Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research

Paul Bradshaw and I have spent the day at Exploring Collaborative Learning In Media Studies Programmes, a one day seminar hosted by Winchester University, funded by the HEA.

This one day seminar will allow for academic staff from different higher education institutions across the UK to convene and to discuss the benefits and problems in collaborative learning, how social media – and other technologies and practices – can be used and to share good practice in facilitating collaborative teaching and learning in undergraduate media studies programmes

We attended to present a paper on ‘Stories & Streams’, a teaching and learning research project we have been running this year, with financial support from BCU’s Centre for Enhancement of Learning & Teaching. Stories & Streams is a response to observations we have made about instrumental ways in which students consume learning based on their expectations of job roles. We have developed a response that is problem-based, peer-to-peer and student-led; the initial findings suggest that students have engaged with learning at a deeper level and produced work of a higher standard (although there are also new problems still to address).

The teaching and learning activity has been delivered by Caroline Beavon, Paul Bradshaw, and Jennifer Jones. The evaluation of the project and the research outputs are being prepared by Jennifer, Paul and me. The article which accompanies today’s presentation will be available in a collection to be published on the HEA website.

Paul’s slides from today
Project blog

Digital Transformations is “a research network exploring digital transformations in the creative relationships between cultural and media organisations and their users”.

I attended their first workshop last week, alongside BCMCR colleague Paul Long. Paul was there hoping to discuss notions of expertise with other researchers and scholars, and also to engage in some ideas to inform the Culture Cloud project. I was there primarily because I’ve taken up a brief in BCMCR to develop knowledge transfer work, and “exploring digital transformations in the creative relationships between cultural and media organisations and their users” speaks quite clearly to that.

The day was structured around some presentations in plenary – some case studies, some think pieces – followed by break out discussions that followed an unconference like format (reflecting the overarching theme of the day about organising activities from the user upwards).

In the end the day for me was actually more interesting in terms of research work, rather than knowledge transfer, and I spoke more about some of the activity happening within hyperlocal media than I did about KT. Not what I expected, but not unwelcome.

Following on from the last breakout session, where I was note taking for the group, I’ve contributed a guest post on lurking as participation to the network – read the post here.

The network has a number of events over the coming months which may be of interest:

20 April 2012: Business models, rights and ownership workshop, at British Library, London
15 May 2012: Design workshop, at Tate Britain, London
21 June 2012: Learning workshop, at UCL, London

To book head to www.digitaltransformations.org.uk

One of the aims of my KTP project, which ends today, was to look at knowledge management systems for small teams. Every day we’re exposed, through email, tweets, blog posts, news and research, to hundreds of snippets of information. But how do we get hold of them when we need them?

Knowledge management is a process that can be put in place to store, keep, retrieve and share knowledge in a useful way. When developing knowledge management it is useful to put a system in place where those who wish to share knowledge and collaborate can access, files, thoughts and ideas in a central organised location. The creation of such a system can be very costly, even using off the shelf technologies.

We set out to create a cost effective system, a prototype, to test the usefulness of knoweldge management across a small team at my placement (and which included the team at BCU).

Wikis and collaborative google docs could be used in this way, but they are quite hard work – ideally we need something that is easy to add to and something which is easy to search. We looked to Evernote for the answer.

Why we chose Evernote

• Evernote can be used across a number of platforms – it has native apps for Mac, PC, Android, and iOS, plus a web interface which makes it as near as universal as we will get.
• In Evernote you can easily clip articles and paste them to a shared notebook for others to see.
• It has text recognition software built in so images and scans with text can be searched.
• Content can be tagged and have meta data applied, greatly helping search and allowing data to be gathered easily into groups.
• We can do all this on a shoestring: one premium account costs $45 – that account can share a notebook with all the members of the team. Team members can use a free account to access the shared notebook, contributing and retrieving information from a communal database.

It is certainly in my opinion worth trying out Evernote for knowledge management within an organisation.  It’s easy to use and could provide a company with competative advantage against others, after all, knowledge is a valuable asset.

During my visit to SXSWi I found myself attending the following panels which all touched on the notion of singularity in different ways:

• Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity
• Wall-E or Terminator: Predicting the Rise of AI
• 3D Printing: Not Everyone Will Be Excited
• PolySocial Reality and the Enspirited World

I wont profess to being an expert on the subject after only attending four panel discussions (so I might not get everything right in this blog post), but it is an area which interests me greatly and it was wonderful to attend panels at SXSWi that discussed it.

For those who don’t know (in layman’s terms), the notion of singularity is best described as a moment where AI becomes more intelligent than us, and in some versions of this the machine will be able to replicate itself with modifications to make it better in some way.

So within the realms of the 3D printer, a printer is currently being programmed to replicate itself totally. Once it’s done that, the replica may be able to reproduce itself but ‘better’.

