Project idea in English
Wikicampus
The aim of the project is on one hand to explore applying different social media tools in education and on the other to explore the problems of cultural entrepreneurship and to develop an entrepreneurship educational package for the field of culture. The idea is to assemble the ’best practices’ of entrepreneurship education in the partner organisations and develop a joint educational material + virtual platform for the consortium.
As such, the education and its implementation would take place in an international environment. The students are exposed to the idea that they have to think across borders and learn to cooperate in order to succeed as an entrepreneur. The education will take place virtually and be organized and implemented in concert by the partner organizations.
We are considering Second life as one potential platform/environment for that purpose. Second Life offers a richer world for creativity and for testing business ideas than the real world while it is based on a realistic and functional economy. However, Second Life as THE platform is not considered a given by any means - the idea is to consider it as one serious possibility.
The central idea guiding the project, developing the education and the platform, is to present entrepreneurship as creativity and a highly social effort. The framework of the education is to bring together different fields of knowledge and skill within the sphere of culture: arts and crafts, performing arts, business economy, production and management… And to break traditional, one-dimensional thinking of sticking to the individual fields of knowledge.
The students are to work together in groups and to come up with new ideas and products that are born out of different viewpoints colliding. They are to try to assume each other’s points of view and to simply embrace the fact that innovation is born out of encounters. These encounters will live on in the virtual sphere, where the community of cultural entrepreneurship will grow with each running of the course (result: international social networks).
The project will probably involve Research on the applicability and potential of social media in education; and on (internationally common) problems in cultural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. It will continue with Development of pedagogical methods and educational material for cultural entrepreneurship; and Implementation i.e. constructing the technological platform realizing the pilot course, organized and implemented in concert.
Most of the partners consider that the package to be developed should be appr. 3-5 ECTS in size. The general approach would be perhaps that each partner would be responsible for the teaching of (at least) one module in the package.
Most of the educational material already exists among the partners, which means that the Development process would thus focus on the application and supplementation of the material specifically for the field of culture and for virtual environment. The main task would therefore be to adapt the entrpreneurship education to a) the field of culture b) pedagogically to virtual worlds and to fostering creativity c) to social media in general d) to an international studentbase.
The name of the project at this point is Converging Cultures: Educational Living Lab for Collaborative Entrepreneurship / CONVERGE; this is open for discussion.
The partners at the moment are:
TUAS (Departments: Telecommunication and E-business; Arts academy) (Finland)
Humanistic University of Applied Sciences HUMAK (Turku Finland)
Satakunta University of Applied Sciences SAMK (Finland)
Adulta (provides education specifically tailored to meet the needs of individuals, private companies and public institutions in Finland)
Stockholms Folkhögskolan (Sweden)
Tallinn Unversity (Estonia)
If you know of other potential partners (especially in Russia, considering the geographical emphasis the Baltic Sea Region programme places on it), please let us know!!!
