8 is a way of sharing all the lessons learned from our collaboration with the AHRC and making sure that the research findings produced by the funded projects are made the best use of. It contains articles from the likes of Bill Thompson, Kathryn Corrick and Pat Kane on, amongst other things, media literacy, the ethics of play and digital inclusion. There are contact details for all researchers involved in the studies and an official view of KEP's aims from the lead AHRC and BBC partners. There's also a graphical representation of one of the projects - a collaboration between the production team working on CBBC's virtual word for children, Adventure Rock, and the University of Westminster - which shows the connections and influence a collaborative project builds over time.

The KEP is a pilot programme. It has shown that deep level academic analyses of BBC services are of incredible value to both the BBC and its audiences. It provides a key to unlocking the full business potential of digital media and has the potential to reshape how we deliver future content, in ways we can all be a part of. We hope that the KEP will act as a springboard for BBC Research & Development in its work to remain at the cutting edge of the collaboration and innovation agendas. This very much relies on our stakeholders being made aware of the programme and its successes. Our hope is that 8 will encourage them to sit up and take notice.

You can download a PDF copy of 8 here. If you'd like a copy of the actual newspaper please contact christianna.salako@bbc.co.uk from BBC R&D's Innovation Culture. The research studies themselves are all available in the box on the right. 8 was produced in association with the Newspaper Club.

Jo.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and BBC Future Media and Technology (FM&T) have been working together since 2005 to develop a long-term collaborative strategic research partnership underpinned by AHRC's strategy to enable collaborative research and development in the arts and humanities. BBC FM&T were actively seeking to exchange knowledge and develop new research and development collaborations with academic partners in the arts and humanities to consolidate and extend the BBC's public value in the digital age. The AHRC is working to address barriers to innovation in the Creative Industries and this joint initiative with BBC Future Media and Technology is providing a valuable platform for scoping a framework for innovative collaborative funding programmes.

Since I joined the AHRC in May 2006, I have been directly involved in the scoping, development and delivery of the Knowledge Exchange Programme (KEP) leading for the AHRC and working in partnership with Rowena and Brendan at the BBC. I believe that the success of the AHRC/BBC collaboration and the KEP has been due to the inclusive shaping and dedicated relationship building by both organisations from the early, exploratory stages through to present day and this is essentially down the people involved although we didn't always get everything right first time!

Jo Pollock took over the AHRC lead for the collaboration in November 2008 and has quickly established and continued a close rapport with BBC colleagues through the Knowledge Infusion Programme and the end of programme showcase event 'AHRC/BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme: a collaborative journey' held on 27 April 2009. This was an extremely successful day in many ways. One of the highlights was the panel debate 'Collaboration in the 21st century' which produced some very interesting insights and view points from panellists and event delegates. The event also provided me with the opportunity to meet up again with Rowena and Brenda and the KEP project award holders which has always been a pleasure.

The next stage is to evaluate the collaboration and the KEP and to identify the best means for taking our partnership forward strategically and in a sustainable way. I look forward to the outcomes of the evaluation and to continuing the close working relationship we have forged with the BBC.

Congratulations to all involved in the collaboration at the BBC and AHRC and to the KEP project award holders for producing such excellent and exciting outcomes from their joint research.

Susan.

Brendan

'Adventure Rock' is a 3D virtual play environment for 6-12 year olds which launched in April, 2008. Children explore an open air world to solve the mysteries of the island, meet crocodiles and robots, play games, go snowboarding, make videos, cartoons, invent contraptions and go dancing, and so on. We ran a year-long research project aimed to find out what children thought of 'Adventure Rock' and other virtual worlds for children such as Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters. The main researchers were Lizzie Jackson (myself) and David Gauntlett, from the University of Westminster, working primarily with Rachel Bardill and Pete Davies at BBC Children's.

90 children aged 7-11 from Cardiff, Belfast, Glasgow and London took part. The children told us what they liked and didn't like in two sets of creative workshops and in diaries. Their parents also gave us their views via a questionnaire and we spent time with the producers of 'Adventure Rock'.

The children told us they wanted to be sociable, creative, to have control of the space and to be able to change it, to have a visible status, to know where they were, to have a clear mission. They also liked the fact that 'Adventure Rock' was 'outdoors' and that there was some humour. Children felt virtual worlds should provide help when you need it, and they wanted to see professional video from CBBC, plus their own work and other children's work in the worlds. They wanted somewhere to live (a home, hotel or town), and to have shops and a place away from adult rules!

