Meeting 22 05 2009
Wikicampus
Converge meeting May 22, 2009 at the Arts Academy (TUAS)
Stockholm Folkhögskolan
MKFC is entirely based on eLearning. Entrepreneurship is embedded in all courses, also in the arts. Students are therefore used to presenting their skills and work to others via social media.
Kalle Hedlund works as an eLearning developer at MKFC Stockholm College, developing several courses and learning methods. His educational background is a Master’s degree in Educational Design – ICT and learning. He has practical experience as a teacher and a course developer in connecting e-communities to curriculum development, pedagogy and e-teachers’ competence – to create student attention, motivation, networking and learning, both with the help of computers and mobile phones. He thinks that the most important thing, also considering Converge, is to guide the students into sharing their ideas and making them visible via ICT. One of the main objectives of the project should be to find the tools of social media to publish your talent / ideas and to sell them.
Kalle is somewhat skeptical regarding SL as the course environment – it might not be the best forum since it requires so much extra work. Other net communities work better for sharing and publishing ideas. In fact, although SL is interesting in terms of the degree of freedom it allows for creativity, it might actually be too far away from reality.
A community example about Art 2.0 in Ning, http://arted20.ning.com/ they have 3805 members and everyone has a gallery (photos, videos) individual pages, blogs, there are discussion forums and members can form groups etc. As an administrator you can choose what contents are protected with a password.
An idea for how to be a creative entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship could be more of a collective effort: a group of creative entrepreneurs working in concert can share the burden of managing the many different dimensions of entrepreneurship. One can focus on marketing, another on product development, pricing, cultural export or cultural management. A distribution of work will allow each to respectively focus on practicing and developing their core (cultural) talent.
In developing this approach the project would benefit from cooperation with the creative incubator of HUMAK to be launched next autumn. The project and the incubator could utilize each other’s services and expertise and introduce their creative entrepreneurs to each other.
Definition of creative entrepreneurship
We agreed to apply the classification of the Finnish Ministry of Education:
The cultural export sectors are film, classical music, popular music, other forms of music, literature, the visual arts, design, architecture, handcrafts, industrial design, theatre, dance, circus and the performing arts, art and culture in the digital media, radio and television, computer games, cultural events, cultural and eco-tourism, and cuisine. Cultural exports also covers children’s culture and service concepts in the cultural sector, such as Finnish library concepts, museum applications, physical exercise and sport. (Staying Power to Finnish Cultural Exports. Publications of the Ministry of Education, Finland 2005:9.)
Topics discussed at the meeting
• The project should introduce a concept for running a profitable creative enterprise
• Entrepreneurship should be integrated in all cultural/arts education
• The aim of our approach should be to spark an enthusiasm towards entrepreneurship and to be informed of what it entails
• A major problem in applying social media lies in the fear of someone stealing one’s ideas
• Cultural production could offer their services to the artists
• A cooperative could present an answer to many problems: it could add to the motivation of becoming an entrepreneur; the need of an entrepreneur for social support; sharing know-how; common products and services
• The problems a cooperative would face are the level of commitment and distribution of work
• For entrepreneurship to become more attractive there is a need for more information about product development and commercializing cultural expertise
• There is also a need for creating more of an interface between different cultural sectors
• We need to think of ways businesses could benefit from participating our project
• We could include (cultural) enterprises as learning material for the students – the entrepreneurs could, in turn, become more learned in social media and the ways it could benefit their businesses
• This interaction would take the form of workshops with different themes or problems
• Workshops would include the arts/cultural students; business students; entrepreneurs and a business consultant
• The idea would be for the students to examine the product development and marketing of the businesses involved
• Some Turku-based creative enterprises: TS-yhtymä; Luovia; Linnateatteri? Matkailuyritykset; Saaristoverkot; Vaakahuone, Ukkopekka, Herrankukkaro.. Down by the laituri – (Happening oy)
• The virtual service of Turku 2011 -event (LiveTurku) – we should present our project idea and think of how we could participate; we could establish a virtual fair presenting our young cultural talent - LiveTurku would be a suitable forum since it’s going to be a permanent thing
• One idea for LiveTurku: a database of cultural management offering support for the Turku2011- projects
• We should go ahead and rent a SL-expo environment and a lot on one of the islands; SAMK has been already contacted by businesses interested in renting a lot on the BusinessFinland island
• Regarding the curriculum for the project: we should present a view on how to operate as an entrepreneur within the field of culture – thinking only in terms of cultural talent and cultural production will not get us very far
o Event marketing could produce a new approach to cultural entrepreneurship
o HUMAK: One discovery in running Nuori Yrittäjyys education (Young Entrepreneurship) is that the students would have liked much more time for developing their business ideas and products
• In terms of the project we have to consider continuity and permanence of the results; a permanent result is that this course which will become part of our curricula – however, a yearly virtual fair is not enough for arguing permanence
o continuity of educational coopearation between the partner organisations
o The project needs to find the channel for presenting and marketing cultural products/services (SL one such channel)
o The project has to establish a network that will guarantee the continuity and effectiveness of education
o A pedagogical approach to the course: establishing cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral teams for developing creative business ideas
• The virtual platform should integrate education, product development, sharing and marketing of ideas and networking – it should encompass both a password-protected environment for sharing and developing ideas and a public arena for presenting and selling them
• A virtual environment will add to the attractiveness of 1) the project in terms of easy enterprise participation and 2) entrepreneurship as a potential and practicable form of livelihood
• Heidi Varpelaide told us that cultural actors such as libraries and museums are interested in producing their own virtual establishments on the EduFinland island in Second life
• If the project should start in the late spring of 2010, the first workshops would take palce in the late autumn
• SEE http://secondsamk.wikispaces.com/ Heidi’s presentation “Avattaren vuosi”
• (One) target group (in addition to cultural students and enterprises) of the project could be those cooperatives of HUMAK’s Young Entrepreneurship course, which are not ready to establish a business nor to participate in an incubator
• For the next meeting each educational organisation will think of potential contents for the project curriculum: themes/pedagogy/problems for the workshops
• Next meeting June 11 at 10.00 at the ICT building
Links and further reading:
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