Opening up opportunities for creativity through media training

Denbigh School Students participating in the media training

Year 12 Denbigh School Students, from left to right: Tiffany Dudden, Alice Rose, Eleanor Papworth, Emma Holland, Georgie Rush, Heather Stone, Sasha Russell, Alex Dejean and Connor Bean

From the 1st to 5th July 2013 10 media students from Denbigh School participated in a Media Training Course at the Open University as part of the RCUK-funded Engaging opportunities project. The training was led by staff from the OU’s Open Media Unit.

Over the five days of this practical course the students developed and practised new skills, such as working with digital tools and technologies, producing pieces to camera, and editing footage. Six short films were produced over the course of the week. Here three of the students—Alice Rose, Connor Bean and Heather Stone—describe their experiences. Links to the completed films are embedding throughout the post.

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Focus Group-based Public Engagement

This post was originally contributed to the Isotope repository on 14th August 2008 by Eric Jensen at the University of Warwick and has been reposted here.

Dr Eric Jensen, University of Warwick

Dr Eric Jensen, University of Warwick

Activity description
Traditionally used by market researchers and social scientists to identify a range of interpretations on a topic of interest, focus groups have recently been adapted by at least two independent teams of public engagement practitioners with the aim of generating dialogue about robotics and health. This article describes the mechanics of planning, design and moderation of focus-group based public engagement events, making reference to these two cases, which were evaluated as part of the Isotope project.

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Engaging opportunities: a research café on ‘smart drugs’

Dr Ellie Dommett

Dr Ellie Dommett, The Open University

I recently took part in a Research Café at Denbigh School in Milton Keynes as part of the Engaging opportunities project. I’d been invited to take part as members of the project team were aware of my public engagement with research work.

The structure of the café was similar to the Café Scientifique events held across the country but instead of engaging members of the general public in scientific debate over a latté in the local coffee shop or bar, this event was held at the school with an audience of Year 12 students, sipping coffee and eating biscuits.

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Engaged Futures consultation and NCCPE blog

NCCPE Blog post: An Engaging thesis

NCCPE Blog post: An Engaging thesis

The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) is running an Engaged Futures consultation.  Alongside, and partly in coordination with this consultation, the NCCPE have launched a blog (NCCPE’s blog).  

The NCCPE team invited various stakeholders to contribute a post to the new blog as part of the Engaged Futures consultation.  Authors were asked to imagine a future for some aspect of engaged research.

My contribution was based on an imagined future for postgraduate research and it titled ‘An engaging thesis‘.  The NCCPE team are keen to start a discussion around these articles, which will grow in number in the coming weeks, so feel free to comment, circulate, etc.