Electronic Submissions

Assignments for this unit will be submitted online via the Turn It In/Grademark software that can be accessed through the MAS350 iLearn unit.

To submit an assignment:

1. Go to the MAS350 iLearn site.

2. Click on the relevant Turn It In assignment name.

3. Click on the Submit Paper tab.

4. Select Student Name.

5. Enter a Submission Title.

6. Select Submission Part if there are multiple parts available.

7. Click Browse and select the file you would like to submit.

8. Click Add Submission.

There is no examination for this unit.

Students will be required to adhere to the following Special Consideration Policy.

Special Consideration Policy

http://www.mq.edu.au/policy/docs/special_consideration/policy.html

Applying for Special Consideration

Students applying for Special Consideration circumstances of three (3) consecutive days duration, within a study period, and/or prevent completion of a formal examination must submit an on-line application with the Faculty of Arts. For an application to be valid, it must include a completed Application for Special Consideration form and all supporting documentation.

The online Special Consideration application is found at:  http://www.arts.mq.edu.au/current_students/undergraduate/admin_central/special_consideration.

INTERNSHIP PLACEMENT AGREEMENT

Internships are designed to help students make the link between theoretical and methodological studies by learning to apply what they have learnt in a practical situation, and to give internship providers the opportunity to work with a current undergraduate student with a background in media production. They involve a three-way partnership between the university, the placement provider and the student. Participation involves specific responsibilities for each party, as set out below.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY

The University is responsible for the development and implementation of Participation Units. The University agrees to:

(a) Provide third party public liability and personal accident insurance coverage for Students undertaking a Participation Activity;

(b) Provide a contact person who will liaise with the Organisation throughout the duration of the Student's Participation Activity;

(c) Monitor and evaluate the quality of the Participation Activity;

(d) Ensure the proposed Participation Activity, where appropriate, passes through the University's ethics clearance procedure prior to commencement;

(e) Provide the Organisation with information regarding the Participation Units, including objectives and assessment requirements;

(f) Provide pro-formas for the agreed Participation Activity reports (where required);

(g) Ensure that Students engaged in a Participation Activity with the Organisation sign an undertaking in the form set out in the Participation and Community Engagement Partnership Agreement; 

(h) Provide consent forms for criminal record or any other checks required by the Host Organisation prior to the Student's commencement in the Participation Activity;

and

(i) Take exclusive responsibility for the discipline of the Student; and overall responsibility for assessing the academic performance of the Student in the unit.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE ORGANISATION 

The Organisation is responsible for agreeing to the specification of the Participation Activity and the ongoing supervision of the Student during the activity.

It agrees to:

(a) Comply with the occupational health and safety laws of the state or territory where the Participation Activity will be undertaken;

(b) Conduct orientation for the Student about the Organisation: informing them about occupational health & safety requirements; emergency procedures; expected standards of dress and presentation; confidentiality privacy; and ethical guidelines etc;

(c) Provide sufficient resources/facilities for the Student to undertake the Participation Activity, including supervision by the person listed in the Schedule in the Participation and Community Engagement Partnership Agreement;

(d) Advise the University and the Student of any clearances that the Organisation deems necessary for the Participation Activity and ongoing supervision of the Student(s);

(e) Ensure that the Student is aware and where practical, notify the Student of any relevant privacy, confidentiality, ethical or other requirements attaching to, or copyright, design or other intellectual property interests in, any records, documents, works, materials, artefacts, exhibits, models displays or any other objects in the custody of the Host Organisation to which the Student is given access for the purpose of preparing and completing the Participation Activity;

(f) Provide reports as specified in the relevant Participation Unit on the Student's performance in the participation activity;

(g) Acknowledge, where possible, the Student's role in authoring any Materials and any use made by the Organisation of those Materials; and

(h) Agree that the University unit convenor may view the Participation Activity and/or Materials for the purposes of assessing the Student's performance in the unit.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE STUDENT

The Student is responsible for completing the Participation Unit and for adhering to the systems that the unit convenor has put in place to monitor and detect when something has gone wrong. Note that any work place bullying and resulting psychological damage counts. The University has a duty of care for each student and therefore you will need to complete assessment task number 2, as this is one of the ways in which your placement is monitored. Furthermore, if anything problematic occurs during your placement, you are required to contact the unit convenor as soon as possible on:

0413 197 880 

guy.morrow@mq.edu.au

In addition, you are required to attend three two-hour seminars. During the first seminar the unit convenor will go through the Occupational Heath and Safety issues relating to MAS350 work placements. Students are also required to:

