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The Brisbane Media Map: Connecting Students,Industry, and University through Authentic

Learning

Christy Collis, Queensland University ofTechnology

Abstract- How can an undergraduate course and itstechnology-integrated learning design strengthen the student-university-industry triad? This paper describes the BrisbaneMedia Map, (http://bmm.qut.edu.au), an authentic learningproject in which undergraduate media students work as a teamto design and populate an online directory of Brisbane's mediasector. The paper focuses on the pedagogical design, assessmentand management, and technological architectural of the MapProject and its implications for strengthening university-industrial relations in an urban area.

Index Terms-Education, Educational technology,Information technology

I. INTRODUCTION

T his paper focuses on a potentially important component ofthe university-student-industry triad: undergraduate students.When it comes to the university-student-industry triad,undergraduate students are a neglected group, as well as anuntapped resource. Many linkages between universities andindustry are undertaken through research connections whichfocus on academics, postgraduates, and specific industrypartners. The Australian Research Council's Linkage grants,in which academic teams--teams which often include apostdoctoral fellow--undertake collaborative research projectswith industry partners, are a clear example of the developmentof this kind of university-industry relationship(ht wwrcovu/gan prograsik ). Yetthere is no place in the Linkage scheme for undergraduatestudents, who do not have the skills, publication track records,or seniority to be involved in this type of university-industrypartnership.

Currently, one of the major ways in which undergraduatestudents are brought into the university-industry-student triadis through workplace learning schemes or internships-collectively known as work-integrated learning--in whichundergraduates spend limited periods of time in industry

Manuscript received April 11, 2006. This work was supported by theQueensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Faculty.

Christy A. Collis is with the Creative Industries Faculty of the QueenslandUniversity of Technology, Kelvin Grove, Queensland, 4059, Australia.(Corresponding author: phone: +61-7-3864-8189; fax: +61-7-3864-8195; e-mail: c.collis@ qut.edu.au).

workplaces. However, while work-integrated learningschemes have clear benefits for participating students [1], theycan be difficult to organize in a way that strengthens not onlystudent skills, but also the triad. Organizations have limitedresources available for dealing with individual work-integrated learning students, and full-time undergraduatestudents have limited time in which to undertake work whichbenefits the industry partner in meaningful ways. Further,work-integrated learning schemes can be difficult toadminister: with students in various workplaces undertakingvaried tasks, both assessment and management can becomplex and time-consuming for teaching staff involved. Yetundergraduate students can potentially be an important part ofthe university-student-industry triad; the question is, how cantheir skills, work, and knowledge best be mobilized? Thispaper addresses the question:

What are design constraints, opportunities, and optionsfor an undergraduate course which strengthens andactively contributes to the university-student-industrytriad and what is the result when these are realized inpractice in a particular urban setting?

In particular, the paper addresses key opportunities as wellas constraints in the university-student-industry triad whenlarge cohorts of undergraduate students are involved;identifies a series of dimensions along which design optionscan be identified for courses embedding authentic activities tolink academic standards and industrial interests; describes acase in which a combination of the options has led to asuccessful linkage activity involving undergraduate students, atechnology-oriented university, and its local industrialenvironment; and concludes with recommendations relating tothe transfer of the strategies to other university-industrialsettings.

II. GENERIC DESIGN

A. General constraintsUniversity-industrial linkages typically involve students asresearchers or for individually oriented field workexperiences. Undergraduate cohorts, in contrast, involvelarger number of students whose time and skill set forcontribution to the university-industry partnership are limited.

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A first generic constraint relates to these parameters and alsoto the need for a systematic form of assessment and grading toapply to student work. Also, typically there is little budgetavailable for scaffolding of students or of industry partnersproviding an access opportunity for the students. Budget mustbe available for any technical infrastructure involved insupporting the students and in presenting their products toboth their university supervisors and industrial contacts.Undergraduate students can have mixed backgrounds and skillsets, which complicate general approaches to short-termimmersion activities. Finally, the experience of the studentsmust be both academically sound as well as practically usefulto the industrial partners.

