Multimedia Exhibitionists

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
Today (23 March 2005) we had our third Multimedia Exhibition of students' multimedia project work at MMTD, Brunel University. It was remarkable that different constituuencies of interest came together in a coherent and unfussed way.

Staff went around assessing students work, probing exploring examining the offerings presented. Despite the Exhibition seeming chaotic there was an unerlying order - a puposiveness. (Chaordic?)

The Technicians had worked hard to put all the bays on one floor in Tower C, and created tags, badges and allocation maps. They ensured the technology and software was appropriately configured. Steve Gardiner, Chief Technician, went around taking pictures with his digital camera. I must get some of those pictures and post a couple of the better images to this post to give the full flavour of the Exhibition.

The Exhibiting Students had designed their posters and made a range of artefacts and promotional devices to display their work. Creativity abounded. They had thought carefully about what they wanted to do. The Art School Exhibition had infiltrated a traditional Engineering Faculty!!.

Other Students in the "Year Below" came along in the afternoon. They were recipients of feedback from Level 3 to Level 2. In one sense the whole operation was managed. But in another sense the myriad interactions between persons can never be managed. Often it is enough to set up the structural conditions that they MAY occur. For these Level 2 students there was sufficient 'requisite variety' to suggest the show was more than the staff's educational propaganda. It was an exhibition of a reality that they themselves would be part of next year.

Finally, the External Examiner was present as he had been for five years. Now retired, he looked on at the burgeoning exhibition with a benign smile. "The students have moved on and are producing interesting variegated work. They have left the websites behind."

It seems so true: to move on you must leave something behind.

Awareness and a "New Intimacy"

Dr Brian and His Thoughts

Yesterday I assessed some students work with another person. It was Level 2 undergraduate assignment work in marketing communications. The assessment was of student market research and banner ads for the web. It was demonstrated "live" - in person - by student pairs to two academic assessors.

On several occasions, during live assessment, I was aware of an intense interest by the students on what I was saying. I was describing my reaction to their work, how I would react if it had been illustrated fully. I mentioned another Faculty in the University and how they were moving towards requring video to be used as part of assessment of drama students work in performance. This caught the students' interest.

A pair of students were talking about the new "flash drives". I said "You could so easily have shown how easy they are to use with video, you could talk about the new systems which can read small memory cards for by-passing camera download software. But instead you have submitted lots of unremitting text. Do you not think that anything that livens up what you have to say results in improved communication?" Students saw how their notion of media was far too fixed.

I feel we have yet to benefit from the "new intimacy" in communicatiom, which personal video will give us. The students 'intense interest' was an example of this "new intimacy": they could see I was encouraging them to get 'inside the skin' of their research topics. From what I saw, students seemed to think this was an unusual attitude on my part. But nevertheless an interesting one, since the multimedia technology is there to make it happen, and the skill to make it happen is in their hands.

On reflection I was inviting them to be more creative, to express themselves. Strange that people need to be invited to do that. It seems to me to be as natural as breathing.