bachelor of communication honours

The current program director of labsome, Adrian Miles, is on research leave for the second half of 2009. This means he gets to do a lot of reading, writing, editing, and publishing, without the demands of teaching and administration. Yes, it is quite a luxury. Since he's nicking off, Rachel Wilson will be acting program director.

The postgrads and Laurene Vaughan are having an informal discussion around interviewing as research and similar things:

The interview session will be held at 1pm - 3pm on Tuesday June 9.

It will be up in our neck of woods. All of you are welcome to join in,
and for those of you wanting to interview, very highly recommended.

This is a pdf that contains the abstracts and speculative word clouds for the 2009 labsome research for each student. We used this in a presentation to the meanwhile design studio students, and as an exercise in redefining what is being done.

The postgraduate students are going to have a workshop and chat amongst themselves about interviewing and research. Those of you who are going to do interviews should join in. No dates yet, but I'll let you know when.

The first communal lunch is set for Wednesday May 13. With the fine folks from meanwhile... 12.30 for a 1pm munch off.

This is the list of people and food to date:

• James: tabouleh
• Wye Keen: a rice dish
• Ariel: mini muffins
• Jonathon: wraps
• Emily: a cake
• Sandy: cookies
• Royce: chicken soup
• Tess: drinks and some dip for Sarah's sakatas
• Sarah B: sakata's

Organise what is being contributed to the shared studio lunch next week.

Build a presentation of our research problems or questions that will be presented to meanwhile.

Schedule time for next week.

Literature review progress? Feedback? Work to view?

Ethics? work to look at, questions?

Bring a problem for discussion

Brainstorm a word cloud of ideas/qualities that you want your project to have, and then use these to give it a new title. Then write a definition for this new word.

Rewrote 4 sentence abstract. Looked at project timelines and provided feedback. The key points are:

• Enough detail to see the tasks that need to be completed to achieve the outcome.
• Make them like bar graph so you can fill in your progress and easily see where you are up to.
• Be aware of what things require other things to be done first, and order appropriately,
• And conversely be aware of what could be done simultaenously.

Discussed collaboration project with meanwhile.

Have made a new page on the site that contains all the supervision documents as individual files and as a complete pack.

Started with any questions and problems to date? Seem to be none (which is a concern!)

The wiki: how to hand it in. Due this Friday, email me the urls of the pages that you have contributed to. It started out to be a group exercise but individual research directions developed and so the task can reflect these.

Distributed the supervision timeline so get a sense of workflow for supervisors, discussed the role of the progress reports.

Distributed thesis and project assessment sheets. Read and discuss. This is what examiners are required to assess against. So you must ensure you meet, display, indicate these things. Answered questions about some specific items. Stressed that you will do better if you make it explicit to examiners that these things are present.

Discussed how your supervisor can redirect/change your work, this is part of their new role. This to make your research stronger, and to also get more focussed support.

Moved on to developing project timelines. These are preliminary, but should include all assessable work that you know about. Then think about milestones, what tasks are required, when. What targets need to be met (eg how many words per week, per day?). What should happen when you meet them - ie rewards?

In blogs some of you seem to be developing good problems. Any key problems like tossed around as a group?

The latest issue of Text includes the Proceedings of the Art of the Real: National Creative Non-fiction Conference. This means there are a variety of essays there about writing non fiction, relevant to many of you. Perhaps worth a look?