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The Post Industrial Media Project is a collaborative teaching and learning research project undertaken by Adrian Miles, Allan Thomas, David Carlin, Glen Donnar, Paul Ritchard, Rachel Wilson and Seth Keen of the RMIT Media program.
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Post Industrial Media is a collaborative project undertaken by a group of media practitioner-teachers within the RMIT Bachelor of Communication Media program. This project received funding from the School of Media & Communication Teaching and Learning Fund (2007).
We are in the process of developing and evaluating a new curriculum for an undergraduate media program. The intent of this is to develop a teaching and content model that is relevant to professional media practice in a web 2.0 world and to have sustainable, flexible and process-orientated teaching practices that shift teaching from content and skills acquisition towards learning how to learn.
This has raised several issues and required the close integration of content, pedagogy, assessment and technology. Key things we outline here are the development of what we describe as media literacy 2.0, which is a combination of media literacy, 'network literacy', social literacies and literacies of learning; the role of infrastructure and technology; a curriculum map that sketches the gradation of theory and practice over the three years (as well as the assessment structure); and our teaching philosophy and general (schematic) views on theory and practice and how we 'boundary cross' between these.
The media program is a stream within the Bachelor of Communication (B.Comm) in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. We are a technical university, which means we teach applied courses, and have a long tradition of such teaching and research. The B.Comm contains undergraduate degrees in media, public relations, journalism, and professional communication, as well as an honours program.
There are a range of subjects that media delivers, some only to media students and some to all students in the B.Comm. In addition there are subjects that media students are required to do that are outside of the media-specific degree structure. What we have documented and explored here are the subjects that media controls and which form the kernel of the media program.
The media teaching team self-initiated a major review of all aspects of the media degree early this century. A central focus of this review became the curriculum and pedagogy of the program, and the review provided an opportunity to restructure the entire degree. This restructure concentrated on embedding specific teaching methdologies into the program and also on redefining the basic requirements of a media degree for this century. These decisions were realised through consensus over many months of discussion, argument and planning and have been implemented progressively over the last five years. At this point we believe that, while problems remain, we have got many things right, and the general intent and ambitions of the program in relation to the integration of teaching and learning with technology and reflective practice has been productive and successful.
This project is primarily an opportunity to let us pause and just describe what we are doing, as much of our model has become implicit. We want to make it explicit for others, for new staff and for our students. It also lets us make visible what is working, and idenitify where gaps remain and further development might be needed.
The original (late 2007) team consists of:
However, all that we are writing here has been informed by conversations and the contributions of all members of the RMIT media teaching team.
Our aim is to document and share the curriculum designs, innovations and practices we have developed and implemented in the teaching of media to undergraduate students. The RMIT media program has a highly integrated, whole-of-program approach to the use of a variety of new and emerging technologies which combines aspects of process and problem based learning with reflective practice. During the implementation of this approach over the previous five years we've made numerous mistakes, scored some successes, and PIM is an effort to actually document what we are doing, for ourselves and for others.
What we are documenting here is not a comprehensive overview of every course but a snapshot of the experiments, practices and strategies that we have developed to improve the teaching of media to students in light of contemporary media education, theory and practices. We are only writing on those subjects that we are currently actively involved in, so what is contained here is less a rigorous discussion and examination of the entire program but more a reflexive and critical narrativising of our everyday teaching practices.
The project is not intended to document all of the subjects taught within the media program, nor to document the history of change that has occurred within those subjects. We also don't want to examine the rationale and process undertaken to initiate the program review that lead to these curriculum innovations in the first place. We are writing of those subjects that we have direct experience of, have recently taught, and that we are participants within. It is also worth mentioning that not all staff within the program have the same level of interest in pedagogy that we do, and that while PIM is perhaps the leading of curriculum development and innovation within the media degree, the overall degree is 'lumpy' as we test and trial new ideas, make mistakes, and work with others.
We are achieving this primarily through this wiki. The aim is to produce thick descriptions of our practice, identifying what we do, how we do it and why. Through this sort of 'writing out' of what we do we are hoping to make explicit what has been implicit in a great deal of our curriculum design and implementation, and to also identify what needs to happen next. The writing was undertaken during a three-day intensive research retreat where we collaboratively authored this document, live in the wiki, in what you'd describe as a blended mode.
A follow up full day writing retreat was then held in a participants house, and further writing days and retreats are planned.
A three day research retreat was conducted in Daylesford in late November, early December 2007. This was the first major effort at producing content in and for the PIM wiki. A second one day retreat was held in June 2008 to continue documentation and development of the wiki.
Outcomes of the Post Industrial Media project currently include this wiki and a series of abstracts for papers and media projects for presentation and delivery in 2008.
A photo gallery is available.
See useful and related links that have been produced as a result of this research are available via:
We have also provided advice on how to cite pages in the wiki. All work here is collaboratively authored and should be attributed as such. It is available under an Australian Creative Commons Attribution, Non commercial, Share Alike licence.
This project, in terms of the content in the wiki, is incomplete. This is not simply because it is a wiki and it is a bit odd to think about how such a knowledge and writing structure could ever be 'whole' or 'complete', but because we have adopted a pragmatic methodology which could be described as a synchronic thick description. It is partial, concentrates on those subjects that we have recent experience on, and is not so much a complete mapping of our media program as the highlighting of particular parts of it. We hope to continue the development of the project, including this wiki, to include more material and to also produce content about media literacy 2.0 in a variety of media.