Volume 1 (2008): Issue 2 (January 2008)

There has been a tension in Cultural Studies between those authors who see fun as important; and those who see it as a distraction. This tension has been played out around the concepts of amusement, distraction, pleasure, celebration, playfulness and desire. I think that fun is important. As we move from Cultural Studies to Cultural Science, I want to retain a focus on fun.

This paper draws on an ongoing doctoral study of student engagement with new digital media technologies in a formal schooling environment to demonstrate the importance of playfulness as a learning disposition. The study shows that cognitive playfulness mobilises productive engagement with learning innovations in the context of a traditional learning culture. Specifically, the paper discusses findings that emerge from a quantitative study into the level of student engagement with, and usage of, one school’s digital innovation in the form of a new Student Media Centre (SMC). The study analysed how different student learning dispositions influence the extent to which students engage with new digital technologies in the context of their otherwise traditional schooling. What emerges from the study is the interesting finding that cognitive playfulness, defined as ‘the learner’s dexterity and agility in terms of intellectual curiosity and imagination/creativity’, is a key factor in predicting students’ valuing of the opportunities that Web 2.0 open-source digital learning affords. In presenting an empirical validation of this finding, the paper contributes new knowledge to the problematic relationship between student-led digitally-enhanced learning and formal academic schooling.

This paper draws on recent computing and social organizational research to open up new possibilities for constructing learning environments that optimise opportunities for university students (and, indeed, their teachers) to work as members of dynamic creative teams. Given that the challenge of setting up a learning environment that fosters such a complex mix of relational dynamics is not a simple matter of ensuring that people feel good about themselves, the paper canvasses two areas of research that can be usefully bought together to provide principles on which to build learning environment for ‘high flying’ creatives.

The first is research that synthesises computer animation and biological behaviour to understand how ‘birds of a feather flock together’. ‘Flocking together’ allows birds (boids are the computer animated variety) to fly higher and exhibit greater scheduling and routing capabilities than each bird can do alone. The means by which this extra capacity is achieved can tell us a lot about how we might do better in a team environment than we can alone. The second is the sociological research that inquires into how good ideas get picked up and moved about in organizations, that is, how a novel idea, produced in one specialist cluster, can be transported across ‘holes’ (voids) in the organization to and integrated with the work of different, even unrelated, clusters of specialists.

Insights from these two different domains of research – one focusing on the ‘micro’ dynamics of a team of a few people, and the other focusing on the macro dynamics of working across teams, are combined to develop principles for building a learning environment that can optimize creative high flying.

The central common feature of a number of recent technological developments (collectively referred to as Web 2.0) is collaborative production of content on an amateur basis, that is, for motives other than commercial reward. Amateur production of content generates significant external benefits that are shared by society in general. Indeed the amateur production of various types of content is probably more socially beneficial since it is typically given away free The individual and social benefits of such activity therefore justify public policy responses to the opportunity now before us.

This paper introduces the concept of identity dynamics to evolutionary economic analysis. The extant literature on the economics of identity is reviewed and integrated into the micro- meso-macro model of evolutionary economic analysis. This model of identity dynamics serves to both generalise extant concern with the economics of identity as well as to integrate and develop broader psychological, social science and humanities models of identity in the context of open-system evolution as a contribution to cultural science.

Film and TV productions, a key area in production screen business, comprise of processes with high demand for creativity and flexibility. However, despite the era of fast developing technology, film production processes are carried out in an old fashioned way. This is reflected, for example, by the fact that document processing accompanied by daily shooting activities is still primarily paper-based and coordinating geographically distributed cast and crew is purely manual or at best through emails. There is an opportunity to bring process innovation into this industry, which can streamline and optimise film production processes and thus reduce production costs.

Business Process Management (BPM) is the mainstream contemporary technology-enabled business improvement method. It has proven to provide significant benefits to an organisation in terms of cost savings and responsiveness to changes. In this paper, we apply BPM technology to process innovation for film production. We also share experiences in how to deal with innovation barriers in the film industry. Over the course of the investigation, a prototype called YAWL4Film was developed on top of a state-of-the-art BPM system. YAWL4Film supports collection and entering of production related data and automatic generation of reports required during film production. The system was deployed in two student productions at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), as well as in a feature film production by Porchlight, an independent film production company.