currency of the web they create virtual identities on the WWW. Over the next few weeks this identity is continuously shaped and moulded to suit different purposes. For example, sometimes I set them a challenge to define their identity as sitemap for an imaginary website, in no more than 8 words. Without the distraction of an interface and all that goes with it, can they convey a sense of who they are through this sitemap. Is it possible to make a statement or even to intrigue? Experimenting with their identities in this playful manner appears to be quite a liberating experience. The students always actively engage with this process.

Seeding collaboration – Workshop at York St John University

A few weeks ago, I delivered an introductory session to a series of workshops with undergraduate students at York St John University. This is a variation of the Digital Footprints programme with a focus on working collaboratively. Over the next couple of weeks I will be working with them on re-branding a departmental magazine. Students have formed 6 groups and each group has to deliver a pitch for the direction they would like to take the magazine in, they also have bolster this pitch by creating a convincing virtual identity for their group. It was interesting to observe the shift in group dynamics as they began the process of defining their identities. There was serious ‘reflecting’ going on around the room.

I hope to post more information about the workshops over the coming weeks. May I request you leave a comment if you are interested in this work.

Promoting the surgery: If you want to promote the surgery, you can download leaflets (in colour and black and white) designed by the very talented @hyggedesigns. They are available for download here.

Surgeons: This time round, the following surgeons will be present. If you would like to volunteer, please get in touch with me via twitter @gopaldass or you can contact me atabhay dot adhikari at gmail dot come.

Abhay Adhikari
Ben McKenna
Christine Morris
Dan Croxen John
John Popham
Jon Irvine
Mike Leigh Cooper
Monica Tailor

… And finally, a social media surgery in action:

Many thanks to John Popham for capturing the previous York Social Media Surgery in action. He will be one of the surgeons at the upcoming surgery.

Interacting with Japanese school children

These are early days still. However, I am keen to document what little progress has been made. Everything is well and truly up in the air at the moment and I am keen to bolster my confidence by documenting these small steps. In the event this project does come to fruition it would be great to reflect on the journey.

So what has happened? Conversations mainly. With some very interesting people. The sort who grasp the fundamentals of the breath-awareness programme. Now if I may temporarily digress into hyperbole. I get a sense that these people also appreciate the aspiration that guides the project. 50 Schools in Japan will be a tremendous opportunity to realize my work in a meaningful context – to enable children to become more aware of themselves and to recognize and handle stress and anxiety.

Coming back to the point – what have these conversations been about? A number of different things, from addressing the practical aspects of returning to Japan and convincing 50 schools to participate, to fine-tuning the nature of the workshops so that they adhere to the cultural sensitivities.

A breath-awareness workshop in England differs tremendously from a workshop in Japan. Both have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. While working with native english speakers offers much more flexibility, working with the Japanese allows me to use more abstract references when it comes to themes such as reflection and self-awareness. However, I have to be very careful.

Let me explain the configuration in which the previous Japanese workshops took place. Rather than deliver instructions in broken and confused Japanese (not to mention the problem with accents), I worked with a native speaker who translated my instructions in real-time. As the nature of the audience (young children, teenagers, some office workers, teachers) varied, there was a lot of improvisation to adapt these instructions. The only thing I had to be mindful of was to convey the message as simply as possible so that it could be translated quickly in real time. However, conveying abstract references in simple english isn’t the easiest tasks. And often, during the most intense moments of the workshop I came up with gems which elicited the ‘raised eyebrow’ reaction from my translator. To her credit, she never lost her composure and after a split second, came up with an appropriate explanation in Japanese.

Almost everyone I have spoken to so far has generously offered their help and some have already agreed to step in as advisors to guide the programme’s development. This makes me very hopeful. There is a very long way to go but as I said earlier, at this stage these small steps are hopefully seeding momentum for future strides. Over the next few weeks as these relationships take on a more formal hue, I will be happy to introduce these people along with their fascinating professional profiles through this blog.

