Collective learning in an industry-education-research test bed

Abstract

The creation of UTS’s and Animal Logic’s Master of Animation and Visualisation (MAV) tackles fundamental and contemporary shifts in business and society by testing a model that could enable a matching paradigm shift in education. As an industry–university initiative designed to educate the next generation of game-changers, the curriculum centres squarely on critical and creative thinking, problem posing and solving, innovation and invention, and complexity and collaboration. Participants in the programme, academic researchers and industry partners work collectively to address complex creative problems in order to step beyond the boundaries of the known and into new domains. In this chapter, we begin to describe and analyze this collaboration and its creative practices. The three pillars of a framework for making sense of collective professional learning, developed and tested in a recent Australian Research Council Linkage Project, are used to examine the complex, dynamic, highly nuanced and ecological nature of learning as it occurred in this collaborative industry–university environment. That process distilled a set of enacted principles. As a test bed for explicating the art and science of collectivity in creative practice, initial findings suggest the nature of fine-grained studies now needed to yield further insights, model and theorize collective learning.