BU Research Blog

This week, BU hosted the 5th annual Media Education Summit. Over 60 delegates attended from all over the world, to hear a wide range presentations and to take part in themed conversations about the scholarship of learning and teaching in our field.

Keynote speakers included Caroline Norbury, the new Chief Executive of Creative England. She set the scene for the Summit and challenged all media educators to “get out more”!

Next we had Ian Livingstone – remember the Fighting Fantasy adventure books in the 80s? He started the Games Workshop and is now President of the videogame company, Eidos, home of Lara Croft. Ian talked about his NextGen report and the ICT curriculum in schools, which is now gaining quite a lot of traction.

Paul Lewis from The Guardian shared his thoughts on collaboration and what he called “layered journalism”. He used his own reporting of the riots last year in London and Birmingham as a case study, and showed how he used Twitter both as a source and a means to get close to the unfolding story.

Jon Dovey from the University of the West of England talked about his REACT project, which is a collaboration between UWE, Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter Universities. Funded by the AHRC, the project aims to bring together arts and humanities researchers and creative economy companies to work on a series of ‘Sandbox’ initiatives. It’s probably the best example of ‘Fusion’ I have ever seen, and has given us all a lot to think about.

The Media School’s Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP) started the Summit in 2008, as a forum to bring together those in the field of media and creative education. Since then we’ve been to Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London and we are planning to hold the 2014 Summit outside the UK.

We filmed the keynotes, and they will start appearing on the website soon, if anyone is interested:

http://www.cemp.ac.uk/summit/2012/