In late 2009, Sandra Haukka secured funding from the auDA Foundation to explore what older Australians who never or rarely use the Internet (referred to as ‘non-users’) know about the types of online products and services available to them, and how they might use these products and services to improve their daily life. This project aims to support current and future strategies and initiatives by:

The Working in Australia’s Digital Games Industry: A Consolidation Report is the outcome of a comprehensive study on the games industry in Australia by Dr Sandra Haukka from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) based at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. The study responds to concerns that Australia’s games industry would not reach its full potential due to a lack of local, highly skilled staff, and a lack of appropriately trained graduates with the necessary knowledge and skills.

The Creative Economy report card of 2011 is a Snapshot of Australian creative economy indicators.

Creative industries are advertising and marketing; architecture and design; visual arts; film, TV and radio; music and performing arts; publishing; software and digital content.

Australia’s Arts and Entertainment Sector underpins cultural and social innovation, improves the quality of community life, is essential to maintaining our cities as world class attractors of talent and investment, and helps create ‘Brand Australia’ in the global marketplace of ideas (QUT Creative Industries Faculty 2010). The sector makes a significant contribution to the Australian economy. So what is the size and nature of this contribution?

Click HERE for more information about the Creative Workforce 2.0 Program

The Growing Future Innovators scoping study includes a detailed review of local, national and international policy relating to arts, education and innovation and case studies of innovative and best practice schools education programs delivered by eighteen contemporary arts organisations in Australia and the UK.

Abstract

Australia currently lacks a mechanism to gather evidence on the formation of public attitudes to the introduction of new technologies, particularly the formation of attitudes to nuclear energy technology.

This is a limiting factor in achieving informed debate in the development of a national energy policy.

These are key findings in a research project recently completed by the National Academies Forum. Its report, Understanding the Formation of Attitudes to Nuclear Power in Australia, will be released today at a CEDA function in Perth (details below).

The Creative Economy Report Card provides a snapshot of key facts about Australia's creative industries, the creative workforce and businesses -- based on analysis of national statistics and reports.

Abstract

It has now been over a decade since the concept of creative industries was first put into the public domain through the Creative Industries Mapping Documents developed by the Blair Labour government in Britain. The concept has developed traction globally, but it has also been understood and developed in different ways in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America, as well as through international bodies such as UNCTAD and UNESCO.

Julian Thomas
The Australian
February 22, 2010 12:00AM

CONFUSION and disarray surround Stephen Conroy's decision to rebate licence fees for commercial television broadcasters.

The decision raises the most basic question that can be asked about government dispensation of any kind: what was this money for?

There are young Australians who are already making a name (and money) for themselves in the latest market for creative content – and it didn’t exist a moment ago. YouTube is a huge repository of amateur content, but it is also rapidly evolving into a site that has legally contracted Hollywood movies and TV shows but is working out ways to share revenues from advertising with gifted and committed amateurs whose creativity attracts a big following.

Can government play a role in assisting Australian creative talent to catch some of dynamism of emerging markets for culture?

Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy.

Australian Financial Review

Creativity is today’s ultimate black box a Rorschach blot onto which there are projected innumerable meanings. When academic Richard Green reviewed the literature recently, he found so much variation that he concluded the field was ‘so attenuated, extenuated, or misunderstood that operationalising of the key concepts is missing or impossible’. He tried to order the field, and constructed a profile of 42 models of creativity which, when combined with assorted variations and typologies, totted up 303 variables!

In this paper, we provide specific examples of the educational promises and problems that arise as multiliteracies pedagogical initiatives encounter conventional institutional beliefs and practices in mainstream schooling. This paper documents and characterizes the ways in which two specific digital learning initiatives were played out in two distinctive traditional schooling contexts, as experienced by two different student groups: one comprising an elite mainstream and the other an excluded minority.

Story Circle is the first collection ever devoted to a comprehensive international study of the digital storytelling movement, exploring subjects of central importance on the emergent and ever-shifting digital landscape.

* Covers consumer-generated content, memory grids, the digital storytelling youth movement, participatory public history, audience reception, videoblogging and microdocumentary
* Pinpoints who is telling what stories where, on what terms, and what they look and sound like

Faculty Seminar Series

Professor Justin O’Connor, Research Capacity Building Professor Tuesday 28th April 12pm-1pm The Hall (Z2-226) CI Precinct QUT Kelvin Grove

Creative labour: emancipation or honey-trap?

The paper seeks to warrant the authors’ claim that creative capacity building can, at least in substantive part, be made visible through empirical processes of inquiry. To do so, the authors present methodologies and findings from two research projects they have conducted into creative capacity building, the first of which tracks student networking capacity and the second of which identifies cognitive playfulness as a creative learning disposition.

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.

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.

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?

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

The following papers, from the Creating Value Conference (hosted by CCI, 25 - 27 June 2008, Brisbane), have been peer reviewed as per HERDC Category E1 specifications.

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
http://www.learninglabcoalition.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=ca...

[DVD] National Creativity Showcase, QUT, 6-7 December 2007, Highlights.