By regularly posting entries, I hope I am creating a digital footprint that might catch the attention of potential collaborators. To the readers, if you know of someone who might be interested, may I request you to forward this post to them. If you would like to write to me to find out more about the breath-awareness workshops you can contact me at abhay dot adhikari at gmail dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.

    York Social Media Surgery
    March 1, 2010
    5:30 – 7 PM
    Priory Street Centre
    15 Priory Street
    York, YO1 6ET

Yep folks, it is time for another Social Media Surgery in York. These surgeries are aimed at charities and community groups in the city – to assist them to use the www (particularly social media and web 2.0) in a variety of constructive contexts. They are held in a relaxed, informal setting (no speeches, presentations or jargon). The ‘Patients’ sit down with a surgeon for a one-to-one Q&A session. These sessions usually last between 15-25 minutes, so that every patient gets a chance to speak to a couple of surgeons.

I help organize these surgeries along with @CMoz and @JohnPopham. The first one was conducted last year in November and went rather well. We had around 10 different charities attend and around 12 surgeons volunteered their time.

Attend: You can follow updates on York’s Social Media Surgery on twitter by searching for the #YorkSMS hash-tag. I am in the process of setting up an eventbrite website, if you or anyone you know would like to attend, please book a ticket. These are free, but if you book before hand it helps us keep track of numbers.

Volunteer: If you would like to volunteer as a surgeon, please get in touch with me via twitter – @gopaldass or you can drop me a line at the following mail address: abhay dot adhikari at gmail dot com.

Just a quick note about the game, it was developed and evaluated through 2 pilots studies as part of my research at the University of York. The objective now is to develop it as educational ICT for the SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) initiative, and as a health & lifestyle product for home use. Given the ubiquity of stress and anxiety in everyday life, I feel that the latter is an important direction for the game’s development.

The sound design for the biofeedback signal is being undertaken by Radoslaw Rudnicki. Since our first discussion in December, he has already sent me some fantastic sketches. Given the nature of the games, it is essential that the sound-design be absolutely spot on. Check out some of Radek’s music on his website.

I am still on the lookout for a graphic/character designer to make the biofeedback games more accessible to the target audience. I have a number of ideas in this context, and am keen to take them further. If you are a graphic designer or know someone who will be interested, please get in touch.

Introducing breath-awareness in mainstream education

Over the past few weeks an idea for a new project has been brewing in my mind and only yesterday did it finally take shape as an abrupt phrase – 50 schools in Japan!

The 200 odd testimonials I collected during my previous trip to Japan were deeply appreciative of the breath-awareness workshops. I was amazed and touched that the participants took time to write very insightful feedback – about what they felt during the workshops and how they would apply the breath-awareness activities in everyday life. So it isn’t much of a surprise that I am very keen to further my work in the Japanese context.

However, that is easier said than done. There are a number of challenges that need to be address and I have been wondering about the best way to move forward. Past experience has shown that I am most motivated when I have a definite goal to work towards, which is why I have been dwelling upon – to use a terrible cliche – the bigger picture. One thing is for sure, I definitely want to work in mainstream education. Despite the constant demands placed on students, they are considered to be ‘healthy’ until they begin to physically manifest the effects of stress, anxiety and tension. This is why I feel it should be a priority for schools to introduce training which empowers students with emotional-control and behavior management skills. As I have mentioned in an earlier blog post, seeding breath-awareness is perhaps the best way to achieve this. And I spent a considerable amount of time and effort whilst pursuing my PhD research to create a pragmatic and secular framework through which this could be done.

Coming back to the issue of furthering my work in Japan. The last time I worked with somewhere between 170-180 children and a small number of school teachers. For the next time, I want the scale of the project to be significantly larger. There are a number of reasons for this and I assure you that a misplaced yearning for grandiosity isn’t one of them.

[more later]