B. Generic opportunities

In contrast to these constraints, there are many positiveopportunities for strengthening the university-industryrelationship with cohorts of undergraduate students. First,from a developmental perspective, students oriented towardfuture careers within a specific industrial environment canobtain authentic experiences within this environment, helpingthem in their professional development. Second, from alearning perspective, learning is strengthened to the extent thatit is authentic and grounded in real-world issues andexperiences [2] where students are engaged in worthwhiletasks involving interaction with others. A framework for thistype of learning is Engagement Theory [3], which "is basedupon the idea of creating successful collaborative teams thatwork on ambitious projects that are meaningful to someoneoutside the classroom. These three components, summarizedby Relate-Create-Donate, imply that learning activities:

1. occur in a group context (i.e., collaborative teams)2. are project-based3. have an outside (authentic) focus"

The notion of an authentic focus requires developing aproduct that is valuable to an outside customer [3, 4]. Whenthe outside customers are industries, it is consistent withschool-to-work orientations (workplace-oriented learning) andwith a "service" philosophy linking the university and itsindustrial partners [5]. If such a service- and workplace-oriented project can be devised and managed in the academicsetting, it offers strong opportunities for strengthening theuniversity-industrial partnership as well as strengthening thelearning experience for the students. Course concepts relatedto workplace learning involve new ways of learning in theworkplace including action, situated, and incidental learning[6]; such concepts should also be central to academic coursesrelating to the workplace. Finally, such an approach to coursedesign represents an opportunity for innovation in highereducation, where renewal processes are "necessary forsurvival" [7]. "Unless [higher education] organizations areprepared to renew their products and processes on acontinuing basis, their survival chances are seriouslythreatened" [8, p.12]. Thus, if the constraints noted earlier canbe managed, the payoff for an approach to course design that

strengthen the student-university-industrial triad. Toovercome the constraints and realize the opportunities task-oriented design decisions must be taken and appropriatetechnology must be available.

C. Design optionsKey design decisions for an undergraduate course reflecting

the above constraints and opportunities fall along thedimensions:

1. Authentic vs simulated projects? Authentic projectsare directly based on the situations in the workplacewhereas simulated projects make use of casematerials prepared by the instructor. For resultsmeaningful to others outside of the academic settingand when a wide range of entities are represented inthe "others", then a project making use ofexperiences from the actual industrial settings issuperior.

2. Pre-structured vs open-ended tasks? Since logisticconstraints require that the project engaged upon canbe managed by the students within the set period oftime of the course, some pre-structuredness isnecessary. However, as much as possible, studentsshould make decisions within the structure as to howto realize their projects.

3. Group vs individual projects? Private vs publicproducts? The nature of Engagement Theoryidentifies the preferences here.

4. Kind of product? A database driven Web-accessibleenvironment in which information and resources ofindustry-wide value are made available is anappropriate product. A large group of students canbe subdivided into different subgroups, eachresponsible for different aspects of the environment,including its locally relevant content, and its designdecisions relating to structure, navigation, and userinterface. The product needs to be accessible to itsintended audience and at the same time needs to besecure, but with students having write- and evenadministrator-level privileges in order to takeownership of the design and creation process of theproduct.

5. Assessment criteria? For the product to satisfyacademic requirements, aspects of it must requireintegration of course concepts with practicalrelevance for the industrial audience. ReflectingEngagement Theory, assessment criteria should relateto both the product produced as well as the processesinvolved in the various group contexts. Criterion-referenced assessment based on the determination ofclear criteria is appropriate for this [9] .

