W2 – The Unlecture

This week’s lecture mostly reinforced and clarified some of my thoughts from the previous week.

Firstly, there were some key ideas about things we face as we blog that I really took to. There was the idea about sketch–writing that I really like which relates back to some of the concepts about writing without audience from WMT. However, when publishing content on a blog, opposed to a private, hard-copy journal, there are some serious considerations in terms of copyright and media regulation that we, as media practitioners, must be subjected to and wary of. As much as we may like to experiment/speculate/try to write without audience, constraints such as these always exist. This is the reality of networked media and online publishing.

Secondly, Adrian’s brief recommendation to blog informally and often was a simple but very key piece of advice. I think it’s common as students to feel protective about our work in fear of it being published without first being perfected, or for things to be read without feeling completely sure of how our ‘writing’ may be consumed. But the fact of the matter is that we all need to get used to letting go of our writing, be it a major work or small and simple expression of an idea, and let it be consumed. I think this is an integral part of growing from being a student (when your work often remains between yourself and your teacher) to a media practitioner (when you’ve got a deadline by which you need to produce and distribute your work).

Thirdly, I have some feedback on the form of the unlecture. I feel it could’ve worked better had it been an open forum – just a simple hands-up, ask a question to the panel of tutors/coordinators etc. I think this would’ve inspired more interesting questions to develop about ‘networked media’ rather than the dry, administrative questions I think we all just quickly scribbled down. When this happens (as it has at times over the last two weeks), it tends to feel like a lecture on teaching methods, rather than a learning environment in which these somewhat ‘new’ or ‘unorthodox’ learning philosophies are learnt through experience. I think we’d all do well to just jump into a discussion about the issues or topics within the networked media industry, and learn by doing. Having said that, I respect that it all takes some getting used to, so a bit of conversation about how things are going to work this semester isn’t so bad…