I just realized that the previous post on the site is from March, which means there is an urgent need for me to provide an update on what has been going these past few months. I am quite happy to say that there have been some exciting developments/commissions and some interesting work in the pipeline. I will endeavor to provide a brief summary below and will go into details of individual projects in separate posts.
1/ Yortime Web Surgeries: I have been commissioned by Learning City York (a city wide consortium which includes the City of York Council) to delivery a blueprint for a grassroots digital literacy initiative to engage voluntary organizations and community groups in the city. The project is well underway and will come to an end sometime in late October/early November. I have a host of responsibilities, one of which is to facilitate an open dialogue between disparate groups. This is exciting stuff with some interesting challenges.
2/ Kyokusen Yokocho : This project (for a Japanese client) has recently come to an end. I developed a conceptual framework and engagement strategy for an online curated space to showcase contemporary illustration and design to the Japanese audience. The project has an international dimension as it aims to attract artists from across the globe. Amongst other things, the site will feature exclusive interviews, themed selections and will also offer tutorials. The strategy has been put into practice and I am quite keen to see how the site develops over the next couple of months.
3/ Digital Footprints: Over the past couple of months I have been playing with a workshop format that uses social media as a means for introspection and self-awareness. The idea is to encourage participants to shape Digital Identities which can be put to good use in order to achieve professional and personal goals. Rather than focussing on operational aspects and simply jumping onto the social media bandwagon, the workshops focus on soft skills and values. Needless to say this is quite a tricky concept. However, I have been extremely fortunate to meet some very clever, progressive people who have commissioned to run a few sessions as part of student/enterprise development initiative within their universities. These first few sessions have been quite successful. I even got one participant saying that he found the workshop (and I quote) – fantastic!
4/ Opportunities Gateway: Work on the OG is going well. Over the few months my involvement with the project has grown considerably. Once again I am very fortunate to work alongside some dynamic people who are very inspiring in the way they operate. I will provide more details about this project soon. This past week I found out that I am expected to go on a reconnaissance trip to a dozen or so cities in/around Yorkshire over the next couple of days! I am quite looking forward to that.
5/ Teaching : And finally, most of my teaching commitments are coming to an end. I teach at a number of HEIs on courses such as Media Enterprise and Creative Digital Collaboration. Students from the ME course had their presentations a few days ago. There were a couple of other members of staff present to judge them. I am quite happy to say that they were all thrilled by the quality of the work and the confidence exuded by most students. I am very keen on encouraging a reflective process as I think self-awareness is key to the realization and subsequent ownership of aspirations. Looking at the students talk about their work, it was obvious they had put a lot of thought into it and were much more aware of their professional skills and goals, which was an absolute delight for me to see.
Right… I am sure I have missed out a few minor details here and there, but I hope to be a bit more regular in posting updates.
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.