Did you graduate from Wolverhampton Fine Art 1994?

Ok so some folks will have noticed some recent Twitter and Facebook activity from me asking the question in the title of this post.  If you did graduate from Fine Art 1994 from Wolverhampton. Then please let yourself be known and I'll forward the link to a simple career history survey - it should only take 10 minutes. Here is some of what I've said to the participants:

This survey is for graduates of Wolverhampton University's 1994 Fine Art Alumni. The survey is part of Charlotte Carey's PhD research. The research seeks to understand links between gender and entrepreneurship within the creative industries. Any information you contribute will be stored securely and your name will never be attributed to any of the data offered. This survey is aimed to capture the career paths of a cohort of creative industries graduates. I am hoping that the 1994 Fine art Wolverhampton alumni will participate in this study.

As part of the process of reaching this sample group I am making use of social media with the hope of generating a snowballing effect. Whereby one participant will forward information about the survey to their contacts within the grouping. This is proving harder than expected, partly due to the nature, amount of time that has passed and individuals names changing (through marriage etc.). An approach I am taking is to leverage my own social media networks in order to try to reach this group. All help is gratefully received. If you are or know of anyone within this grouping then please contact me directly via twitter @charlottecarey or simply respond to this posting in the comments.

IEEP; Twitter and Teaching Enterprise

Yesterday (yeah okay I know I haven't blogged for ages, anyway...) I was presenting to this year's IEEP (International Enterprise Educators Programme) cohort with colleagues from two other universities; Dr Kelly SMith (Huddersfiled, @kellyjs) and Tom Williamson (Coventry @floppyarms). Not really sure how we were billed but I went along to talk about how I have used Twitter in my teaching.

Above is a screen shot of a slide. The table highlights how I think twitter is useful for the different courses I teach on.


I was trying to talk about why I use Twitter? Mainly it's because I teach interactive or digital marketing. So obviously Twitter, along with many other things, is covered. I use it for a number of practical things too. Students can interact with my networks (an area that with colleagues I have discussed elsewhere), develop their own, get an insight into appropriate ways of using Twitter on behalf of their future clients and for developing their own businesses and personal online presence. Twitter is not explored in isolation it is one of many tools (just currently particularly useful). As well as this students are encouraged to use it to annotate the session under a common #hashtag, making for group note taking and an ensuing conversation which, potentially, extends beyond the class room.


At the IEEP event a number of concerns were voiced. One of the issues that arose was anxiety about referring students to documents which held no academic rigour. Along with this was anxiety about the level of academic evaluation as to the value of services like twitter.

My initial response to these two points. Firstly the speed with which technology changes and the ways in which folks use the Internet and apply the various tools available is constantly evolving. In contrast an academic paper can literally take years to go through the review process and be published. This making research relating to use of twitter (at least peer reviewed academic research) rather thin on the ground. Twitter only started in 2006 after all.

A second aspect is a tension which I perceive within enterprise/entrepreneurship education and which has been borne out in various evaluations of enterprise provision I've been involved in. This being the balance between academic/theoretical pursuit and the need to provide students with insight into new and emerging business models as well as timely and appropriate marketing approaches (and that's scratching the surface). I am talking about theory vs practice.

The ensuing talk offered much healthy scepticism and tough questioning.

However anyone would think that we were pushy sales folk trying to flog our wares, rather than a couple of academics discussing how we are embracing new technologies, trying to conceptualise their implications and seeking opportunities from them for ourselves and our students.

Hmm as a final note I must thank the IEEPers as one way or another the debate has ended a long drought period within this blog (been tweeting too much....:-) Thank you and perhaps see you on twitter @charlottecarey

Fear and loathing in doctoral studies...

Dear blogger forgive me it has been sometime since I last posted. 

Dear reader 

This blog has lost its way. Or rather this blogger has lost her way. Sometime ago I thought this was a twitter related thing but barely tweet anything worth reading there at the moment either...

Tomorrow I am due to present my PhD research so far.... this goes on and on. I have been delayed somewhat of late. Partly due to what I realise is pure fear! Fear of not completing (I know go figure, pull your finger out and bloody well get on with it), fear of my intended sample group not playing ball. Okay what else? oh yes fear of the whole scale of the thing.

This will not be news for anyone else who has embarked on this particular journey. It is a slog and as I've mentioned here before with all the other family and work things going on there is little time, at least not the right sort of concentrated time I could do with to fully engage with the process. Anyway these may all be excuses. Think I need to figure out a solution here. 

Okay I have a much more positive post to write about some other new, interesting and thoroughly distracting pieces of research I've been working on. 

Incidentally I might give this blog another chance. If I get a chance I'll update on tomorrow's event.

Kreative Oslo

This week I am in Oslo. I am attending the launch meeting of Creative Metropoles, a new project where I am working with a couple of colleagues from across the university and researchers from 12 other EU cities. I'll talk about this in more depth as it develops but my colleague Jon Hickman has made a start by developing some of the conversation we've been having here about creative industries definitions. 

Glamorgan Enterprise Education event

Just a brief round up of the day back in December where, amongst others,  my colleague Harry Matlay and I spoke at Glamorgan University on Enterprise Education. Includes a gym motivating pic!

Enterprise education and web 2.0

Okay so there's no new years list. No resolutions (of the blogging variety).  Last year was pretty intense but in a good way. I am now more a lecturer than a researcher - although I have a couple of research projects about to get underway and so the balancing act will continue for the forseeable and PhD rumbles on (desperate to get some of my work time devoted to this - that's a little something to work towards). 

So my research interests are evolving but still focussed on the following broad topics:

• Gender and entrepreneurship in the creative industries
  
• Enterprise education 
  

The former of these is my PhD topic and pretty much under wraps for the time being - it is a long slog with moments or real joy when I can literally feel my brain absorbing new ideas and stuff, but otherwise hard.

The latter, which has emerged from my funded research, has developed into various strands: 

1.  Contextualised enterprise education (i.e. enterprise taught within the context of a discipline e.g. sport or art and design)
   
2. What can generic business school enterprise education learn from how existing curriculum is taught within art and design?
   
3. Enterprise pedagogies and web 2.0  - this is an interesting area and one which seems to have a growing interest. Mainly it's about how education can respond to students increasingly immersed in the online world? how does that make them different sorts of learners? and what fantastic opportunities exist with in social media etc to engage with our students?
   

Based on the latter I am presenting next Friday (23rd Jan 09) at Birmingham City University for an event run by the Higher Education Academy for English.