Tutorial One

Introductions are always tricky. I found myself telling people things that are very impersonal.

“I have a dog”
“This is my first year of media”

Obviously everyone already knew that but I am anxious when it comes to talking about my self. I always worry about over sharing and becoming branded as that unfortunate piece of information that I let slip out. So I tend to keep it simple; name, contextual major, movie. This is the formula that works for me as I tackle introduction after introduction.

Upon reading that my first assignment would be a “self portraits” I was nervous, but relaxed as soon as I we were given the okay to be as abstract and playful as we could possibly be with out pictures and clips. I am still worried about over sharing but I think it’s better to do it in a way where you can explain in your blog later.

Some ideas I am starting to have in regrades to what I can capture as part of my self portrait:

  • photo showing a gift vs something I was buy for myself
  • conversation snippets between me and friends
  • recording of favourite sounds
  • pictures of book shelf / shows how I organise and what I read/store there
  • videos of places I walk pass everyday
  • recording of my favourite movie scenes
  • recording of me reading a book quote I like
  • video showing how I move around uni/certain areas
  • photo showing whats on my walls

Also we were shown this website which I found to be quiet interesting and hopefully helps with further inspiration in this assignment.

Deep Attention and Hyper Attention

At the start of the lectorial I found myself struggling to pay attention. The only thing that kept me from flicking to twitter was the fear of those behind me seeing inappropriate content on my feed. As housekeeping eventually turned into a reading I found myself although interested that I was unable to finish the article without jumping around and skimming through certain paragraphs.

After finishing up I had pretty quickly come to the conclusion that an entire high school span of doing homework with the accompany of tv and music had probably lead me to develop “hyper attention.”  This was further reiterated as I begun to discuss the article with my peers but we also discussed how our first couple of days in this course had been.

Reading this article really came as a surprise to me as I was unaware that being able to focus on multiple things as once is becoming recognised as a learning style rather than being dismissed as having no attention span. I am excited to see how institutions can start to incorporate both deep attention and hyper attention in their curriculum. A strategy that worked for me was a lecturer addressing the class and allowing us to doodle during his talks as he understood it helped some people focus better. Another strategy would be to incorporate more interactive elements to lectures and encouraging more discussion.

Dear Future Self

  • I want you to learn how to edit media
  • I want you to get better and contributing to lectures 
  • I want to learn how to critically think about films and develop the language 
  • I want to get better at not leaving work to the last minute 
  • I want to know more about gender, sex and race in media 
  • I want to learn how to use grammar correctly
  • I want to learn how to broadcast and create podcasts 
  • I want to learn more about how to write critically 
  • I want to learn about how to combine writing with other media to create a new way of presenting ideas 
  • I want to get better at sharing my work with others 
  • I want to look into joining a student newspaper or magazine
  • I want to learn about media in other areas of the world
  • I want to get better at mood and lightening
  • I want to get better at networking
  • I want to get better at presentations

by the end of this degree