After they had seen the findings BBC Children's producers decided to place more video within the world and the activities children could do together were increased by extending the accompanying website. The research showed 'Adventure Rock' didn't offer all the things the children wanted, however both the children and the parents felt the BBC should be providing content like 'Adventure Rock'. To read both an overview report for general readers and a fuller report with more information on 'Adventure Rock' project go to artlab.org.uk

Lizzie

Brendan

The sample of online fans that responded to the online questionnaire was predominantly female (76%), white British (81%) and aged 40-59 (62%). Despite stories reflecting the multicultural nature of British society, online fan cultures around The Archers remain white spaces. The level of education was very high indeed - 74% have been through Higher Education. The Archers is unique among British soap operas in attracting this middle-class, highly educated demographic, and the BBC Archers website has reinforced this effect. It provides a space for keen listeners to keep up with the programme and exchange views with others. Catching up with the programme via Listen Again, podcasts or synopses is the most popular use of the site. The weekly vote - which significantly is easily accessed from the home page - is also popular. For some, the website provides a visual accompaniment to the programme.

Only a third of our respondents said that they used the BBC Archers messageboards, which nonetheless were the most active of all the Archers fan sites we mapped. The Facebook Archers Appreciation group is also growing rapidly and has over 2000 members and a younger demographic. We found much less activity on most of the independent fan sites, with the exception of the 'umra' usenet group, which has about 100 regular posters (posting mainly on topics other than the programme). The official fan club site, the 'Archers Addicts' has a faithful group of around 20 posters.

For some, the BBC messageboards are an important social network, and they can be a lifeline. They can also intensify the pleasures of the programme by providing a 'double dose soap' in the form of the messageboard 'characters' and their exchanges. Some of the posters on the BBC Discuss The Archers board negotiate the apparent contradiction between their middle-class cultural status and soap opera fandom by adopting ironic or even 'anti-fan' postures, while others are more celebratory. This clash of different versions of fandom, or 'fan-tagonisms' is, however, typical of fan cultures generally, and by stimulating discussion, it contributes to the liveliness of the boards. Those who find the discussion 'too critical', too fast-moving or intense, migrate to other online spaces such as the 'Archers Addicts' or the Facebook Archers Appreciation group. It's possible that if the BBC Archers site provided an alternative, easily accessed space, with a lighter kind of discussion, they might find their way there. The presence of the host 'Mr Keri' on the BBC boards and the sense of connection with the programme and the producers that this provides make the posters feel at home and 'listened to'.

The online discussions provide a space in which very detailed visualisations of characters and scenes can be developed, shared and compared. Comparing imagined versions of characters or scenes permits multiple interpretations, in contrast to the threatening closure of photographs of actors (which in the case of The Archers, listeners frequently refuse to look at). In this way, the messageboards extend the openness of radio, by providing a space where new meanings and stories can be generated by listeners, and where the imaginative work of listening can, in some measure, be captured.

The Archers has a unique relationship with its audience because of the fact that many have been listening since childhood. The culture of the programme and of many of the online websites we analysed is one of femininity, which of course does not prevent a minority of men from participating. However, for the mainly female fans, narratives emphasising the capacity to repair relationships and the role of community in supporting vulnerable individuals are likely to be pleasurable.

The 'anti-fan' and ironic fan postures adopted by some BBC messageboard posters can lead to a strongly critical tone which those involved in the programme's production may, quite understandably, find undermining at times. However, our research shows both that the messageboard posters are a minority, even among online fans, and that these kinds of engagements are typical of fan cultures more broadly, particularly in online spaces. We would recommend that these discussions, like the website as a whole, be seen as a successful adjunct to the programme - a sign of, and opportunity for passionate investment in the programme by some listeners. They also indicate that The Archers is part of a changing context where new technologies are blurring the boundaries between cultural producers and consumers. Fan cultures, as the independent development of the Facebook site attests, have their own modalities and conventions, and cannot be predicted or indeed controlled.

Lyn Thomas is the Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of European Transformations, London Metropolitan University. Her paper forms part of the output from a collaborative research team funded through the AHRC/BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme. Details of a parallel study into the fan cultures of Radio 2 listeners by Bethany Klein from University of Leeds can be found on the Radiolabs blog. The full AHRC/BBC KEP report includes contributions from Tim Wall & Andrew Dubber (Birmingham City University) and Matt Hills (Cardiff University) and further examines the fan cultures of Archers listeners as well as the online communities built around personality DJs and specialist music. The report can be found here.