A description of a course designed around theseconstraints, optimizing these opportunities, andillustrating these design options follows.

is based on authentic activities and Engagement Theory can

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III. THE BRISBANE MEDIA MAP

A. SettingThe course and project described in this case, involving

undergraduate students in the context of their university'spartnerships with the local industrial sector relating to media,is called the Brisbane Media Map (BMM). The BrisbaneMedia Map as a product is an online directory of theAustralian city of Brisbane's media-industry sector. Themedia sector is comprised of eight general categories: print(including newspapers, magazines, print publishers, andstreet-press publications); broadcast (including radio andtelevision); audiovisual (including cinemas and audiovisualproduction); new media (including games and leisuresoftware, electronic publications, web developers, and Internetservice providers); music (including record labels, musicpromotion, production, venues, and festivals); media services(including marketing, advertising, public relations, mediabuying and planning, image and graphic providers, andintellectual property legal services); community media; andorganizations responsible for media governance and support.It includes dynamically searchable profiles of mediaorganizations and companies in the Brisbane area as well asreviews of issues facing the industry, and has proved to be apopular resource for students, job-seekers, and media industryprofessionals. Since 2003, the site has attracted an average ofover 1250 hits per day. The Brisbane Media Map is the onlypublicly-available resource which provides fine-grainedinformation about the whole of Brisbane's media sector: itprovides descriptions, histories, and contact information forover 500 organizations. It also includes commentaries whichreflect on various key aspects of the Brisbane media sector,and a 'hot spots' map which spotlights specific geographicalsites of industrial concentration. For the media industry inBrisbane, the BMM provides sectoral visibility and a single-site portal to the entire complex industry sector. For anindustry as dynamic as media, the annually updated nature ofthe BMM is also crucial.

The Brisbane Media Map is an initiative of the Media andCommunication discipline housed in Queensland Universityof Technology's Creative Industries Faculty( 1e ). QueenslandUniversity of Technology's ethos and institutional identityrevolve around the idea of a 'real world university': auniversity which has strong partnerships with industrialsectors and concerns, and a university whose students tend tobe vocationally oriented towards professional contexts. TheCreative Industries faculty embodies the university's 'realworld' focus by concentrating on industries in whichindividuals' creative talents and skills generate wealth andemployment. Media is a major sector within the creativeindustries broadly, and within the Creative Industries facultyspecifically [10]. Media is also an important industrial sectorin Brisbane itself. Although Australian Bureau of Statisticsfigures are not calibrated to account thoroughly for the mediasector in Brisbane [10], there are an estimated 600 media

companies and organizations currently operating in theBrisbane region. The context and motivation for the BrisbaneMedia Map is more fully described in [ 1].

B. PurposeThe Brisbane Media Map is revised, updated, and re-

launched annually by Media and Communicationundergraduate students enrolled in the final-year courseApplied Media Communication. The course runs for 13weeks over one semester and involves approximately 30students. Applied Media Communication is situated at theend of the Bachelor of Creative Industries (Media andCommunication) degree; it marks the culmination of thedegree, and involves the synthesis and application of many ofthe skills and competencies acquired over the course of thedegree. Students in the course are well-equipped withtechnical skills and conceptual understandings of the mediaindustry, but they lack both project-management skills andexperience and a familiarity with the local media-industrysector. The key aims of the course are thus to assist upper-level Media and Communication students in the transitionfrom undergraduate study to professional employment; tobuild awareness of the Brisbane media sector; and to buildstudents' project-management skills as well as to strengthentheir skills in professional communication and teamwork andtheir industrial awareness.

The Brisbane Media Map was initiated in 2000 by DrChristina Spurgeon and is now managed by the author withtechnical design and development assistance from anothermember of the Faculty. Reflecting Engagement Theory , theproduct produced by the students is meaningful for its real-world audience outside of the university, providing the onlypublicly-available directory of Brisbane's media sector. TheBrisbane Media Map was designed from the outset to benefitboth the students involved in its creation and the industrialsector in which these students are likely to seek employment.In order to achieve these ends, several decisions have had tobe made regarding the course's organization, staffing, andassessment, and the Brisbane Media Map's technicalarchitecture. Because the Brisbane Media Map is now in itssixth iteration, these decisions have been refined through anannual iterative process.

C. - Layers ofscaffoldingThere are five key layers of scaffolding which support

the course: course organization, technical architectures, thedatabase driven course-management system, assessment, andstaffing.

