TQEF TF Theme:
Personal Development Planning: accumulating and projecting web assets for employment purposes.
Review of Proposal:
Widespread attrition in graduate employment has made it imperative that students optimise the professional value of their skills and the web assets they have accrued to communicate them. This proposal has extended and disseminated the practice of using content-rich multimedia weblogs and IT in the area of PDP and personal or group marketing.
Aimed at refining production values in student web assets and extending the innovative means of transmission of content to employers, customers and viewers; the proposal has extended the market advantage of graduates in a competitive employment and enterprise environment.
An additional aspect of this project relates to the tendency for companies - in the current economic climate - to prefer to engage the services of freelance designers rather than make a commitment to extending their team of direct employees. With the comparative growth in this area of the market, students have been encouraged to form multi-disciplinary partnerships for the purposes of co-operation on promotions. By offering freelance design work over a variety of categories and with a range of styles, the impact, as professionals, of a group of fresh graduates is enhanced in the breadth and maturity of the joint on-line offer.
Relevant University LTA strategy targets:
Developing student skills by further developing and coordinating cross-university and school-based methods and instruments, including skills needed for ICT-based learning. a move to work situated and partnership learning
Embed the University Skills Framework through the Personal Development Planning proposals, developing existing practices in Schools reflecting their individual cultures.
Promote high standards of information literacy to all learners through a variety of delivery methods Developing student skills by further developing and coordinating cross-university and school-based methods and instruments, including skills needed for ICT-based learning.
Progress , Outputs and Outcomes
Year on year, the level of sophistication demanded of students in developing PDP-oriented webpages across many degree programmes across the Faculty has increased since the original innovation in textile design.
The prime initiatives in this respect over 2008-09 have been two-fold.
Students have been introduced to the mechanism of using separate cross linked web-blogs for different categories of design work or information, with separate but inter-related visual identities. This is in contrast to the earlier limitations of simply adding additional posts to a solitary web-blog. Students have also learnt to enhance the maturity & complexity of their pages by appending appropriate ‘gadgets’ such as RSS leads.
Secondly, students have been encouraged to form ‘virtual’ multi-disciplinary studio practices, where, for instance, a printer, a knitter and a weaver - as a coalition - choose to advertise their joint skills or services through a single portal to linked webpages. Students have been directed to continue to use www.blogger.com as the simplest, richest, pop-up free hosting site. As part of the google stable of interlinked services, blogger enjoys access to a greater variety of upload tools than comparable sites. Text, digital images, slide shows and videos are easily compiled & edited and the visual format of pages can be readily customized. Added value components such as RSS and other ‘gadgets’ are no more complex. This allows users to refine and enrich content and navigation without losing creative momentum.
In respect of the textile design programme, the New Designers 2009 exhibition in London was considered the best vehicle for the deployment of web-assets allied to physical examples of creative output. As an exercise in rudimentary ‘augmented reality’, interactivity and miniaturisation, it was conceived that digital resources could be used to support the real exhibition in two ways. An array of HD iMac screens was installed within the show stand, which displayed personalized, categorized or grouped digital assets of the graduate designers. Visitors with appropriate 3G mobile phones could grab QR-codes adjacent to physical artefacts to access related digital content on the screens.
Eg. this code leads to http//:createducate.blogspot.com
Alternatively ‘stand executives’ were able to use iMac-enabled remote controls to access the content for visitors - either by request or on the basis of perceived interest.
Evaluation:
Scanning the evolution and spread of student usage of blogging to consolidate and capitalise upon the benefits of PDP, it is clear that the initiative has been timely and developmental in nature. As a process, it is now fully embedded in number of programmes and has added to the impression - and reality - of student competence and fluency in many aspects of multimedia IT usage.
Individual students have gained confidence in their professional readiness as represented by their ability to assess, edit and project their own output through the Internet. The power of the directed email containing hyperlinks to their own – or group – design work pages has enabled effective and economical cold-calling to potential mentors, agents or employers.
It is clear that the initiative has evolved since its inception. Students no longer doubt the value of having a web-presence; they now very directly understand the power of networking and targeting. They have progressed from wondering what to say or show - to the point of now designing how they want to best portray themselves and their professional output using the tools that have been made available to them.
Dissemination:
Within the academic community of the Faculty, there has been incremental awareness and use of web pages for student Personal Development and Planning, highlighted by a Faculty staff blog. The cooperation with colleagues in Technology to build mechanisms of interactivity related to student web pages has added to the momentum of development and dissemination.
Additionally, the deployment of interactive web-assets in the context of a national / international exhibition has given further credibility to the process across the Faculty.
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