Brendan

"In July 2007 I started running one of the AHRC/BBC projects. It was focused on User Generated Content in the news. I say focused but it felt quite the opposite. We were researching radio, television and online newsrooms across England and Wales, as well as Network newsrooms. We interviewed 115 journalists and 10 senior managers, undertook a nationally representative survey to find out who actually submits UGC, placed an online survey on the BBC website and organised and ran 12 focus groups to find out why people submit, but also the barriers which prevent others from contributing. It was a year-long project which produced a huge amount of data, and proved to be the first significant study of UGC at a broadcast organisation.

The report was finished in September and can be downloaded here.

That's when things got interesting. Disseminating research is always a significant challenge, but in an organisation the size of the BBC, even more tricky. So we arranged a 6 month secondment and I'm now based in Birmingham working with the English Regions New Media team.

This for me is what knowledge exchange is all about. I've been here 2 months so far and I've already had so many informal conversations with people from all over the BBC about the research, whether it's over coffee, or at after work drinks when someone says 'what do you do?' or being put in contact with someone through someone else.... I'm learning an enormous amount and hopefully my in-depth knowledge of the research is more useful than a 60 page report lying on a desk, marked 'to read'.

BBC Local is currently going through big changes. There is a roll-out of newly designed websites and I'm able to work with the team to find ways of managing UGC and making it easier for audiences to contact the newsrooms. Perhaps more importantly, I'm working on building 'community' on the local sites. Looking at excellent examples from the States particularly in terms of web 2.0 initiatives, I'm working with the team to see how we can build some new and exciting tools into the websites as they are rolled out. It's fascinating to be working in a new environment, but on a personal level, it feels such a luxury to be able to just spend time thinking, researching and attempting to make change come about. I'd recommend this way of exchanging knowledge over all others.

Claire"

A 90 strong audience consisting of academics, BBC staff, innovation funding bodies such as the Technology Strategy Board and the wider media industry heard the head of BBC Research & Development put into context the importance of the collaboration between the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the value of knowledge transfer at this level to keep the BBC at the leading edge of innovation.

The day showcased the collaborative research projects supported through our pilot funding call. As well as displays from 7 projects highlighting outcomes and findings we also had project presentations in the Big Room from the following projects:

• Claire Wardle: User Generated Content and its impact upon Contributors, Non-Contributors and the BBC (this session was blogged by one of the original lead partners, Robin Hamman, now at Headshift.
• Heather Powell: Open Archive: The Miners Strike - A Case Study in Regional Content
• David Gauntlett & Lizzie Jackson: Audience and Producer Engagement with Immersive Worlds (case study: Adventure Rock)

Our current partnership model with the AHRC has been a pilot and very successful for that. It's allowed us to be pioneering in the way we work, accept that our learning journey has provided us with some key 'do's and don'ts' for collaborative working practices between two large and disparate communities, and at the same time delivered a bunch of terrific recommendations based on in depth audience behaviour analysis around areas such as accessibility, community, learning and user generated content. The research papers can be found below in PDF format. We are currently awaiting 1 more and will upload as soon as we have it.

UGC at the BBC
Alone Together? Social Learning in BBC Blast
A Public Voice - Access, Digital Story and Interactive Narrative
Children in Virtual Worlds
Virtual Worlds - An Overview and Study of BBC Children's Adventure Rock
Inhibited Exploration in Older Customers of Digital Services
Listener Online Engagement with BBC Radio Programming
Radio listeners online - A case study of The Archers
The Miners' Strike - A Case Study in Regional Content

The event will be held at Wallace Space in St Pancras, London and will start at 11am. There are still a few (free) tickets left so please contact Louise Elliot at the AHRC on L.Elliott@ahrc.ac.uk to reserve a place. A full agenda for the event can be found here: agenda.pdf

The best ideas come from combining different skills and points of view. Often the most valid contribution comes from those with a standpoint outside the core area of interest - insights that elude those standing closer to their subject matter. In short, different points of view lead to good conversations. To facilitate a model of collaboration between academia, the BBC and the wider media industry that reflects this philosophy we've created beebac.

beebac is a space where academics and media professionals can find people and projects that interest them. It is a network for BBC staff, academics and industry partners. It enables you to find people and projects you want to be involved with, explore areas of mutual interest and exchange ideas and resources. You can explore subjects that interest you by joining the relevant groups on the network or set up your own topics of discussion and invite others to join you. There are graded levels of privacy that allow you to choose who you share your information with and a powerful search engine that prioritises results by people and subject matter so you can find what interests you. There are a number of different ways of sharing and messaging other users that protect your privacy while allowing you to gain the benefits of working collaboratively
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From a BBC perspective beebac is about having continued access to a massive community of professionals whose jobs are dedicated to studying the relationship between media, society and culture. It is also about exploring the responsibilities we have as a public service broadcaster that stretch beyond simply our output. From an academic point of view it's about getting access to the vast store of data that broadcasters have to offer and the opportunity to converse with media professionals who are in a position to make real use of research findings. From all angles it's about the opportunities afforded by networking with likeminded individuals and working in a truly cross-disciplinary manner. beebac is also the online home for the AHRC/BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme. We'll use the site to keep you up to date with everything related to the KEP, highlight upcoming events and funding calls and point you to other places on the web that we think are doing interesting things.

