Tuesday we spent visiting the Huxia painting village with students from Xian International Studies University.

The village is home to three prominent painters in the peasant painter tradition.

Here is one of the painters holding one of his paintings.

The day’s activities provided an excellent opportunity for a number of new experiences. First, Nottingham and XISU students had the chance to interact with each other for a full day. Second, their interactions were nicely structured by the visit to the painting village, where the painters paint agriculture scenes anchored in socialist collectivisation. Third, we got to examine the painting and have a lesson from a prominent painter of the tradition. Fourth, we had meals in family homes, to understand different culinary traditions. Finally, we got to examine another model of cultural industry development.

In the photos below we see the artist Pan Xiaoling demonstrating paper cuts, students working together on their papercuts and paintings and some of the outputs of their outcomes.

You can see an interview we conducted with Artist Pan Xiaoling on an early trip here

After one of our few relaxed mornings we headed to Kangbash, a new district in Ordos about 30km from the centre of Dongsheng.

Kangbashi has been built as a city housing about 1 million people, though as yet almost nobody lives there. We all noticed how quiet and peaceful the place was, with almost no cars and very few people.

At the heart of the city are government offices which overlook a magnificent statue of Genghis Khan and his advisors. Genghis Khan is the most famous Mongol, having created the largest empire in human history and setting the foundation for the Yuan dynasty.

The central part of Kangbashi is host to a number of impressive civic buildings, including a new library and museum.

Like Las Vagas, the city rises from land that for much of the year looks like desert, though in summer is grassland.

The last day in Beijing finished at Beijing West station, where once again a large group of foreigners playing cards and writing their diaries provoked interest from the locals.

We arrived in Dongsheng around midday after a 15 hour journey on the overnight train from Beijing and spent the afternoon exploring the city a little, getting a sense of how small (though a little atypical) cities in China feel, visiting the Bronze age museum and dining on traditional Mongolian food.

On Wednesday we visited Shijingshan district of Beijing.

This district is to the West of the centre of Beijing and is developing as a cultural and recreational hub for Beijing.

Through the dedicated efforts of our alumni we were privileged to have a meeting with senior government officials, including the district vice governor. The meeting was useful in three ways, to understand the role of local government in economic and cultural development, to hear about the specific development ambitions of district and for the students to see how typical government meetings and briefings run.

The key plank of Shijingshan’s development is the regeneration of the 8.5 square kilometre Shougun steel plant into a cultural and entertainment area. We learned that the district has already been successful in developing some of the key underlying capabilities to enable this regeneration. Specifically, they have been successful in developing tourism and cultural activities and related high technology (as applied to virtual reality and online communities).

After the meeting visited Dotman, a firm based in the science and technology park. The firm’s key development is a full 3-D model of the city that can be used for entertainment as well as business purposes. As part of the visit, the students brainstormed some questions about the future of online communities with the management of the company.

Shijingshan district kindly hosted us to a wonderful lunch after which we visited one of the cultural sites, at which we were treated to a traditional Chinese painting display by a famous Chinese artist.

And the painting was presented to us as a gift recognising our visit to the district.

The trip to Shijingshan concluded with a visit to the Shougan factory gates to get a sence of the scale of the districts cultural and recreation industry development ambition.

On Tuesday (the seventh day in China) we began our exploration of Chinese business by visiting Tasly in Tianjin.

The trip began early and we took the high speed train from Beijing South station to Tianjin. The journey covers more than 120km in less than 30 minutes and hits a maximum speed of more than 300km/h.

At Tasly we received an introduction to the company, which is an innovative publicly listed pharmaceutical company that specialises in developing traditional Chinese medicines into products that are more readily usable. One of their products is currently undergoing tests for FDA approval in the United States.

Our briefing included a tour of the manufacturing plant.

After the briefing and tour we had the chance to sit and discuss business issues with two senior managers, one from human resource and one in charge of international marketing. Both executives provided us with a detailed understanding of some of the opportunities and challenges facing Chinese companies seeking to globalise.

As is becoming a tradition, we like to present a Nottingham University sweatshirt to those who have helped us

On Monday, having spent the first few days getting used to China, seeing how people live and investigating history and culture, began the first real engagement with business.

