This paper explores the tensions that arise for young people as both ‘digital kids’ and ‘diligent students’. It does so by drawing on a study conducted in an elite private school, where the tensions between ‘going digital’ and ‘being diligent’ are exacerbated by the high value the school places on academic achievement, and on learning through digital innovation.

This issue of Media International Australia is based on several of the papers presented at the Digital Literacy and Creative Innovation in a Knowledge Economy symposium held by CCI and the ARC Cultural Research Network in March 2007. Guest edited by CCI researchers Kelly McWilliam and John Hartley, along with Mark Gibson, the articles in this issue consider how the rapid development of digital technologies has changed the production and consumption of media content, altering the very nature of the relationship between 'producers' and 'consumers'.

Whether we describe them as Gen Y, the Net Gen, the Millennials or the Yuk/Wows, today's young people have grown up in a highly technologised environment. They interact, engage and disengage with greater speed and choice than ever before. But are they equipped for a work future in which creativity has become the defining feature of economic life?

No longer the preserve of creative industries, 'creative capital' is needed everywhere, because novel thinking, navigation, interactivity, border-crossing and forging new relationships have all become crucial to success and productivity.

We identify some tensions between formal education and informal learning in the uses of popular literacy since the nineteenth century, in order to argue for a ‘demand-led’ model of education in digital literacy.

Online digital environments are inviting all of us to reject the role of spectatorship and to participate actively in our own learning write Erica McWilliam and Norman Jackson

Download paper: Follow your bliss

Careers in the creative sector are unusual in that they are characterised by boundarylessness, in which short term employment relationships and self-employment are common, and the responsibility for career development is placed on the individual. In addition, it has been suggested that many creative workers possess career motivations distinct from those associated with traditional career patterns, such as progression and security. This study examines the career orientations of creatives to determine whether certain motivations are linked with career management competence and success in the boundaryless career.

Download paper: Monitoring student creative capacity

This paper explores how research in the fields of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Business can be applied to monitoring the development of student creative capacity.

Download paper: Making music together

Music curricula have become increasingly systematised in universities. This means that students may be segregated into class groupings that do not naturally support active participation in knowledge sharing, networking, moving between expert groups, socialisation and professional success. This may result in students graduating still unprepared for professional workplaces.

Download paper: Aligning curriculum, pedagogy and assessment for building creative capacity in undergraduate students

Teaching-for-creativity is "rarely an explicit objective of the learning and assessment process" (Jackson, 2006, p.4). In Europe, collaborative research projects have been recently set up to address this lack of acknowledgment or explicitness. Australian universities lag behind in this respect. However, Australian HEIs are now showing increasing commitment to creative capacity building as an outcome of undergraduate teaching.

Download paper: Creativity's crossing forces: a danced interplay

This paper examines various perspectives on creativity fuelled by a current collaborative research project, Dancing Between Diversity and Consistency: Refining Assessment in Post Graduate Studies in Dance, in an attempt to arrive at some position on the value of creativity and critical reflection from the point of view of artistic practitioners within academic parameters.

Publication: Cognitive playfulness, creative capacity and generation ‘C’ learners

[Website] Erica McWilliam, Carrick Associate Fellow
http://www.carrickinstitute.edu.au/carrick/go/home/fellowships/pid/397

[Website] Learning Lab Coalition http://www.learninglabcoalition.net/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemi...

[Factsheets] Learning Lab technologies and related issues
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[DVD] National Creativity Showcase, QUT, 6-7 December 2007, Highlights.