I haven’t blogged here for a while, which is a shame. Although I don’t think anyone reads it 🙂
Last Thursday night I managed to get to the LCF BA final show. Fantastic work and inspiring atmosphere as always. If you couldn’t make it the live stream looked good and the Instagram feed had good coverage.
This time of year is Summer Show season and there are shows in every UAL college. As a governor I try and go to as many as I can. There’s a good list of dates and times here. I’ll try and get to LCC and Chelsea next.
A few weeks ago I spoke at the DeL 2015: Technology Culture Practice held at CSM. Before the conference I tweeted that my first slide would be “stop calling it e-learning”.
That seemed to work. There’s a good write up here.
I went to the CSM graduation at the Royal Festival Hall this morning. As a governor you get to wear a gown, a funny hat and you sit on the stage behind the Vice Chancellor and Heads of College and people like that.
You also get to clap all the graduands on and off the stage. Talented people with exciting futures ahead of them. There was a great atmosphere. It was an inspiring morning.
I visited the CSM show yesterday. There is some fantastic work on display. I liked this poster by Timothy Tyndale Brockbank which has been reblogged a zillion times since last night.
But there’s loads of other stuff too. All of the colleges have a show on this Saturday. So let’s make Saturday Visit A UAL Show Day. I’ll be visiting a few with the kids. Full list of shows here.
I was at CSM this evening for the renowned Fashion Show. I’ve never been to a fashion show before, luckily Grayson told me what to expect – the weird and wonderful and that’s just the music
The show was fantastic.
Print by Han Kim
Grayson even managed to tweet a few future trends.
Today I met Katie, she’s a UAL grad and now works at Wieden & Kennedy. She also teaches part time on the CSM Illustration course. She’s helping illustrators understand the internet and it’s possibilities for their future careers.
Here is the description of the course, “As technology evolves the way we communicate, illustrators, designers and filmmakers have to find their place. The tools are in your hands to talk to the world. So what are you going to say, and how are you going to get people to listen? “How not to suck on the Internet” will give you the knowledge to answer these questions.”
As regular readers will know, in my role as a governor I’ve been helping UAL to be more digital and working out what that means for them. We’ve just held the first meeting of the UAL DIgital Think Tank. It’s a group of people convened to look at the overall approach to digital at UAL.
It’s a small group, moving quickly and will report back in July. It’s the first step in a long journey. More news here as it happens, but meanwhile here’s more detail from Nigel Carrington the Vice Chancellor.
DIGITAL THINKTANK
Ben Terrett will chair a Digital Thinktank which considers our overall approach to Digital in the contexts of publishing; digital services; and learning and teaching.
The Digital Thinktank will comprise a core Steering Group of Ben Terrett, Jim Nottingham, Edward Venning, Frances Corner and Fred Deakin. Kerry Sullivan will act as Secretary of the Thinktank and provide logistical support to the Steering Group.
The steering group will scope the project and ensure delivery.
The Steering Group will meet as soon as possible to scope a timetable and methodology for the gathering and review of data and an agreed programme of deliverables to be launched in September 2015. The deliverables will consist of short actionable projects (including a UAL-wide coding club) which will be designed to test ideas with a view to developing a broad digital strategy for UAL over the course of the coming academic year.
The Thinktank will include the Steering Group plus, initially, Marcus Saunders (LCF), Ben Stopher (LCC), Rebecca Ross (CSM), Chris Fellows (CCW), David White (CLTAD), Dani Salvadori (Enterprise) and Helen Anderson (Recruitment). This initial Group will identify other potential staff members and student members.
The Thinktank will operate in an open and transparent manner (including via a blog) and members of the Thinktank will engage with end users – students and colleagues across the University.
The Steering Group will report to Executive Board on its proposed deliverables no later than September 2015. The drafting of the report of the Thinktank will be led by Ben Terrett, Jim Nottingham and Edward Venning with assistance from Kerry Sullivan.
Last night I met some students with three of my fellow governors, Andrea, Diana and Sim.
As governors we felt that we didn’t fully understand the students perspective because we rarely get to meet them. So we organised an inform get together in the CSM bar. The students were great and told us lots about their experience of UAL, good and bad.
It was really valuable for us and we’ll definitely do it again. I’ll try and post more info here when I have it.
