From the program information: Create.Ed was ‘Australia’s first eLearning conference to focus on teaching and learning in the creative industries will bring together world-class experts in industry and academia’ (http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse?SIMID=n7hnhkbfvsq6z). The presenters mostly came from the Graphic Design, Multimedia and Photography and Exhibition design fields. The audience ranged from secondary school teachers, TAFE teachers, educational multimedia developers and university lecturers.
The use of eLearning in Multimedia has always seemed quite logical and has been part of my teaching strategies, but at the start of the day I was questioning how the more physical arts could effectively use eLearning. Within first five minutes of the conference this question was answered for me. The example was from Gail Hart, who told a story of how she was skeptical of a teacher’s desire to use eLearning in teaching dance. But she expressed her surprise at how successful the teacher had been. This dance teacher had workshopped and developed a performance with a group of students and after the performance sat down with group to reflect on the performance. He then continued this discussion online with the students over a period of time. The teacher found the students become more excited and engaged with discussion over time. The result was that the students engaged in deep reflection about the performance and their learning was enhanced.
Many of the talks were underpinned by 4 key ideas:
1) Understanding of the creative/design process is important for our students
2) Communication skills are important to the future success of our students (this includes face-to-face and online communication skills eg using email to do business instead of just for social reasons)
3) Collaboration skills, and how to collaborate across disciplines and develop in what was being termed ‘trans-disciplinary’ skills, which means one person working across multiple specializations.
4) Using technology for communicating and collaborating in visual ways, because visual thinking skills are essential to the creative industries.
These key ideas developed into the following messages from the conference for me:
- The use online discussions allows student to examine their process in deeper ways. Often online virtual studio areas can be used to exchange images as well as text. Students were more relaxed and often experimented more in these online spaces and hence often their work was more innovative.
- Online discussion allows students to develop new and more complex communication skills, often introducing the professional use of online communications, rather than personal use.
- E-learning systems allow for ease of collaboration between students, professionals and teachers.
- Tools such as the Omnium Project allow for visual dialogue in ways that other learning management systems don't allow. The really important part of the Omnium project is that it demonstrated how visual and rich media could be used in a collaborative process online.
Many of the talks were case studies of how people had explored, experimented with and realized these ideas within their teaching.
Following are summaries of each of the talks.
Rick Bennett was the keynote speaker. He spoke about the Omnium Project (http://www.omnium.unsw.edu.au/) which is an online collaboration and learning project that has been running since 1999. The project is supported by an exciting learning management system developed for the project, that allows images and other rich media such as sounds to be exchanged and worked on by multi participants both on- and offline.
The Omnium project allows creative people to work in the way they work best, which is with images, instead of having to work in the normal text based environment of the web. This system was developed to meet the need for complex collaborative image-based work.
Within collaborative spaces, Rick brings together students, professional graphic designers, interior designers and product designers to work together in projects. Features of our design practice were supported within the system such as sketchbooks to explore ideas, galleries and pin boards to share ideas, and meeting spaces.
I had great expectations of the next talk, “Experience Design: Practicing what we Preach when Negotiating Technological and Educational Interdisciplinary” by Linda Leung, because experience design is one of my areas of expertise and interest. Leung made linkages between the experience design and learning design processes, and also between user-centered and student centered design processes, which was interesting.
The next speaker Adrian Bruch spoke of his own journey in the creative industries from a cartoonist to organizer at the Interactive Information Institute (http://www.iii.rmit.edu.au/) based at RMIT and what he saw as important issues for teachers in the creative industries.
Some of key points he made were:
- Rules are made to be broken
- Teachers in the area should be experimenters
- We should embrace failure in both our own practices, teaching and in our students.
- We should learn from our students
- To keep on learning
- To have a life (his suggestion was only way to do this was to have a laptop)
- We should build our networks
- We need to share what we learn with as many people as possible.
The next speakers were from the University of Wollongong. They described a project were groups of 3rd year graphic design students worked on projects for external and internal clients. The students managed all parts of the projects including the client liaison. Each group of students had a space online to discuss the project. An empirical analysis of these online discussions was completed and some of their findings where:
- There was more critical and reflective discussion during the planning and early stages of the project; during the later production stages there was more discussion devoted to practical matters.
