Learning & Teaching Fellowship Presentation

As the BIAD Fellowship for 2012 draws towards its conclusion, I'm posting the presentation that I gave for this month's Learning & Teaching Symposium. Part of the undertaking of accepting the fellowship is to offer up our projects in a form that can be readily disseminated to other lecturers within the Institute. This is the first part of that process for me.

I've added notes (my 'director's commentary') to the PDF of my slides (originally created in Keynote of course), so they should stand as at least a reminder of the presentation. I've also tried to indicate some of the intended next steps within the notes, so if there's anything you think I should be talking to you about, please give me a shout. I'll share more of my outcomes as they happen.

I'm really interested to learn how others have tackled similar problems of teaching credible web approaches to diverse groups of students (especially in the art & design and creative sectors). How are you ensuring that students can develop strategies that adapt to technical and cultural changes? How are you measuring their effectiveness?

eBooks For Education

Over the past few months I've been participating in the SEDA-accredited Advanced Academic Practice program, and using it as an opportunity to develop ideas around using Apple's iBooks to support teaching. This last week saw two formal showcase events at which I presented along with my fellow participants in the course.

If you attended and watched the presentations, I hope you found them interesting. I've certainly had a good response from a number of different faculties across BCU, as well as within BIAD, and I'm sure a number of these will develop into new eBook projects. If you didn't make it to one of the presentations too bad, but I'll be opening out some of the ideas here over the next few weeks (and in a forthcoming podcast project).

In the meantime you can download the presentation in the form of an annotated PDF. This is a kind of attempt to provide a director's commentary alongside the slides, at least in text form. Slides are a very poor means of communicating when taken out of context, so this is an experiment at making them do a bit better job of that. Let me know if you have any questions.

Developing Web Strategies for Creative Enterprise

In August I was fortunate enough to be named as one of this year's Learning & Teaching Fellows at BIAD, with a programme that helps Masters degree students in Visual Communication make effective use of Web and online media in their developing creative practices. We'd piloted this earlier in the year, taking 38 students in a range of creative disciplines through a three-week programme to deconstruct their day-to-day practices and think about how they'd rebuild them using available online tools. As you might expect, social media tools featured heavily in students' strategies, and a significant number of them have continued to use their networks effectively after graduation, building reputation in their fields, securing jobs, and developing credibility.

The Fellowship Award is to allow us to develop the strategies for wider application and to make teaching materials available as a resource to other postgraduate and undergraduate courses in BIAD, and potentially further afield. We're also planning to publish a guide in ebook form. If you've experiences to share, or if you're part of a creative academic programme which might benefit from getting involved, get in touch sharl@mac.com.