The Teaching Landscapes in Creative Subjects: Fine Art Area Report

Report written as part of a research project (The Pedagogy of Fine Art) exploring contemporary pedagogy and attitudes to teaching within the fine art subject area

Open research data: Report to the Australian National Data Service (ANDS)

Main points Research data are an asset we have been building for decades, through billions of dollars of public investment in research annually. The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution presents an unprecedented opportunity to ‘leverage’ that asset. Given this, there is increasing awareness around the world that there are benefits to be gained from curating and openly sharing research data (Kvalheim and Kvamme 2014). Conservatively, we estimate that the value of data in Australia’s public research to be at least $1.9 billion and possibly up to$6 billion a year at current levels of expenditure and activity. Research data curation and sharing might be worth at least $1.8 billion and possibly up to$5.5 billion a year, of which perhaps $1.4 billion to$4.9 billion annually is yet to be realized. Hence, any policy around publicly-funded research data should aim to realise as much of this unrealised value as practicable. Aims and scope This study offers conservative estimates of the value and benefits to Australia of making publicly-funded research data freely available, and examines the role and contribution of data repositories and associated infrastructure. It also explores the policy settings required to optimise research data sharing, and thereby increase the return on public investment in research. The study’s focus is Australia’s Commonwealth-funded research and agencies. It includes research commissioned or funded by Commonwealth bodies as well as in-house research within research-oriented agencies wholly or largely funded by the Commonwealth. Government data or public sector information is a separate category of publicly-funded data – although there is some overlap at the margins (e.g. Commonwealth Government funding for Geoscience Australia). Main findings For the purposes of estimation, we explore a range of research funding and expenditure from total Australian Government funding support for research to the sum of government and higher education expenditure on research by sector of execution. The lower bound estimates are based on the labour-cost share of research funding and expenditure ($4.3 billion to$6.4 billion per annum), and upper bound estimates on total research funding and expenditure ($8.9 billion to$13.3 billion per annum)

Excepting the future

This report makes the economic case for flexible copyright exceptions and extended safe harbour provisions. Copyright can strengthen the incentive to create by affording rights holders exclusive rights to exploit their work. This can bring into existence work that would not otherwise exist, generating economic benefits. A content owner’s exclusive rights are subject to limitations and exceptions.Excepting the Future makes the the economic case for flexible copyright exceptions and extended safe harbour provisions. These mediate the respective rights of the myriad participants in the copyright eco-system, where intellectual property (IP) outputs are, to an increasing extent, developed from IP inputs, where creators are also users, users are creators and copyright material cannot be distributed digitally without copies being made. A companion report, Exceptional Industries, reveals the economic contribution to Australia and other countries made by industries relying on such limitations and exceptions to copyright. In Australia in 2010 this includes: Contributing 14% of Australia’s annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or 182 billion;  Employing 21% of our paid workforce, almost 2.4 million people;  Paying wages and salaries of 116 billion.   This report was prepared for the Australian Digital Alliance by John Houghton and Nicholas Gruen, Lateral Economics

What is Meant and what is Understood? The Role of Written Assessment Feedback in the Fine Art Subject Area

Report written as part of a research project (The Pedagogy of Fine Art) exploring contemporary pedagogy and attitudes to teaching within the fine art subject area

Rational Maps, Monopoles and Skyrmions

We discuss the similarities between BPS monopoles and Skyrmions, and point to an underlying connection in terms of rational maps between Riemann spheres. This involves the introduction of a new ansatz for Skyrme fields. We use this to construct good approximations to several known Skyrmions, including all the minimal energy configurations up to baryon number nine, and some new solutions such as a baryon number seventeen Skyrme field with the truncated icosahedron structure of a buckyball. The new approach is also used to understand the low-lying vibrational modes of Skyrmions, which are required for quantization. Along the way we discover an interesting Morse function on the space of rational maps which may be of use in understanding the Sen forms on the monopole moduli spaces.Comment: 35pp including four figures, typos corrected, appearing in Nuclear Physics

What are we teaching when we teach art?

This paper presents a historical account of the art curriculum, in order to understand what is being taught in art today. It explains how present-day conceptions of art owe much to Romanticism and the social order which emerged in Europe under the influence of the Enlightenment. These conceptions have been tempered and disrupted by a hundred years of modernism, following from the 1960s by contemporary art. The art curriculum owed much to a combination of apprenticeships to teach skills and art academies to teach drawing and aesthetics. Only in the twentieth century did modern art exert an influence and when it did it was in the form of self-expression and formalism. Both of these have been challenged by contemporary art, which embraces mechanised means of producing art, places the emphasis on ideas, theories and contextual knowledge while subverting some traditional hierarchies. Contemporary art influenced significant art education movements, such as discipline-based and issues-based, learning about visual culture, as well as the use of mechanical means of making art, such as lens-based media. The core of art education is now the ability to explain, contextualise and even theorise. This should abet but not eclipse some of the things art can be, such as thought provoking, entertaining and moving

