Last week was a busy week, event-wise, what with the digital publishing seminar, the Pecha Kucha night, and the zine festival. In the middle of all that, several colleagues from the centre attended and presented at the CEMP Media Education Summit.

Students, scholarship, and our KT work

Oliver Carter gave a presentation, on behalf of himself and Faye Davies, entitled Student to scholar: developing vital academic skills on the journey from FE through HE. This paper discusses how, in the School of Media, we start instilling academic research skills from day one of year one. As part of our approach students are now engaged in producing and publishing support materials for our course textbook. The support website is part of a further project managed by Dr. Simon Barber and hosted at Interactive Cultures where we’re trying to rethink what a text book support website should actually do. It’s a nice case study in what we do here, as you can see the clear link between research, knowledge transfer, and teaching and learning, and it all links thematically back to our growing interest in digital publishing.

Web 2.0 in media education

Dave Kane and I gave a paper titled Student led design of Web 2.0 learning and teaching practices in media education. This paper builds upon our previous research into the uses of web 2.0 technologies within teaching and learning. As with our previous work, our hypothesis is that there is often a rush to adopt new technologies, primarily because of their ‘newness’, rather than as a result of a considered analysis of how they assist in the learning and teaching process or with little consideration as to what a learning culture wants to achieve through the use of technology. We looked at a small case study (interviews with students on the MA Social Media at BCU) to understand some of the issues at play in designing e-learning support materials. The work has prompted a number of new directions which we are actively exploring and we look forward to sharing more of this work in the future.