(a) Complete all the assessment tasks required for the Participation Unit,

(b) Complete appropriate health checks and any other clearances deemed necessary by Macquarie University and or the Organisation;

(c) Meet the time commitment required to undertake the Participation Activity;

(d) Complete the tasks involved in the Participation Activity in a diligent and professional manner;

(e) Maintain high standards of behaviour and personal presentation throughout the Participation Activity;

(f) Abide by and cooperate with the Organisation with respect to all the rules, requirements, and procedures of the Organisation, including (without limitation) those dealing with occupational health and safety, equal employment opportunity, security, criminal record and child protection legislation checks and confidentiality;

(g) Take due care in handling of materials and objects;

(h) Participate in the required classes and assessment tasks for the Participation Unit;

(i) Refer any problems or concerns that cannot be readily dealt by me and/or Host supervisor to my Macquarie University supervisor or other appropriate University staff member as soon as possible;

(j) Acknowledge the Organisation's role in hosting me in the Participation Activity in any documentation I prepare which is based on or incorporates or refers to materials produced during the course of the Participation Activity;

(k) Not use the materials in any manner which is in breach of the requirements concerning confidentiality, privacy, ethics or intellectual property notified to me by the Organisation and/or Macquarie University;

(l) Assign all intellectual property in any materials including but not limited to reports, data, presentations, programmes, designs, diagrams, drawings produced by me during the Participation Activity to the Organisation from the time of its creation or development. This assignment will come into effect from the date on which I commence the Participation Activity or the date upon which the relevant rights come into existence where the material or any part of it is created after I commence the Participation Activity; and

(m) Give the Organisation all reasonable assistance to facilitate any application for any formal protection of these materials and shall sign, execute and deliver any documents, forms and papers required to be produced or obtained in connection with any such application at the Organisation's sole cost and expense.

'Opportunity Identification' and 'Opportunity Creation' 

On the unit this year we plan to investigate student team-based possibilities for expanding the range of delivery modes for PACE within a media program (in addition to running the activities in a traditional way). We currently have a PACE development research grant to explore the research question: What is the nature of student team-based internships in terms of collaborative creativity? Through an engagement with the literature pertaining to both arts entrepreneurship curricula in higher education (Beckman, 2007; Brindle, 2011; Daniel, 2010; Huq and Gilbert, 2013) and group creativity research (Amabile and Pillemer, 2012; Sawyer, and DeZutter, 2009; Badke-Schaub, Goldschmidt, and Meijer, 2010; Baer, Oldham, Jacobsohn, and Hollingshead, 2008), we are examining our case study data in order to explore the possibilities for using Macquarie University’s new collaborative learning space, MUSE, to build teams of student interns in our media program. In addition, we will suggest potential ways in which media related internship programs can further develop and progress. Our findings relating to student group-creativity have enabled us to evaluate the feasibility of shifting (or partly shifting) the focus of our internship units from a mindset that focuses on placing students individually with pre-existing organisations, towards harnessing the potential of student team-level creativity, thereby enabling students to establish their own start-up organisations and pursue their own entrepreneurial curiosity (Jeraj and Antoncic, 2013).

Creative industries entrepreneurship has received scant attention within the field of Work-Integrated Learning (WIL). Our case study demonstrates how creative entrepreneurship can inform WIL models in order to enhance graduate employability, and in particular, graduate self-employment. The establishment and maintenance of an internship typically involves primary interaction between three people: the intern, the mentor and the associated organisation, as well as the field advisor and the university (Brindle, 2011: 207; Hanson, 1984: 56; Wong, 2011: 526). The argument we will make on this unit however is that we need to think more divergently about the possibilities for internships within the media/creative industries. This is because media/creative entrepreneurship is unique (Bridgstock, 2012), and this uniqueness means that this field of study readily leads to the establishment of start-ups and to spin-off formation (Rasmussen and Borch, 2010) because self-employment/entrepreneurship is the default setting in the media/creative industries.

The study we are completing was funded by a Macquarie University (MQ) Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) development grant. MQ’s PACE program is advertised to students in the following way, PACE “will take you out of the lecture theatre and place you in the heart of your chosen career well before you graduate. PACE broadens your university knowledge by embedding practical experience into your degree. You’ll be able to apply your ideas in real settings locally, regionally or internationally, while gaining invaluable life experiences and adding credit to your course.” The issue for the field of media studies in relation to this statement is this: if media professionals in Australia increasingly maintain their own businesses, then the “real” setting involves creative entrepreneurship and a need for students to work towards setting up their own businesses “well before” they graduate.   