Funding calls provide one framework around which collaboration can take place but they are not necessarily the only way that it can be supported, or the most sustainable. If the BBC is going to continue to work in conjunction with academia it is important to start building a community that can sustain itself and direct members to topics of interest as well as other like-minded individuals.

beebac is currently in beta testing and you can sign up here. Once you've received your authorisation email head to The Hub for up to date information on everything that's new on the network and beyond. beebac is a pilot project and it would be great to get the community to a stage where we can assess whether this model of collaboration between the BBC, the media industry and academia has a future. Please feel free to drop me a line once you're signed up.

Brendan

I came on board as the new AHRC Knowledge Transfer Programme Manager last November as the 8 KEP projects were drawing to an end. Having heard so much about this high profile partnership during my time in other posts at the AHRC I was excited to hear that Sue and Rowena were planning to make a further injection of funding available to extend existing projects. As I began to learn about just some of the fantastic findings and outputs that the research teams were producing, it became clear that the added value this Knowledge Infusion funding could bring was immense.

For AHRC, this was not only an opportunity to further support these teams in developing innovative research and knowledge exchange practices but also to highlight the real and demonstrable impact that the outcomes of such research can have for stakeholders far beyond our own community. It would be great if this supplementary funding means seeing actual policy change at the BBC to reflect these research findings, some of which have been revelatory.

Having begun to get to know the academic award holders for the scheme and see their final reports it has also become apparent just how beneficial its been for them to have had unprecedented access to BBC resources as a result of the KEP. Knowledge Exchange is a relatively new concept for AHRC and its communities and, in a competitive research climate, increasingly important as a key strategic area. I hope that we can support these projects, through the Knowledge Infusion funding and in other ways, in embedding not only their research findings but also their knowledge of working in this way within their own research cultures. If we can go some way towards raising the profile of our Knowledge Transfer Team's activities, encourage interest among our academic communities and raise demand from stakeholders in the user community I will be very happy. Lucky I'm not asking for much!

Jo Pollock

Some background...

The AHRC's Vision and Strategy 2007 - 2012 aims to position the AHRC to meet the opportunities and challenges it faces as a Research Council and to provide direction for the spending review period 2008 - 2010 and beyond. Knowledge Transfer forms a core element of this vision as outlined specifically in the AHRC's Strategic Aim 3:

'To strengthen the impact of arts and humanities research by encouraging researchers to disseminate and transfer their knowledge to other areas where it can make a difference'

KT, as the AHRC understand it, refers to the processes by which new knowledge is co-produced through interactions between academic and non-academic individuals and communities. This includes innovative activity brought about by the application of existing knowledge to new contexts. AHRC's interpretation of KT assumes that the new knowledge that is created through such engagements delivers significant added value for both the academic and non-academic partners.

An important element of AHRC's KT strategy is the need for us to build and sustain strategic partnerships and the flagship Knowledge Exchange Programme with the BBC, as well as supporting a number of fantastic projects, has been fundamental to our development in this area.

Knowledge Infusion funding - the call

Last November the AHRC and the BBC committed to making further joint funding available to support proposals to infuse co-produced knowledge and outcomes from projects funded under the Knowledge Exchange Programme (KEP) into both academia and the BBC. Applicants were asked to indicate impact for both project partners in the form of in depth, targeted or niche research arising from the original projects and which may also produce pilots or prototypes. Activities under this initiative will specifically embed the research findings of individual KEP projects in a way which spreads their impact beyond that initially envisaged at the project outset.