1) Course organization: The course is run over thirteenweeks, during which time students must be introduced to bothconceptual and technical aspects of the BMM, work within ahierarchical network of teams to address specific aspects ofthe project; undertake research; design, build, and upload therevised version of the BMM; and complete individualacademic assessment tasks. Ensuring that all of these tasks fit

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into a standard semester, a semester in which students are alsoenrolled in other courses, requires careful organization. In thefirst three weeks of the course, all students meet in aconventional classroom setting and are given three lectures:these lectures familiarize them with the BMM as a mediaresource, with the basic technical architecture of the BMM,and with the general problems associated with mapping anindustry sector as diverse and as swiftly-evolving as media.After these three introductory sessions, students complete anassessment task in which they indicate the specific areas of theBMM project in which they are interested: these areas includeresearching and updating records for individual subsectorssuch as print media or community radio, improving site lookand feel, and organizing communication within the projectteam. Based on these indications, each student is then assignedto four or five teams of approximately five students each. Theinstructor ensures that each student is assigned to a variety ofteams so that each student uses technical, research,organizational, and planning skills. Each student is the teamleader of at least one team. A list of teams is posted to thecourse's website in the fourth week. This list also contains alist of basic duties and responsibilities for each team and amap of the hierarchical structure of the project team as awhole. In line with Engagement Theory, the students assumeresponsibility for the expectations: the duties andresponsibilities list has been partially authored by students inthe previous year's iteration of the course after reflecting ontheir experiences during the BMM process.

The delivery of the course then begins to change, as thefocus moves away from the dissemination of information bythe instructors towards the students' own team projects andprocesses. Physically, the course moves out of the classroomand into the computer labs and smaller meeting rooms. TheUniversity's campus-wide WIFI network proves to be highlyuseful, as students move from room to room with theirlaptops. In order to assist students with project managementand teamwork skills, three workshops are delivered, focusingon team management, time management, and leadership.Workshops, however, comprise only an hour of each three-hour session: the remaining two hours are devoted to teammeetings organized by the students. Students make use ofemail, mobile phones, and the groupware tools in the course'sweb environment to organize team meetings. Halfwaythrough the semester, each team leader gives an oralpresentation to the group which details her/his team'sprogress, problems, problem solutions, and work still to do.As an aspect of collaborative learning [3, 4], this processallows students to learn from each others' experiences andstrategies, as well as familiarizes them with the professionalpractice of project reporting. The final three weeks of thecourse do not involve any formal lectures or workshops:teams work in labs or in meeting rooms towards the finaldeadline by which the new version of the BMM site must beready for upload. The course thus adopts a flexible deliveryapproach: it includes formal lectures, instructor-ledworkshops, student presentations, student meetings, student

computer lab work, and substantial use of the functionalitiesof the institution's course management system for group andteam communication.

3) Course management system: The institution's coursemanagement system (the locally developed CMS) plays acrucial role in the course. At the beginning of the course itserves as a standard 'push' technology through which theinstructor delivers information and material to students.Regular notices are posted on the site, and a FAQ sectionallows the instructor to manage emerging problemsefficiently. As the unit evolves, however, the CMS becomes abusy collaborative space: the instructor creates individualfolders in which each team can store ongoing work, and grantsadmin authorization to specific team leaders so that relevantleaders can upload material such as the project newsletter.For example, admin authorization is given to the student whois the team leader in charge of collecting the media issuescommentaries through the CMS's online assignmentsubmission function: all students submit their commentariesthrough the site, and the commentaries team leader accessesthem for editing. Each team is responsible for creating a'version document' which details the logic behind itsdecisions, problems they encountered, and strategies withwhich they dealt with problems; these documents are held onthe CMS for future cohorts. Similarly, the FAQ sectionremains available via the course's web environment each yearso that each new cohort can learn from the questions ofprevious groups. Two types of institutional support related tothe CMS are required for the course to succeed: the CMSmust be flexible and easily adaptable to the evolving needs ofthe students, and the ability to allow certain students to haveadmin authorization to specific areas of the site must be inplace.

