Sitting through this unlecture was so captivating and inspiring I actually thought we were all going to clap at the end of Adrian’s speech!

I know… I’m a nerd for admitting this but I actually don’t care 🙂 I even found myself considerring being a media professional rather than a PR professional, which was what I was initially leaning towards. Little problem, I suck at computers, and my photo-shop skills are similar to those of my 3 year old brothers’ cut and paste projects he brings home from kindergarten…

I was especially moved by the concept that Adrian’s lectures are not like a “business transaction”, which got me to thinking, well most education facilities are. I mean from my little brothers kindergarten, which prepares you for primary school, which prepares you for high school, which prepares you for VCE which completely dictates how your life is going to turn out… is just a big fat conveyer belt. Children are institutionalised from the moment they can talk and put through a strict process to extend their knowledge to the edge of the child’s capability. It doesn’t care about feelings. It cares about results. Efficiency. Productivity. Future benefit to the economy. Its a machine! My friends could all tell you this rant that I frequently went on through high-school.

However, I am proud to say that the whole business-transaction thing wasn’t quite as strong for me. I went to a public school, I never had a tutor. I persevered with school to get the best grades I could because I WANTED to go to University. Most everyone I have spoken to in my degree has come from a private school and had access to private tutors. Sometime I do feel disadvantaged when I realise the gaps in my knowledge base that these friends already have, and I would definitely send my own children to private school if I had the means to in the future.

I am the first person in my family to have gone to University. Don’t get me wrong, my family aren’t unintelligent, they all had great jobs that they loved, but it just wasn’t within their means or interests to go to a higher level tertiary institution. My mother is a nurse, my father is a police-officer (I don’t talk to him very much but I know he’s somewhere high up in the force now), my grandfather was an electrical engineer and my grandmother a chef. I feel very privileged to be where I am today.

And thats what Networked Media is about. Its not a case of “you must learn this and this by this time to get any sort of job”, its an opportunity for us to broaden our perspectives on knowledge where it is free and valued. It all comes back to that concept ‘University teaches you how to BE something, rather than how to do something”.

So yeah, this lecture made me feel very proud and privileged to be a student at RMIT sitting in that very lecture theatre. *Here are the claps that I envisaged for the end of Adrian’s’ speech * 🙂 End of emotional reflection.