Jillian Hamilton

Demonstrating the impact of a distributed leadership approach in higher education

ABSTRACT Higher education is under pressure to advance from a singular focus on assessment of outputs (measurements) to encompass the impact (influence) of initiatives across all aspects of academic endeavour (research, learning and teaching, and leadership). This paper focuses on the implications of this shift for leadership in higher education. Demonstrating the impact of leadership in higher education requires taking a step beyond measuring the skills, behaviours, and achievements of individual leaders to demonstrating how universities can evaluate the impact of actions taken to build leadership capacity across the institution. The authors extend the outcome of empirical research into how a distributed leadership approach can be enabled and evaluated in Australian higher education – to analyse the effectiveness of these processes for both measuring output and assessing the impact and influence of practice.

Supervising Practice: Perspectives on the supervision of creative practice higher degrees by research

PhD supervision is a particularly complex form of pedagogical practice, and nowhere is its complexity more apparent than in new and emergent fields, such as creative practice Higher Degrees by Research (HDRs) where supervisors face the challenges of a unique, uncharted area of research training. While there is an increasing body of literature on postgraduate supervision, and another emerging body of research into what creative practice/practice-led/practice-based research is, so far little attention has been paid to matters associated with research education leadership and pedagogical aspects of supervision in creative practice disciplines.For this reason, this special issue brings together a range of perspectives on the supervision of creative practice PhDs in visual and performing arts, media production, creative writing, and design.

Speaking of Supervision: A Dialogic Approach to Building Higher Degree Research Supervision Capacity in the Creative Arts.

Abstract In the emergent field of creative practice higher degrees by research, first generation supervisors have developed new models of supervision for an unprecedented form of research, which combines creative practice and a written thesis. In a national research project, entitled ‘Effective supervision of creative practice higher research degrees’, we set out to capture and share early supervisors’ insights, strategies and approaches to supporting their creative practice PhD students. From the insights we gained during the early interview process, we expanded our research methods in line with a distributed leadership model and developed a dialogic framework. This led us to unanticipated conclusions and unexpected recommendations. In this study, we primarily draw on philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogics to explain how giving precedence to the voices of supervisors not only facilitated the articulation of dispersed tacit knowledge, but also led to other discoveries. These include the nature of supervisors’ resistance to prescribed models, policies and central academic development programmes; the importance of polyvocality and responsive dialogue in enabling continued innovation in the field; the benefits to supervisors of reflecting, discussing and sharing practices with colleagues; and the value of distributed leadership and dialogue to academic development and supervision capacity building in research education.

Designing locative and social media technologies for community collaboration and social benefit: PetSearch

The convergence of locative and social media with collaborative interfaces and data visualisation has expanded the potential of online information provision. Offering new ways for communities to share contextually specific information, it presents the opportunity to expand social medias current focus on micro self-publishing with applications that support communities to actively address areas of local need. This paper details the design and development of a prototype application that illustrates this potential. Entitled PetSearch, it was designed in collaboration with the Animal Welfare League of Queensland to support communities to map and locate lost, found and injured pets, and to build community engagement in animal welfare issues. We argue that, while established approaches to social and locative media provide a useful foundation for designing applications to harness social capital, they must be re-envisaged if they are to effectively facilitate community collaboration. We conclude by arguing that the principles of user engagement and co-operation employed in this project can be extrapolated to other online approaches that aim to facilitate co-operative problem solving for social benefit.

Embodied communication in the distributed network

Through the adaptation of new technologies, the creative industries are proposing new forms of interaction for the distributed network. This paper considers the new media artwork Intimate Transactions as an example of a creative, experimental approach to interaction and network technology. It discusses this artworks design of physical interaction, which includes whole-body interaction with a hands-free input device; the incorporation of choreographed interaction with its screen characters; the production of generative, multi-sensory feedback around a dramaturgical model; and the use of haptic devices to relay bodily movement across the network. It explains how this physical interaction produces a sense of flow that perceptually suspends awareness of the works actual site in favour of a shared virtual space. It then considers how this shared space becomes activated by multi-sensory feedback, including the physical sensation of touch. It concludes that these innovative approaches to physical interaction help to establish the potential for embodied communication and co-presence within networked space.