Educators who are convening internship units therefore arguably need to facilitate ‘opportunity creation’ by focusing on student peer-to-peer networks and clusters of students, rather than isolating students by solely placing them individually with pre-existing organisations. There is a gap in the literature relating to the facilitation of on-campus and emergent student team creativity that will feed both ‘new venture creation’, as well as ‘transitioning’ outcomes, through what we will call ‘opportunity creation’. The argument here is that in the context of internship units, opportunities can not simply be identified, they need to be created because novelty is sometimes emergent (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009) and creativity is often distributed between members of a group (ibid).     

For the purposes of understanding how to best design a capstone internship unit in a media program, Amabile’s (1983a, 1983b, 1996) componential theory of creativity is useful when it is considered in conjunction with Taggar’s (2002) work, which has expanded upon parts of this model. Amabile’s componential theory includes three intra-individual components and one external component (the social environment) that influence creativity. The intra-individual components are:

1. domain-relevant skills (expertise, technical skill, and innate talent in the relevant domain(s) of endevour);

2. creativity relevant processes (flexible cognitive style, personality traits such as openness to experience, skill in using creative-thinking heuristics, and persistent work style);

3. intrinsic task motivation. (Amabile and Pillemer, 2012:10)   

Taggar (2002) has expanded this original model with his discovery of ‘team-level creativity-relevant processes’, which have been added to ‘creativity relevant processes’ in the original theory. Team creativity-relevant processes involve a group’s ability to work together effectively and make the most of each member’s skill set.

In terms of the theoretical framework for this unit, it is useful to consider team creativity-relevant processes as part of the broader componential theory of creativity while also zooming in to consider the exact mechanisms whereby creative products emerge from groups. To this end, Sawyer and DeZutter’s (2009) work is useful. Drawing on the work of cognitive scientists who have conducted a broad range of empirical studies of how various cognitive processes are distributed across groups, Sawyer and DeZutter use the term ‘distributed creativity’ to refer to times when collaborating groups of individuals collectively generate a shared creative product. According to these researchers, distributed creativity ranges from being relatively predictable and constrained, to being relatively unpredictable and unconstrained (82). Their study is primarily concerned with the latter because it concerns social encounters that are improvisational and are therefore unconstrained, allowing for unexpected creativity to emerge. They use the term ‘collaborative emergence’ to refer to the unpredictable creative outcomes that are sometimes generated by improvisational groups. In our research project our case study group was an improvisational one and so therefore the terms ‘distributed creativity’ and ‘collaborative emergence’ are used when analysing the data.  

Distributed creativity is the norm within sectors of the media/creative industries such as popular music (ibid: 83). Situations when the same group comes together multiple times are common; musical groups rehearse many times in order to generate a collectively created performance. The argument on this unit is that new venture creation involves a similar team-creativity-relevant process and because four in five professional artists in Australia maintain their own businesses (Throsby and Zednik, 2010) we need to structure our media related internship programs in a way that will help to facilitate this well before our students graduate.

Therefore on this unit we encourage you to explore the following body of research, in addition to material that relates to your specific area of interest within the field of media studies.

READING LIST

Amabile, T –

(1983a) The social psychology of creativity. New York: Springer-Verlag. (1983b) The social psychology of creativity: A componential conceptualization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 357-376.

(1996) Creativity in context. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Amabile, T and Pillemer, J (2012) ‘Perspectives on the social psychology of creativity’, Journal of Creative Behavior, 46(1), 3-15.

Badke-Schaub, P, Goldschmidt, G and Meijer, M (2010) ‘How does cognitive conflict in design teams support the development of creative ideas?’, Creativity and Innovation Management, 19(2), 119-133.

Baer, M, Oldham, G, Jacobsohn, G and Hollingshead, A (2008) ‘The personality composition of teams and creativity: The moderating role of team creative confidence’, Journal of Creative Behavior, 42(4), 255-282.

Beckman, G (2007) ‘Adventuring’ arts entrepreneurship curricula in higher education: An examination of present efforts, obstacles, and best practices. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 37 (2), pp.87–112

Bridgstock, R (2012) ‘Not a dirty word: Arts entrepreneurship and higher education’, Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 12(2–3) 122–137.

Brindle, M (2011) Careers and internships in arts management. In: The Arts Management Handbook: New Directions for Students and Practitioners. New York, M.E. Sharpe, pp.185–216.