Moving from singularity to the event horizon, the event horizon is a point in the development of machines when their is a point of no return.

The panel Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity in my opinion showed the first signs of ‘humanity’ in AI through Bina48.

Bina48 is a animatronic torso that has been created to simulate a human. Bina48 can ‘talk’ and answer questions quite beautifully, is quite charismatic when doing so and can be a little scary. Bina48 has been created using a ‘mind file’ taken from a human Bina and can recognise speech though a speech recognition system, she then constructs full sentences and answers.

Bina48 was one of the highlights of SXSWi for me and if you get a chance I would recommend looking her up online. Seeing her might make you wonder if the event horizon is near.

In her post yesterday, Elizabeth described her trip to SxSWi as part of an official (funded) Birmingham delegation to the annual technology festival. She describes something of the process of getting to Austin and her experience as part of the community that made up that trade delegation. That’s a theme at the heart of a recent article I co-authored with Jennifer Jones, a visiting lecturer here at Birmingham School of Media and a researcher in UWS’s Creative Futures centre.

The article, The imaginary SxSWi, seeks to interrogate the way in which sponsoring trips to SxSWi can be justified; often attendance is positioned as proxy attendance for others but, with so much content from the festival being available online, what knowledge can be transferred only through proxy attendance?

The article is very much intended as, in the words of the hosting journal’s editors, “a ‘think’ piece, designed to spur discussion amongst scholars and audiences”. If you have any thoughts on this please do head over to FlowTV and leave a comment.

Read the article here

This year I went to South by South West Interactive (SXSWi), for the first time and found the whole experience fascinating and exhausting.

When I was planning on going I was a little nervous about travelling and being in Texas on my own. Not something that now I should have worried about.

Before I bought my ticket for SXSWi there were several meetings to discus possible funding that was available from UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), along with networking with those people who were interested in going. As time drew closer to SXSW less and less people came to these networking events until it was only the delegates that had their tickets and were going.

The Birmingham contingent itself is made up of mostly people who have been to SXSW before and who are more than happy to help and give advice before and during the conference, which helps to promote a great community feel about attending. Once in Texas (on the first morning over breakfast), numbers and twitter handles were swapped so that everyone could stay in contact and no one was left feeling as if they were on their own.  Every night (once the conference had ended for the evening), individuals and groups of Birmingham delegates kept in touch via twitter and text and ended up eating dinner and networking together which certainly helped to create a friendly community feel.

During SXSWi the UKTI created an event where some lucky companies were able to present themselves to people attending SXSWi. These mission companies can be found on the Chinwag site here. During this event Birmingham was well represented and it was great to see the products that the people who I had been spending time with were doing via demonstration. This was a very useful event to attend as it allowed for the Birmingham contingent to connect with others from the UK who we had not been too closely in contact with before, see their products and forum other useful links and networks.

Chinwag also held two events; The Great British Tea Party and The Great British Breakfast which brought together attendees from across the UK for a networking opportunity.

Overall I found the community feel of the Birmingham contingent really helpful, friendly and supportive with regards to my SXSWi experience.  I would recommend that anyone who is planning on attending SXSW 2013 should make sure they get to know who’s going from Birmingham before traveling to the conference so they can share their knowledge with you.

After going once, I hope to go to SXSWi again, and if I do I’m already looking forward to sharing my knowledge with anyone new attending.

The call for artists to upload their work for consideration as part of the Culture Cloud project is now online at: theculturecloud.com or theculturecloud.co.uk. There is also a Facebook page dedicated to circulating information on the project. The Twitter feed can be found at: @NaeCultureCloud.

Potential contributors were invited to start uploading/registering art works from 5 March 2012. Registration is open until midnight Friday 4 May 2012.

After artists register and upload images of their art to this site, each will be considered for shortlisting as one of 60 works to be selected by the Culture Cloud curators. Curators are drawn from a national network of partner galleries to New Art Exchange (NAE) and the project: FACT, Liverpool; Asian Triennial, Manchester; Next Level Projects, London; Arts Admin, London; Format Festival/ Derby QUAD;PRIMARY Nottingham; Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham and Cornerhouse, Manchester.

This is a cross post of something I’ve put up on my personal blog – but which some people can’t see as the DNS changes for my migration from Posterous are already in train.

We’ve been fans of Posterous for while at the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research. It’s been a good tool for teaching, as we can create shared blogs for classes with ease. It’s also been handy for project partners, allowing us to build quick and dirty solutions for them so that they can see our ideas play out quickly.

We were strong advocates for the software, and experimental users of it (way back when, I pointed out to Posterous that they’d actually accidentally built a great podcasting tool and Simon worked with them as a private beta user of themes, amongst other bits of play we did with the platform).

