Busy, busy, busy. Good job Nicki’s not about to have our second child any day (oh, hang on…).
First of was a trip to Bournemouth for the Media Education Summit, which helpfully dovetailed rather nicely with the Bridging the Gap conference, rather well summarised in this video yes, I know it says Teesside University, and they did indeed organise it, but it was held in Bournemouth).
Both events were blessed with some great speakers, from Ian Livingstone once more extolling the virtues of a good education in coding to the Guardian’s Paul Lewis giving an insight into the new connected world of journalism and how social media has radically altered the role.
We were there to present the Digital Media Working Academy at Bridging the Gap, specifically a case study of how some of our students (with some valuable guidance and input from Darren Bristow from Quba) helped GfK try out some ideas for their e-magazine and produced a tablet version of a paper-based publication. The best thing about this project (besides the nice things that GfK’s Aoife McArdle said about the work) was that the students have gone on to work for GfK. You can’t get a better recommendation of quality than that!
Once that was fully absorbed, it was off the the BBC Trust for the Audience Council England meeting. It’s the start of a ‘new year’ for this, so it was mainly to catch up on what the pattern of work will be over the next year, but it was interesting to hear how Ben Cooper‘s decision to replace Chris Moyles with Nick Grimshaw would hopefully stop old fogies like me listening to the Breakfast Show and get that average age of the listener back where it should be! Ralph Rivera and Andy Conroy gave an insight into Future Media at the BBC, and suffice to say there’s some exciting stuff coming off the back of the excellent developments across all four screens for the Olympics. It’s one of the few parts of the BBC that has escaped relatively unscathed from DQF, and although (as Anthony Lilley said at Bridging the Gap) the iPlayer “isn’t enough”, there’ll be more things in the pipeline that will made similar step changes in the way people consume the BBC’s outputs. Watch that Red Button!
Finally it was over to Media City to kick off the Audience Council part of the Trust’s review of the BBC online provision. We again heard from Andy Conroy, this time abley supported by Laura Ellis (Head of English Regions New Media) and Saul Nasse (Controller of BBC Learning). It will be interesting to see how this goes, with such a diverse spread of content and users covered by the generic term ‘online’.