Posts Tagged: york st john

action / reflection — No Comments
16
Jun 10

Gateway update – Doing things differently!

The gateway project

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.

action / reflection — No Comments
5
Mar 10

Professional aspirations as a trigger for enterprise…

Routes into enterprise

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!

action — No Comments
22
Feb 10

The Gateway is taking shape!

Notes on the Opportunity Gateway

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.

commentary / reflection — No Comments
18
Feb 10

Creativity and Collaboration

Seeding collaboration

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.