3) Technical architecture ofthe BMM: The BMM itself is aweb-based application written in HTML, PHP, and MySQL.For 13 weeks a year, two versions of the BMM are active: thelive site which is visible to end users, and the developmentsite which is accessible only to students and instructors. TheBMM's underlying architecture is comprised of threeconnected components:

* The front end website through which users viewstatic as well as dynamically generated content

* The Database Management System (DBMS)which allows registered users students andinstructors to work with data sets such ascompany records and record classificationcategories

* The database which houses the textual andphotographic information and responds to searchqueries [11].

The primary function of the BMM is to provide users with asearchable dynamic directory of profiles of Brisbane mediaorganizations and of information relevant to them. Usersaccess individual organizations either through either a menuof industry categories situated on the BMM's front page, orthrough drop-down menus which appear in the frame of each

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page. Nested within each of the BMM's eight mediacategories are several subcategories; students annually decidewhich subcategories 'belong' to which media sector. Forexample, students working on the 2005 version decided tosplit the Festivals and Events subcategory entries, listing someunder the Music category, and other under the Communitycategory. Individual organizations can belong to severalcategories. Each organization is represented by a singleprofile authored by the students. Students research the mediaorganizations' websites and industry-association websites inorder to complete the fields in each profile. These fieldsinclude: organization name, contact information, geographicallocation, core business, primary revenue sources, and history.Each student is required to complete one interview with anindustry member as an additional research method. Companyprofiles also actively highlight the individual students'contributions to the BMM: the most-recent student author ofeach profile, as well as the date of the profile's creation orupdating, is entered and made visible to users. Studentscomment that this aspect of the BMM enhances theirprofessional profiles by visibly attributing authorship of apublic resource to them as individuals. Hidden administrativefields also give information about previous authors of eachprofile, as well as the names of the peer validators, one ofwhom is required to check the team members' profiles beforethey can be uploaded. For quality assurance purposes, eachrecord must be peer-reviewed before it is accepted by thedatabase.A new aspect of the BMM is the 'Hot Spots' component.

This component, accessed through a link on the frame of eachpage, visually represents geographical sites in which specificmedia-industry segments co-locate. 'Hot Spots' arecomprised of a map with a rollover Flash aspect: as the userrolls the mouse over the map, specific hot spots arehighlighted on the map, and a description of the spot's media-industry concentration appears. Clicking hot spots on the mapbrings up a detailed description of each geographical area ofBrisbane and its media-industry environment. Users mayclick on a menu of hot spots for further visual and textualinformation about each geographical location. Hot spotsinformation is entered and manipulated through the DBMS,allowing for standardization and ease of data input.

The BMM's architecture is specifically designed for use inan educational, group-work environment: students are grantedauthorized access to the DBMS, but access to specific areas ofthe DBMS can be controlled by the instructor in order tominimize the potential for mistakes. Further, only instructorsmay delete records, assign specific levels of DBMS access,and limit student access. Thus, although students havesignificant access to the back end of the BMM, this access issubject to some level of control by the instructors.

4) Assessment. Although the BMM is a group product anda group project, students in Applied Media Communicationare assessed individually. Students complete three assessmenttasks over the course of the semester. The first of these,which is submitted in the third week of the course, is an

evaluation of the existing BMM, in which each each studentidentifies areas of the BMM which s/he would like toimprove. Students identify their own strengths and identifyways in which these might be applied to the BMM project.This assessment task familiarizes students with the BMM, andalso assists the course coordinator with the task of assigningstudents to teams. The second assessment task is an oralreport presented by each team leader halfway through thecourse. Each report, accompanied by a Powerpointpresentation, details the team's progress, problemsencountered by the team, and strategies with which the teamhas addressed problems. This assessment task equips studentswith the experience of presenting a professional progressreport in an oral form. The task also benefits other students:students actively learn from other team leaders' presentations,and borrow their strategies for their own team processes.Group problem solving also occurs during the question periodfollowing each oral report as students discuss and assessvarious approaches to similar tasks and problems. The finalassessment item for the unit is a combined report andportfolio. The portfolio contains copies of all BMM workproduced by the student, this includes: records updated orcreated, team and individual time-management charts,contributions to project newsletters, and to team guidelines.This material can be incorporated into students' e-portfoliosfor future professional use. It also ensures that each studenthas fulfilled the requirement of updating at least five existingrecords and creating at least three new records.