5 applications were successful in their bids for this supplementary funding;

What do Children Want from the BBC? Children's Content and Participatory Environments in an Age of Citizen Media
Principle Investigator: Cynthia Carter (Cardiff University)
BBC Partner: Roy Milani (BBC Childrens)
Activity: Examining BBC news provision for teenagers. What exists (and what should exist) for the delivery of current affairs for individuals caught between children's and adult content.
Key Deliverable: Report and events outlining recommendations/strategies for the provision of multi-platform news content for teens

Public Service Virtual environments and their Users
Principle Investigator: David Gauntlett (University of Westminster)
BBC Partner: Rachel Bardill (CBBCi)
Activity: Examining the different personas or "player orientations" that children adopt when in virtual multi-user environments and the drivers for their decisions.
Key Deliverable: Models of possible multi-user public service virtual environments

Easing the Inhibitions of Older Viewer's Exploration of Digital TV
Principle Investigator: Stephen Payne (University of Bath)
BBC Partner: Maxine Glancy (BBC R&D)
Activity: Exploring the behavior of older consumers with respect to Digital TV - their inhibitions and their reasons for choosing to engage with digital services or not.
Key Deliverable: Production of an EPG prototype for impaired users

Alone Together
Principle Investigator: Helen Thornham (City University)
BBC Partner: John Millner (BBC Learning Formal)
Activity: Examining BBC provisions for online learning environments and UGC. Looking at how teens view online creativity.
Key Deliverable: Direct feed into the redesign and re-launch of the BBC Blast initiative including reports, pod/vidcasts and seminars.

Open Archive Project - The Miners Strike: A case study in regional content
Principle Investigator: Simon Popple (University of Leeds)
BBC Partner: Heather Powell (BBC Information and Archives North)
Activity: Bringing together those in the North of England affected by the Miners Strike and BBC journalists to explore the ongoing ramifications that the reporting of sensitive events can pose to a broadcaster.
Key Deliverable: A website that allows the affected groups to select and curate materials to provide a web based account of the miners strike in its first year

Further Information

The research methods used by David Gauntlett and Lizzie Jackson of University of Westminster can be found at the Artlab site.

The new BBC Blast site, which includes the first stage of recommendations from Angela McFarlane's Alone Together study, can be found here.

So where did the journey begin? The collaborative partnership between the Arts and Humanities Research Council and BBC Research & Development (a part of BBC Future Media and Technology) started over coffee in the American Bagel Company on Praed Street, Paddington in November 2005. I'd just come back after maternity leave and my then boss Matt Locke suggested I meet with the then head of Knowledge Transfer at the AHRC, Julie Taylor to discuss how our two communities might indeed transfer knowledge, ideas, and collaborative working practices for the good of all concerned.

With a roughly matched potential community of 26,000 arts and humanities academics and around 20,000 (at the time) BBC employees it certainly seemed a good fit in terms of numbers never mind the enormous wealth of talent, expertise and sheer depth of knowledge within academia. This knowledge had enormous synergy with areas of interest in BBC FM+T: Audience behaviour with regard to digital technology; the barriers and incentives to take-up of digital services; editorial challenges around user generated content; the opportunities afforded by mobile devices; children/young people as early adopters and the whole gamut of how multimedia plays out in people's everyday lives.

To start with we set out an exploratory agenda to discover how our two communities might collaborate on common ground. This took the form of a series of themed 'collaborative inquiry summits' hosted during the first half of 2006 which explored key themes such as mobile communication, user generated content and archive content. By the middle of that year we had enough evidence to suggest that a second, more formalised phase of the partnership would be beneficial and we set about building a business case for a formal strategic partnership between the two organisations under the AHRC's Knowledge Exchange Partnership.

Launched in January 2007, eight collaborative research projects were green lit which ran for between nine and twelve months. They have delivered a range of insights into the changing behaviour of BBC audiences as well as enabling the academic community to gain unprecedented access to the BBC. Once these papers have been made public they will be linked to through this blog. The success of the eight projects has resulted in a further injection of funding into five of the projects. This phase of knowledge infusion launched in mid January 2009 and digs deeper into particular aspects of the original collaborative research projects. These projects are due to deliver in late spring 2009.

As well as the pilot funding call we have also taken the ground-breaking step of embedding an academic from Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Dr. Claire Wardle into BBC Nations and Regions New Media in Birmingham. The placement runs for six months and started in February 2009. During her time there, Claire is working to disseminate the findings of her twelve month study into UGC and News - the biggest of its kind in terms of BBC UGC. Working closely with Laura Ellis, BBC Birmingham's Head of New Media, she is helping devise and implement a strategy for community producers across nations and regions.

So far this partnership has developed a range of new models of collaborative innovation for the BBC. Already there are tangible outcomes from the eight collaborative research projects which are being taken up by the partner divisions with whom the academics have been working closely and are also feeding into the BBC's top level strategic initiatives such as Media Literacy. The second round of funding will provide working proofs of concept and prototypes to compliment the body of research already produced. It's often said that innovation comes from the bottom where exploration happens. The AHRC/BBC KEP has shown that exploration, coupled with collaborative partnerships which are working effectively, can deliver great value for both sides. We are continually fine tuning that relationship to discover what other exciting territory this partnership might cover both now and in the future.

Rowena