The artisan and the artist. Innovation enables transformation

Technologies Excellence Group, for theCurriculum for Excellence Group for SG (commissioned by/for Mike Russell-Cabinet Secy on Education

Reflections on eportfolio professional learning: harnessing an unconference approach

This practitioner-led article documents the journey of a cross-institutional multidisciplinary team to support the development of practitioners’ ePortfolio professional competencies through an “Unconference.” We describe the approach used to support an ePortfolio unconference hosted in January 2018 at Dublin City University. According to Budd et al. (2015), the most meaningful professional learning at conferences tends to occur at the cofee breaks when delegates are free to engage in open dialogue. An unconference is a dynamic participant-driven conference which features discussion and collaboration at its core to support professional learning. This approach was chosen to capture, develop and document current ePortfolio practice in Ireland and the United Kingdom. This article outlines key facets of professional learning generated as a result of the unconference including the promotion of ePortfolio competencies and the generation of collaborative research outputs. At the unconference, attendees participated in experiential learning opportunities which enhanced and extended their personal and professional ePortfolio competencies as well as developed practice-focused research outputs collaboratively in real time using a range of technological tools. Participant feedback highlights the impact of the unconference on their professional ePortfolio learning and practice, and the critical refections of unconference organizers inform future ePortfolio professional development

Anna Maria Maiolino: continuous

Dr Michael Asbury curated an exhibition at Camden Arts Centre of the artist Anna Maria Maiolino. The artist produced an installation with clay that relates to notions of difference and repetition, the idea of the first/primal gesture, ephemerality, cyclical/recycling, etc...Students integrated with the team of volunteers producing these pieces in collaboration with the artist. The seminar was literally a ‘hands on’ experience, where issues were discussed while producing the object. As one of the most significant artists working in Brazil today, Italian-born Anna Maria Maiolino, presented a new, site-specific installation and a selection of film works made over the last 30 years. Anna Maria Maiolino was born in Italy in 1942 and moved to Brazil at the age of eighteen. Studying painting in Rio de Janeiro her artistic career took shape in the 1960s and 1970s, a key period in Brazilian art when artistic experimentation clashed with a repressive political regime. Employing diverse disciplines and mediums including clay, ink, film and performance, Anna Maria Maiolino’s work retains a fundamental concern with creative and destructive processes and with identity; from the subjective to the universal. For the exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Maiolino created an installation using several hundred kilograms of clay. Created by manually rolling and shaping the clay into hundreds of rolls or balls, the basic shapes used in ceramics, the installation refers to everyday tasks, to the individual, society and language; each piece retaining distinctive marks of its manufacture and collectively creating an imposing structure. The exhibition will also included selected films made by Maiolino over the last 30 years, including Y, (1974) and +&- (1999)