The creative use of mobile technologies to enhance learning and teaching in the performing and visual arts

Date: 26 Apr 2013, Location/venue: The Old Fire Station, University of Salford, England

The workshop"offers an opportunity for those involved in teaching, or directly managing degree programmes in the Arts, to find out more about the role mobile learning can play in enhancing the student and tutor experience. Through a series of presentations, activities and discussions, led by academics from the Arts discipline area, participants will be introduced to mobile technologies approaches and see discipline-focused exemplars of mobile learning applied in teaching practice."

(Higher Education Academy)

第29届北京奥运会开幕式 (Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony)

The arts and sciences are drawn more closely together by technology

"A passion for bringing together expertise in the arts, computing and technology is inspiring the University of Greenwich's new Professor of Digital Creativity.

Gregory Sporton, who joins in January [2013] from Birmingham City University, has spent much of his academic career researching the impact of new technology on the visual and performing arts. He is a former professional dancer and has also researched the history of ballet in Soviet times.

He is excited about introducing a new and original focus on the arts to Greenwich. 'I aim to gather together the expertise we have in so many disciplines, such as creative arts, computing, visualisation and all the rest, and make something new and interesting,' Professor Sporton says.

'The arts and sciences are drawn more closely together by technology: there is less differentiation than people think, and at Greenwich I want to build a research environment to explore that."

(University of Greenwich News, 17 December 2012)

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The Art & Media Course at Tama Art University in Japan

"Art & Media Course in Information Design Department of Tama Art University manages various kinds of art forms by utilizing digital technologies and bio medias, such like interactive installations, audio & visual performances, software arts, bio arts, digital animations, and future cinemas. Through the background of recent dynamic changes of relationship between technology and human society, we aim to bring up new types of multi-skilled creators who can transcend the traditional boundaries of fine arts, science, engineering, mathematics and philosophy.The Course has established unique creative environment configured by four individual laboratories which has their own research themes."

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Practising Theatre History as Research

"Much current scholarship in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including my own, focuses on the actual performance of plays in their own or later periods, regarding the texts that survive as, in different ways, blueprints for performance, and exploring them in the context of their performance spaces, actors and theatre-practice and of other agencies such as audiences that impact upon those texts in performance. My own research in these areas is largely conducted through practice.

But let me just sketch a brief background. In 1998, a sea-change occurred in the lives of arts (as opposed to humanities) researchers in the UK, with the creation of the Arts & Humanities Research Board (now Council) which, for the first time, funded practice-led research in the creative arts. I cannot stress too heavily the impact this had on the landscape of research in the performing arts.

That's not to say, of course, that research through practice had not been conducted before then. If I take my own department at Bristol as an example, scholars such as Glynne Wickham, Richard Southern and Neville Denny were experimenting from the early 1950s by staging medieval and early modern plays, and using their findings in their published work.

But the arrival of the AHRB not only provided funding for practice-led research in the academy, but in so doing, confirmed it as being as valid and - not to be underestimated - as respectable as research conducted through more traditional or conventional means. And - a point to which I shall return - it opened up debates not only on how such research might most profitably be conducted, but how it might be disseminated in forms other than the books or journal articles that had predominated - and be disseminated, in fact, through the practice/performance itself."

(Martin White)

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