The report component comprises both an analysis and anevaluation of each student's work within the project. It alsocontains a weekly reflective journal which each student isrequired to keep over the course of the project. In the report,students are required to account for what they did within theproject (this involves including copies of team-meetingattendance lists), and more importantly, to discuss the logicbehind their actions. Students are not required to undertakenew research for the report, rather, they are required to applyskills, theories, and concepts that they have learned in theirdegree to date to their discussions of their work within theBMM project. Students must discuss and evaluate their:research processes, quality-assurance processes,communication skills and practices, leadership experiences,team-membership experiences, time-management processes,technical practices, and project-management experiences. Thereport and portfolio are due two weeks after the official re-launch of the BMM so that students have time to reflect on theprocess after the busy practical phase leading up to the site'scompletion. Assessment tasks are carefully designed so thatthey meet institutional requirements, relate directly to theBMM project, provide students with an opportunity to reflecton and evaluate their own project-based and team skills, andprovide students with material which they can use as theyenter the workforce as job-seekers.

5) Staffing. Instiructional staffing requirements for a project-based authentic learning course such as Applied MediaCommunication differ from those of conventional courses.Applied Media Communication involves three staff members:the course coordinator, the tutor, and the technical manager.The course coordinator is responsible for: the administration

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of the course, designing assessment tasks, managing the CMS,organizing and delivering lectures and workshops, andensuring that the course meets institutional graduatecapabilities' frameworks. Applied Media Communicationdemands additional types of work from the coursecoordinator. In the project-based authentic-learningenvironment, the course coordinator acts as a resource and asa mentor for individual students and student teams, addressingproblems and assisting in decision-making processes as theyemerge. During the team-meeting stages of the project, thecourse coordinator circulates among team meetings, offeringguidance and maintaining a project-wide perspective. Thecourse coordinator also assists students with negotiation skills:student team leaders must regularly negotiate the scope oftheir teams' work with other team leaders, team membersmust negotiate the scope of the work within their teams, andstudents responsible for individual organizations' recordsmust sometimes negotiate with industry representatives whorequest that information be added to or removed from theirorganization's record. The course coordinator also acts as thepermanent liaison point between industries and the BMM:year round, the course coordinator monitors the feedback areaand the email inbox for the BMM, and responds to industrialand other user feedback regarding specific entries and overallsite design. The course coordinator must therefore be able tomanage the course at both micro and macro levels, and tobalance the requirements of the university, industry partners,and individual students is order to ensure that the new versionof the BMM is ready to be launched at the end of thesemester.

Rather than delivering standard tutorials, the course's tutorfunctions as a mentor, circulating through team meetings andreporting emerging problems and ideas to the coursecoordinator. The tutor is also responsible for markingassessment material.

The technical manager plays a similar hands-on role. Thetechnical manager does more than perform the conventionaltasks of designing the BMM's technical architecture andfeatures, ensuring the technical functioning of the site, andmaintaining the site's security and currency. In the context ofthis course, the technical manager also attends student teammeetings and responds to student queries and requests as theyemerge, pointing out technical practicalities of studentsuggestions, assisting with technical implementation ofstudent ideas (such as the Hot Spots map), and providingstudents with technical instruction where required.

The course coordinator, tutor, and technical manager thuswork as a mentoring project team, as well as fulfilling thestandard responsibilities associated with their roles. This canbe challenging, particularly when tutors and technicalmanagers are hired annually on casual contracts and are notprovided with formal training in mentoring or project-basedleadership. However, the BMM experience demonstrates thatthe team-style mentoring role can also be a stimulating andrewarding experience for staff accustomed to less-involved,more-conventional professional roles.

IV. IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANSFER

For such an innovation to work in practice in otherorganizations, support and guidance must be available arounda number of different perspectives.

