Categories
Academic

#TLCwebinar Reworking The Big Agency as an interactive employability unit #bigag16

Wednesday 10th of May April 2017 12:30-13:30 (UK Time) *Moved from 26th April, as browser issues in universities

Find The Big Agency: Blog : Twitter : Facebook

The Big Agency is a second year university unit at Manchester Metropolitan University that I’ve been reworking to meet the following description:

Creative agencies today are not just looking for creativity; they’re looking for employability. In the agency world, skills such as communication, team working, client relationship building, strategic thinking, project management and customer-centric research, all play an important role in understanding and answering the client brief.

The Big Agency unit will give you the chance to work on a brief provided by one of our industry partners, pitching for the client you want to work on. It will help you build your practical agency skills through a range of account management, research and creative-related tasks, whilst helping you develop your personal skills through the process of self-reflection and personal development planning. Big Agency will help bring to life theories, concepts and models of PR, marketing, branding, advertising and self-development and show how you can apply them.

This unit is assessed on an evidence-based portfolio of work to demonstrate your approach and response to a client’s creative brief and your own personal development: a) in the form of an end-of-year video documenting your work, and b) in the form of self-reflective essays and blogs evaluating your personal and professional goals and achievements.

With great help from my teaching team this year – it’s largely working, although there are more tweaks to be made, and feedback from students has been both encouraging, and the negative feedback has largely been things we had already picked up on this year. It’ll be a fairly informal discussion talking through how The Big Agency worked last year (with lectures/seminars), to a more employability focused unit drawing upon real life projects, and as we seek to encourage students to think creatively for themselves, have the courage of their convictions for some, and face the realities of working life for others.

You’ll be able to check out the webinar here… Slidedeck: http://bit.ly/MMUBigAg17

Categories
Academic

[LIFELONG LEARNING] Feedback on Reflective Essay on PhD Supervision

It’s been a while since I wrote an essay, but I was pleased to receive this mark yesterday for an essay on “To produce a written reflective assignment, to include a demonstration of the participant’s critical and analytical understanding of the learning from the unit content, and action planning for their continuing professional development as postgraduate supervisors. (2,500- 3,000 words)”.

You can download the essay (minus appendices) in PDF format, and I think the feedback below was fair – I so enjoyed the reading (yes, I did quite a lot), I didn’t really leave enough time to write/polish.

grademark-phd-supervision

Categories
History Speaker

[SPEAKER] Keep Calm and Carry On: Visualising the People’s War in Posters

As the ceremony from Theipval, commemorating the Battle of the Somme, plays in the background, it reminded me that I’d not posted my slides from a session I presented to the Visual Culture Research Group at MMU on Wednesday afternoon, in which I gave an overview of my book proposal to convert my PhD to publication (very slow progress, yes!).

My presentation came after Jim Aulich had talked about social visual media and the persistence of images, finding comparisons between, for example, the image of Alan Kurdi, and comparisons with religious iconography. Both presentations considered why certain images have meanings, and persist.

In my presentation, it seemed particularly pertinent that this presentation came the week after #Brexit, as we discussed how Keep Calm and Carry On has in many ways detached from its original context, but that the story does affect how people engage with it, that my Google Alerts for the phrase has produced much more interesting content this week than it has for the last couple of weeks, as people once again cling onto the phrase!

Visual Culture Group: Keep Calm and Carry On Book Overview from Bex Lewis