Saturday, July 21, 2007

Birmingham power 50?

The Birmingham Posts Top 50 most powerful people list was published today, I've had a quick look through and some interesting statistics:

45 of Birmingham's top 50 are male
4 are female

Encouragingly 14 of the list are involved in the Creative Industries from the following sectors/roles (by my reckoning).
- Arts council Chair and Arts centre Director *
- Marketing         
- Dance
- Music
- Software designer
- Architect
- Music maker
- Publishing
- Radio presenter
- TV maker
- Artist
- Curator Gallery Director
- Music administrator *
- Journalism

(*2 of the 4 women listed are involved in the Creative Industries (neither are on the list as practitioners)

I do not wish to belittle any of the contributions those on the list have made to the city, region and beyond, but the list as it stands begs some quite obvious questions namely: where are the women on the list? Does this mean there are only 4 influential women in Birmingham? this is not my experience? where are the creative women in Birmingham, why aren't they listed here? and finally what can one do to redress the balance, to highlight and similarly celebrate their contribution?

It would be good to have a look at the criteria and try to develop an alternative listing and I do not mean a women only list. Any suggestions for whom should be considered?


Friday, July 06, 2007

Busy busy busy

What a week? I have done a whirl wind tour of the Midlands (exciting honest).

First my week started with a bunch of interviews with students on our school of art and designs MA in Media Enterprise - it is fascinating seeing how these students are responding to the curricula, their own perceptions of enterprise and how enterprising they feel they are. More on this later an interim report is due (from me) sometime over the Summer. So will try to make something available online.

Tuesday saw me over at Staffs university for the TE3 open day - TE3 being the Technology Enhanced Enterprise Education project which held I believe their third 'open day' and this time supported by UKSEC. Here I was presenting the findings of the evaluation which I have been carrying out recently - it was a pretty intimidating experience Staffs have a state of the art fully functional TV studio so the 80+ audience (of quite serious and senior looking academics) sat behind the much scarier cameras and the whole thing was filmed and web streamed. Anyway having said that it was a great opportunity to see what some of the partners have produced in terms of pod-casts and electronic portfolios and I didn't get camera shy after all.

For me one of the interesting aspects of this project has been the lessons learnt from the efforts to develop teaching materials across disciplines i.e. teaching enterprise outside of a business school. These have been lessons from sports management to the creative industries and it's interesting to see how issues vary across these different disciplines and how each benefit from their own 'flavour' of enterprise ed. Kelly Smith and I will be presenting a paper on this at this years ISBE conference - more on that another time.

The week continued a pace with various trips around a day in beautiful Warwickshire countryside - being trained at Wroxall manor I am amongst other things and 'innovation mentor' and will shortly be providing service design consultancy on behalf of my institution. Thursday some different training at Harbourne Hall (which has the most ornate Victorian interior) here I am learning how to be a teacher - strange really I did 4 or 5 years of lecturing prior to my current role with no training now I do very little lecturing but at least have a better idea how to .

Finally today more interviews for the MA.