A. For thefacultyTypically a course embedding an authentic activity such as

the Brisbane Media Map will have an academic staff memberas key person responsible for the academic integrity andmanagement of the course, particularly overseeing theengagement of the industrial partners, mentoring the personswho will serve as tutors or support persons for the students,and determining the standards and criteria for studentassessment. Such an academic takes on new roles comparedto traditional lecture-oriented teaching [4], including qualitycontrol of material for public access and liaison work withlocal industry partners. The scholarship of teaching (SOT;see, for example,ht)p-//www.clt.uts.edu.au/Scholarship/Home Page.html) takeson new dimensions when the teaching process focuses on thescaffolding of group work within which students make theirown decisions about key design aspects of their work.

B. For the studentsStudents need a well organized resource environment, in

which the expectations of the course and appropriate supportmaterials are available. They also need groupware tools, suchas shared workspaces; tools for document version control anddistributed annotation, feedback, and editing; tools that allowthem to manage their own work-in-progress and at the sametime make work ready for assessment accessible to peerreviewers and faculty before going public. They need tools tomanage their shared agendas and for different forms ofcommunication. They also need skills in communication via aweb environment in terms of presentation design and user-interface considerations.

C. For the universityStudents must be allowed admin or at least instructor-level

access to certain areas of the institutional course-managementsystem so that it is used more as a groupware environmentthan a course-presentation environment. A WiFi networkenvironment and student use of laptops is important to theflexibility needed for participation in multiple teams whileaccessing common resources. To increase the potential of thecontribution to the student-university-industry triad, theuniversity should build upon the work of the students, perhapsby hosting a launch event in which local industry contacts arethanked for their cooperation. Assessment criteria must allowfor performance indicators such as portfolios of studentcontributions and self-reflections. The continuity and securityof the Map environment as well as free public access to theenvironment must be maintained by the University. Anychanges of Map location indicator (URL) must be indicatedby redirects when previous URLs are called up by site users.

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D. For the industrial partnersThe industrial partners need assurance that information

made public does not include company-sensitive informationand is up-to-date at the time of launch of the site. The intakeof information has to occur in an efficient manner, given thetime constraints of the industrial partners. The launch event,to which all contributing industrial partners are invited,provides an opportunity to network with others in relatedindustries in the local urban area, as well as identify promisingstudents as new employees. The industry-issues essays in theMedia Map must be useful to the industrial partners,particularly in terms of up-to-date references and linkages.Usability research among industry contacts is advisable.

V. CONCLUSION

The Brisbane Media Map is an example of a course andlearning activity that strengthens the engagement thatuniversity undergraduates can have with industry in their localarea. Reflecting authentic learning and Engagement Theory,the Brisbane Media Map not only has provided a valuablelocal resource and has opened new channels of networking forthe students and their prospective employers, but also hasrenewed the teaching and learning process for this final coursein the Media and Communications program. Data-baseddriven web technology along with groupware tools are criticalenablers for both the process and the product.

[11] C. Collis, C. Sturgeon, and M. Foth, "Local Media Mapping in Mediaand Communication Studies: the Brisbane Media Map," in ConfProcCommunications Research and Strategy Forum, UNSW, 21-22 Nov 2005.[Online] Available:

Christy A. Collis has a PhD in Cultural Studies from La Trobe University,Melbourne, Australia (2000), a MA in English and Cultural Studies from theUniversity of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1995), and an Honors BA inEnglish from the University of British Columbia (1991). Her major field ofresearch is cultural geography, particularly of Antarctica; she also has adeveloping research portfolio in the area of learning design and technologiesfor authentic learning activities.

She is currently Lecturer in Media and Communication in the CreativeIndustries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,Australia. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University ofQueensland, a Lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of TechnologyUniversity, and the Singapore Institute of Management. She is author, with C.Spurgeon and M. Foth, of , "Local Media Mapping in Media andCommunication Studies: the Brisbane Media Map," in Conf ProcCommunications Research and Strategy Forum, UNSW, 21-22 Nov 2005. Hercurrent research interests include the use of technology in designing authenticlearning projects for tertiary students, learning design for work-integratedlearning, and the implementation of creative industries development policiesin suburban communities.

Dr Collis is an executive member of the Cultural Studies Association ofAustralasia, and a member of the Association of Australian Geographers.

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