Latest News

Shaping cross-cultural online collaboration for education

Posted by Simon McIntyre - March 11th, 2011

Visualisation for the upcoming Rare Earth project in Shanghai.

What happens when students in Sydney are immersed in a multidisciplinary collaborative process with their Chinese counterparts to address urban issues in downtown Shanghai?

 

This was the key question posed in response to the theme 'Old and Young' at the 2010 Better City Better Life Cumulus Conference in Shanghai. COFA Online Undergraduate Coordinator Ian McArthur presented at the conference, held in conjunction with the Shanghai World Expo at a number of venues around the city. 

Ian’s research platform, The Collabor8 Project (C8) is an ongoing series of case studies challenging art and design students in China and Australia to collaborate. In the most recent of the collaborative projects sixty art, design, and architecture students, practitioners and academics from The College of Fine Arts (COFA) and Donghua University (DHU) were challenged to interact online in a process culminating in an intensive two-week studio at DHU.

The paper ‘Creating culturally adaptive pedagogy’ presented case studies from 2009’s PorosityC8 e-SCAPE Studio highlighting profound transformations made real through blended cross-cultural studio collaboration. In it Ian argues that globalised economic and urban territories linked by network technologies and reconfigured geopolitical relationships impel art and design educationalists to develop innovative pedagogies relevant to the emergent needs of students, the world community, and as yet unforeseen industries.

The cross-cultural multidisciplinary collaboration (CCMC) within C8 is founded on approaches to learning that emphasise pedagogy over use of technology for its own sake. This ethos has inspired all C8 related projects to date. Using integrated, adaptive processes, the teaching and learning model presented provokes students to share cultural identity and methods of practice to find the common ground shared by young and old cultures as exemplified by Australia and China.

This research has led Ian to work on developing a new C8 related project called ‘Rare Earth’. Watch this space for updates!

 

 

Share this News! 

     

UNIKEN magazine interviews McIntyre and Watson

Posted by Simon McIntyre - May 17th, 2010
UNIKEN catches up with Karin Watson and Simon McIntyre from COFA Online during an interview with Dr Gay McDonald. Photo by Patrick Cummins.

COFA Online's Simon McIntyre and Karin Watson were recently interviewed by the magazine UNIKEN while conducting an interview with Dr Gay McDonald for the Learning to Teach Online project.

 

Click here to read the interview ->

 

UNSW's magazine, UNIKEN caught up with Simon and Karin to discuss the ALTC funded Learning to Teach Online (LTTO) project during one of their video interviews - this time with academic Dr Gay McDonald, Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Art Education, College of Fine Arts.

Gay was being interviewed about her experiences of using blended learning (a face-to-face teaching scenario supported by some online elements) for the first time in her teaching. This interview is one in a growing series that COFA Online is undertaking as part of the LTTO project. It will join many other insights gathered from academics across different disciplines and institutions as part of the free online professional development resource. You can read about the aims and structure of the LTTO project here.

The first episodes of the project are due to be released in June, so check back soon!

 

Share this News! 

     

New Journal Article: Trust and relationship building in online design education

Posted by Simon McIntyre - March 31st, 2010

Iridescent: Icograda Journal of Design Research

COFA Online team Karin Watson, Simon McIntyre and Ian McArthur have had their recent paper published in the International Council of Graphic Design Associations' (Icograda) design research journal, Iridescent.

 

Click here to read the paper ->

 

COFA Online recently presented a paper called 'Trust and relationship building: critical skills for the future of design education in online contexts' at the 2009 Icograda World Design Congress Education Conference in Beijing China. We are delighted to announce that this paper was also selected to be published in Iridescent, and is available online now.

Below is a sample of the paper abstract...

Could you trust someone you had never physically met to successfully collaborate with you on a design project? As online communication technologies rapidly evolve, the creative industries continue to move towards globally networked and interdisciplinary modalities of practice. These inescapable shifts in the ways designers work have challenged many long held assumptions about the nature of individual design processes.

Such revolutionary changes mean that designers must increasingly master new skills to effectively communicate and collaborate in online environments with colleagues from different cultures, disciplines and locations world-wide. Since they may never meet face-to-face, the success of this new working methodology relies on high levels of trust between practitioners, both personally and professionally in order to achieve effective design outcomes.

In turn the need for design educators to equip students with skills to thrive in the face of this new industrial paradigm is highlighted. Trust is integral to developing the personal and professional relationship building and collaborative skills necessary for contemporary digital working practices. By being sensitive to, and cognisant of these issues, educators can initiate and implement strategies that help create the right conditions for trust to emerge between participants in online learning scenarios. In reality however, the relative suddenness of this shift has seen some educationalists engage in unconsidered responses to this challenge. In the rush to embrace online technologies, the social and cultural dimensions of online pedagogies are often neglected while the relative functionality of digital tools and spaces is given prominence.  

 

Share this News!