- On average students posted between 1.4 and 5 messages a week and those students that posted more than 8 messages a week often had trouble keeping up with workload in other areas.
- They also found that students who had not performed well in individual projects, performed well in the dynamic team environment.
After lunch Mark Galer from RMIT spoke about the practical problems of developing a short commercial online course in digital photography. This content is also used in their face-to-face delivery and is part of RMIT’s move to 100% digital photographic processing reflecting industry practice. Mark’s talk bought home how time consuming the process of developing self paced learning materials can be. Before starting at RMIT, Mark had written a book on digital imaging than had taken close to a year to develop, it took another year to put that material online.
A problem that online learning solved for Laurene Vaughan was the fact that her students simply would never have the time to come to class. This course was RMIT’s Master of Design course, which had been developed for both design and communication professionals and fashion designers. In these industries long work hours and frequent travel make course attendance near impossible. A large proportion of her talk centred on the problems they had with RMIT’s Learning Management System, Blackboard. One her interesting findings was that for content development sessional teachers were a better choice as they have the need for the money while full time teaching staff often don’t feel they have the time.
Michael Sankey from University of Southern Queensland (USQ) spoke from a different viewpoint than most of speakers. Around 76% of all USQ students are off campus students; whereas in the creative arts the percentage is around 50%. Michael used snippets of current education theory to make the argument that because most people learn visually, learning materials need to engage learners in a visual way. However most traditional higher education delivery and distance education is based around the spoken or written word. Rich media brings its own challenges in the online environment. From next year, USQ is planning to provide all current printed material on cd-rom to students and their use of the online learning management systems will include a minimal amount of text, and will primarily be used for discussions, chat and assessment.
The next talk returned to teaching digital darkroom skills and creative skills for the future. Students in Vince Dziekan’s course at Monash University had taken part in a online course run by Sandra Semchuk. Semchuk returned to Canada after a residency at Monash and the online course that she developed included story telling with images being explored by collaborative practice. Logistical details such as different academic years were worked around, allowing Vince to rapidly integrate eLearning into the course, and expand and extend Sandra’s visit to Monash. A interesting aspect of the course that could be applied all areas of teaching was Sandra’s role as a teacher; she worked in the course alongside the students often collaboratively, completely breaking down the perception of teacher as expert or instructor, instead facilitating and teaching by example.
The last talk was Angelina Russo from Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Most of her talk focused on her experiences teaching exhibition design at University of South Australia. Exhibition design brings together many specializations, including interior design, graphic design and IT. Russo’s talk also featured the terms trans-disciplinarian to refer to those areas of practice which are inter disciplinary by their nature eg exhibition design, multimedia, product design. Angelina notes that many students are now operating in trans-disciplinarian manner, without a lot of concern for the separations that once existed.
On the Friday I had the opportunity to tour a cluster of initiatives at RMIT including the Ideas Incubator, the virtual reality facilities, and lab3000. I-cube has Australia’s only commercial virtual reality facility. I have visited and experienced these types of technology at other institutions in Los Angeles and in Finland, but have never experienced and engaged with group of people who seemed to go beyond what the technology could do (and yes the technology is usually expensive and powerful) and who were instead focused on the application of the technology and how it could be used to solve real problems. These solutions included training applications, car design and urban planning.
This group of facilities exist outside of any one department in the university, and are housed outside of any one department’s buildings. This means that one area doesn’t have control over the facilities and means the areas can be brought together in new ways. Grouping these facilities together creates synergies in that the virtual ideas incubator explores and creates new knowledge. Commercial activities are then made possible through the application of this new knowledge and expertise. This focus on innovation and application of new technologies is strong. From these types of activities where ideas and innovation and a desire to bring people together have been valued, RMIT can been seen to be a leader in area. This seems to have partly led to lab.3000 which is one of ‘Victoria's first centres of excellence. Lab3000 has been established to capture and promote the emerging opportunities that will position Victoria at the forefront of the global information economy’ (http://www.lab.3000.com.au/).
Posted by robin at October 14, 2003 10:57 AM