We were lucky to start the day with an excellent presentation and discussion on the energy industry in China, highlighting the importance of energy to China’s continued economic development and the inevitability of the energy mix being dominated by coal and nuclear.

The presentation linked nicely with the afternoon’s visit to Greenpeace, where the first half of the visit focused on the environmental consequences of China’s energy production requirements and possible alternatives to coal and nuclear (Greenpeace being steadfast against the latter).

updated to correct day and include the vaguely relevant photo.

The three Sundays that the students are in China are designed to be slightly more relaxed than the other days (if only the same was true for me). Each Sunday can be spent of cultural activities and learning about Chinese history. This Sunday (their first in China) was spent on a trip to the Great Wall and a walk through Tiananmen and the Forbidden City. I left them to their own devices and caught up with paperwork, email and planning for the next days. Unfortunately, Monday and Tuesday were too busy for me to extract some thoughts and ideas about their experience, hopefully I can do that soon and update this post.

On Saturday we had a photography workshop with local British photographer, Sean Gallagher. Sean has been in and around Beijing for more than three years and his photographs have been printed in National Geographic, The Guardian and national and regional newspapers and magazines in Canada and Germany. His work has been featured on the BBC website and the Greenpeace website. His website can be found here.

Seans key interest is the environment and desertification and he has received a prestigious grant (from the Pultzer Centre on Crisis Reporting) to photograph the issue in China. It was the photo story-telling aspect of this work that gave the workshop its key thread.

The first half of the workshop was a presentation and discussion on story telling and sense-making with photographs, echoing material the students studied as part of their research methods module. The second part was hands on, using seminar and walk through the hutongs (old lane-way housing area) to improve both photography skills and to practice the story-telling.

Some of my photographs, minus the story-telling and narrative are below.

updated to correct typos and add photos.

The train journey was uneventful and much less arduous than the students expected. While somewhat cramped the 1500 plus kilometres passed pleasantly (and mostly asleep).

After checkin, unpacking and brunch we went to 798 art district. The district is a centrepiece of Beijing’s art scene and an exemplar for both urban regeneration and cultural industries development. While there, we took in the Ullens gallery (link) which had a great exhibition by Olafur Elaisson and Ma Yansong. The exhibition consisted of a large low room, hazy from a smoke machine with coloured light from the top.

The effect was that the walls and people inside disappeared completely into the haze. Ordinarily, the effect should be quite disconcerting, almost like white-out when skiing. However, this was different, the effect was almost comforting and we pondered why. Perhaps, we thought because after the brutal hard edged, hustle and noise of the city, the quite and softness was something of a welcome antidote.

Tomorrow will be spent exploring the local hutongs (laneway suburbs) and having a day long photography workshop, being an experiment this year at sensitising students to the environment about them and building their transferable, visual communications skills.

I have concluded a couple of weeks of experimenting with multimedia to support my teaching and have come to some conclusions.

The most important is that, at least for my subject material, there are very limited learning benefits from developing teaching support resources beyond well structured web resources and podcasts — at least in terms of the time for production and the alternative uses of that time.

A key reason for this, is that for lecture material that is mostly argument or summary, synchronised video / text adds almost nothing to the learning experience (just as it almost nothing to a live lecture). The reason for this is that during a, well structured audio presentation the headings and structure should be obvious — if they are not, then the problem is in the spoken material not in the absence of supporting synchronised text (e.g., PowerPoint or similar slides).

Of course, this is not the case for colleagues who need to talk through complex diagrams or equations. For them, an electronic equivalent of interacting with the chalkboard might be very helpful.

One of my worries with typical powerpoint presentations is that there is a tendency to treat the text as the only method of engagement. I suspect that for a lone student listening and watching with headphones in a computer lab, library or study, this might be even more so the case — but impossible with audio only.

This cost-benefit analysis (rough as it is) must be essential to all such choices. I estimate to make a 30 min lecture, with synchronised audio and slides and decent production values would take at least a full working day (assuming the content is prepared). However, as I note, the incremental learning over an audio only production be are probably negligible. As such, that teaching time would be better spent answering email, extra tutorials, etc.