As I say, I’ve been meaning to move for a while because I was starting to lose faith in the software (it had stopped being simple, had started to bloat) and because I was becoming worried that it locked users in too much. By this I mean that when Posterous went hard on a drive to recruit bloggers from other platforms it produced a suite of blog importation tools, but never provided a way out. There’s no back up in Posterous and no easy way to leave. When you’re working with a company that is funded through VC investment and has no clear business plan, these things should always be a worry –  that’s why during the revalidation of the BA (Hons) Media & Communication programme at BCU I’ve introduced the idea that students across our degree specialisms (journalism, PR, new media, photography, TV, radio, music industries and events) should build their personal web presence using web 2.0 tools, but that they should take a considered approach to this, interrogating the institutions in which they are trusting their professional presences.

So I’ve had my escape route planned for some time. Funnily enough one of today’s tasks is “work on blog” – I’ve promised my PhD supervisors that I’ll start writing publicly about my PhD, and as I’ve a PhD tutorial tomorrow I thought I’d better get things in hand (ever the student, eh?).

I’ve just done a dry run transfer of Posterous to self-hosted wordpress. Back last year I’d planned to use the Posterous to WordPress importer plugin, but it hasn’t been updated yet (I bet that’s in progress after yesterday) and doesn’t work with the latest version of WordPress.

This blog post is useful in outlining one way to get content migrated quickly, using wordpress.com as a bridge to a self hosted wordpress site. The import took less than five minutes to clear into wordpress.com, and same again on the transfer to self hosted.

Some things to look out for:

So I’m now waiting for my domain to switch over to my hosting, and this will be my last posterous post. It’s been a fun ride.

A talk given at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies research seminar by invited guest, Dr Dave O’Brien.

Hello, my name is Lisa Wiedemann and I am an intern-to-be at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. Before meeting the School of Media team personally, I would like to introduce myself.

After I finished my studies in Sociology, Cultural Studies and Educational Science at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Germany) last year, I was looking for some practical experience within the broader field of cultural research. Digital Culture has been a main area of interest for my own research, but so far it has been from a theoretical point of view. It has been concerning the development of identity in consumer culture, and I will talk about this a little further on.

Since I am interested in British Cultural Studies and digital culture, I was really happy to discover the friendly people of BCMCR during a long click-journey through the Internet. I don`t know any other research centre, with such a mixed focus on current media and cultural issues: especially Social Media, which pervades so many lived experiences. I particularly enjoyed the content on Social Media as it identifies our interactive culture as a creative tool, rather than simply as a communication channel or networking device.

I am especially looking forward to familiarising with strategies of music organisation and music consumption in the Digital Age. Reading music magazines and writing fanzines has been a huge part of my own youth and I was a big fan of British bands – “The Smiths” for example.

As a student of sociology I associated Birmingham with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which is well known for interdisciplinary research. I have a similar impression of the Interactive Culture team and I am sure I will learn a lot about different approaches toward media analysis.

My thesis was about the lifestyle and fashion blogs of girls; typifying the aesthetication of their everyday life. For instance, in these days of time-space-compression, a young urban subculture shares with the online community what they have worn during the day, what they have bought in the afternoon or what they have eaten in the evening – a pictoral and written summary of lived experiences. Thus I considered the relationship between media transformation and self-constitution of modern subjects. At first this might seems to be similar to the long tradition of cultural criticism in the field of sociology, like the idea of economic self-exploitation through cultural capitalism (consumer market prescribes stencils for lifestyle and forces distinction and individuality). My key interest though was to show how far these weblogs are part of life`s organisation in contemporary culture. Web blogs as online strategy embody what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called “Technology of Self” (Foucault). These days it is important to be creative, to show individuality and to distinguish oneself from others – we could say these are the demands made on modern people. By producing a personal web diary I think fashion bloggers become practitioners and not just observers, taking pictures of their lifestyle or writing about their consume experiences. It was also important for my work to examine the gender aspect of using these new technologies. After receiving my degree I taught about gender and consumerism at the University of Hildesheim.

I believe my time in the School of Media will better inform my interest in popular culture particularly around my main areas of interest (Gender, DIY Culture, Social Web, Cultural Theory and the fading dividing line between work and leisure). I am also interested in research that utilizes academic expertise in a consultative capacity to assist public bodies, commercial companies and community organisations.

The Interactive Cultures Team envelops a vast spectrum of new areas of potential research for me, such as traditional forms of broadcasting and print: popular cultures; cultural policies; media education; creative economies, radio studies; journalism and PR and music heritage.

Certainly after 6 month internship, I believe I will have developed my sense of direction regarding my future academic plans and maybe have developed ideas for my PhD. I’m looking forward to joining the Interactive Cultures team and meeting people in the so called “Treehouse” – I guess everybody likes the idea of climbing great heights!