Chen, X, Zou, H and Wang, D (2009) How do new ventures grow? Firm capabilities, growth strategies and performance. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 26 (4), pp.294–303.

Cope, J (2005) Toward a dynamic learning perspective of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 29 (4), p.373+.

Daniel, R (2010) Career development and creative arts students: An investigation into the effectiveness of career theory and WIL experiences on practice. Australian Journal of Career Development, 19 (2), pp.14–22.

Dhliwayo, S (2008) Experiential learning in entrepreneurship education. Education + Training, 50 (4), pp.329–340.

Hanson, J (1984) Internships and the individual: Suggestions for implementing (or improving) an internship program. Communication Education, 33 (1), pp.53–61.

Hughes, D, Keith, S, Morrow, G, Evans M, Crowdy, D (2013) 'What constitutes artist success in the Australian music industries?' International Journal of Music Business Research, v1 n4.

Huq, A and Gilbert, D (2013) ‘Enhancing graduate employability through work‐based learning in social entrepreneurship: A case study’, Education and Training, 55(6), 550-572.

Jeraj, M and Antoncic, B (2013) ‘A conceptualization of entrepreneurial curiosity and construct development: A multi-country empirical validation’, Creativity Research Journal, 25:4, 426-435.

Kurtzberg, T (2005) ‘Feeling creative, being creative: An empirical study of diversity and creativity in teams’, Creativity Research Journal, 17(1), 51-65.

Kurtzberg, T and Amabile, T (2000-2001) ‘From Guilford to creative synergy: Opening the black box of team-level creativity’, Creativity Research Journal, 13(3-4), 285-294.

McGuigan, J –

(2009a) Doing a Florida thing: the creative class thesis and cultural policy, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15:3, 291-300.

(2009b) Cool capitalism. London: Pluto.

(2010) Creative labour, cultural work and individualisation. International journal of cultural policy, 16:3, 323-335.

Rasmussen, E and Borch, O (2010) University capabilities in facilitating entrepreneurship: A longitudinal study of spin-off ventures at mid-range universities. Research Policy, 39 (5), pp.602–612.

Sawyer, R. K and DeZutter, S (2009) ‘Distributed creativity: How collective creations  emerge from collaboration’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3(2), 81-92.

Simonton, D (1999) Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Taggars, S (2002) Individual Creativity and group ability to utilize individual creative resources: A multi-level model. Academy of Management Journal, 45(2), 315-330.

Throsby D and Zednik A (2010) Do you really expect to get paid? An economic study of professional artists in Australia. Melbourne: Australia Council for the Arts.

Wong, A (2011) How is the internship going anyways? An action research approach to understanding the triad relationship between interns, mentors, and field advisors. Educational Action Research, 19 (4), pp.517–529.

Online units can be accessed at: http://ilearn.mq.edu.au/.

PC and Internet access are required. Basic computer skills (e.g., internet browsing) and skills in word processing are also a requirement.

Please consult teaching staff for any further, more specific requirements. 

MAS350 requires you to find your own internship placement and spend 100 hours with the placement and complete the assessment tasks required. There are also THREE compulsory two-hour seminars across the semester:

C5C 209

Week 1: Either Tues 24 February or Wed 25 February

Week 7: Tues 21 April

Week 12: Tues 26 May

These seminars are designed to address issues relating to opportunity identification, opportunity creation, managerial creativity, productivity, leadership and entrepreneurship. We will not only discuss the aforementioned student-team based PACE activities and the research project that is informing these, we will complete group exercises that are designed to facilitate idea generation relating to your own 'opportunity identification' processes, as well as processes relating to 'opportunity creation'. 

For example, one of these tasks involves conceptual combination. We will initially get you to think divergently about what you would like to do for your internship (and if you already have an internship, what you would like to do for your career). We will get you to write 2 lists (an A and a B list) with a minimum of 3 internship ideas/career options on each list. We will then get you to combine one of the jobs from list A with a job from the B list in order to potentially create a new job idea through a process of conceptual combination. You will work in groups of 3 or 4 in order to collaborate on this. Each group will then come to the front of the class to present their (potentially new) ideas of what you would like to do. 

We will then invite industry guests to come in towards the end of the seminars to give you feedback on your ideas and to see if they would like to collaborate with you in order to realise any of them. 

NB - Remember, all MAS350 placements will need to be approved by the University before you can proceed. Email Arts.Pace@mq.edu.au for the forms, or contact the convenor guy.morrow@mq.edu.au for assistance.