Tales about art and art education

This paper recounts seven tales about ways in which conceptions of art in the professional art world have influenced what is taught in post-secondary art education. It begins with a tale about some pertinent aspects of art history, which provides reference points for the six other tales. The paper proceeds with two tales about traditional skills learning, copying and the importance placed on drawing, which dominated art education in the west until the twentieth century. The next two tales tell how this kind of art education was disrupted by the influence of modernism in two manifestations: self-expression and formalism. The rest of the paper tells two tales about the influence of contemporary art and, in particular, a conception of art from the mid 1960s, going under terms such as ‘postDuchampian’, or conceptual. Amongst the changes in art education this has ushered in are an emphasis on process rather than the final product and a requirement that the learner can explain and justify every stage of the production. This is connected to the need to have a theme which informs the art. Discourse about this kind of art has seen the displacement of connoisseurship by critical theory (with implications for assessment). At the same time there has been an extension of art practice into a range of non-traditional media (lens based and digital in particular) and often with skills taught on demand. Art making has been reconceptualised as a strategy (rather than an inner need) and art practice professionalised

Sustainability in the UK art & design university curriculum: the how and the why

Sustainability is about ensuring everyone's basic needs are being met and can continue to be met in the future. It has two main areas: the social and the environmental. Some include a third: economic. There is a requirement in the UK for universities to implement and promote sustainability, including in the curriculum. This paper concentrates on how this is affecting learning and teaching in art and design. Sustainability in the curriculum has been resisted by those who cling onto an essentialist, formalist curriculum. However, the majority have a broader view of the curriculum in line with changes which took place in the professional sphere from the 1960s. These changes force artists and designers to consider such things as socio-cultural context. In the 1970s, this led to a gradual unfolding of a new curriculum, which has now become widespread. But even within this framework, teachers often find engaging with sustainability in their teaching to be challenging. It forces everyone to reassess their ways of working and living and even their fundamental beliefs and is sometimes considered an irrelevant initiative of management, or government. It can be seen as being in opposition to many of the practices of unfettered capitalism and neo-liberalism; more likely, it exposes some of the contradictions inherent in that ideology. But sustainability can also be considered a dogma in its own right, or even a set of uncomfortable truths people prefer to ignore. Some artists and designers embrace a social practice, but others prefer to indulge in a much more private way of working. Just as some universities wholeheartedly embrace sustainability while others do little more than play lip service to it, so some teachers are enthusiastic and others not. This paper discusses some of the ways sustainability has been introduced into the art and design curriculum, illustrated through case studies. It concludes that it works well if there is a faculty member who champions this way of working, but works best when embraced by most teachers and, in particular, students

The art curriculum: what is it, where does it come from, where is it going

This paper outlines what is taught in higher education fine art courses and attempts to understand why. For many, fine art education is uncertain about itself and what should be taught. To help us understand fine art education now, this paper proposes six curricula that have been successively introduced since the start of formal art education: apprenticeship; traditional; formalist; romantic; conceptual; professional. The present-day curriculum is explained in terms of de-skilling and a continued belief in romantic notions of art for art's sake. These are often implicit and form a hidden curriculum that has a considerable impact on teaching and assessment. These romantic notions need to be better understood and challenged. Moreover, the curriculum is now both too full and too narrow. A solution to this might be found if it were presumed that the curriculum is for learning about art, rather than learning to be artists

Not all jellyfish are equal: isotopic evidence for inter- and intraspecific variation in jellyfish trophic ecology

Jellyfish are highly topical within studies of pelagic food-webs and there is a growing realisation that their role is more complex than once thought. Efforts being made to include jellyfish within fisheries and ecosystem models are an important step forward, but our present understanding of their underlying trophic ecology can lead to their oversimplification in these models. Gelatinous zooplankton represent a polyphyletic assemblage spanning >2,000 species that inhabit coastal seas to the deep-ocean and employ a wide variety of foraging strategies. Despite this diversity, many contemporary modelling approaches include jellyfish as a single functional group feeding at one or two trophic levels at most. Recent reviews have drawn attention to this issue and highlighted the need for improved communication between biologists and theoreticians if this problem is to be overcome. We used stable isotopes to investigate the trophic ecology of three co-occurring scyphozoan jellyfish species (Aurelia aurita, Cyanea lamarckii and C. capillata) within a temperate, coastal food-web in the NE Atlantic. Using information on individual size, time of year and δ 13 C and δ 15 N stable isotope values, we examined: (1) whether all jellyfish could be considered as a single functional group, or showed distinct inter-specific differences in trophic ecology; (2) Were size-based shifts in trophic position, found previously in A. aurita, a common trait across species?; (3) When considered collectively, did the trophic position of three sympatric species remain constant over time? Differences in δ 15 N (trophic position) were evident between all three species, with size-based and temporal shifts in δ 15 N apparent in A. aurita and C. capillata. The isotopic niche width for all species combined increased throughout the season, reflecting temporal shifts in trophic position and seasonal succession in these gelatinous species. Taken together, these findings support previous assertions that jellyfish require more robust inclusion in marine fisheries or ecosystem models