One of my favourite albums of all time – Hold Your Colour by Australian/British Drum and Bass group Pendulum – is great for several reasons, but I’ve always loved the genre’s quirk for using samples and sound bites from the most obscure sources.
Category Archives: Opinion
How do I learn?
TL;DR I will listen intently, scrap useless crap, relate meaningful nuggets of information, recognise it in the everyday
With the start of the semester, Networked Media, and the first ‘unlecture’ in particular, I want to ask myself a very pertinent question: How do I learn? How exactly do I attend to, absorb, and synthesise information, regardless of whether it’s a formal context or not.
What prompted me to think about the very first step of the learning process – attending – was highlighted in this document written by a reporter for the Washington Post, Anne Hull (link may only be accessible by RMIT students). In short the lesson she imparts with for budding journalists is pay attention. Not just to one thing, or the subject relevant to your story, but everything and I feel that this is extremely relevant, even for classroom learning, at least the way I learn. What is the teacher saying? How are they saying it? Are they emphasising anything? Are they biased toward one opinion or another? Are their claims or facts entirely true? Is there a better way to word the information? Continue reading
I Bought a Communication Device, on a Communication Device
I bought a new mobile phone online last week, as is quite common nowadays. You can buy virtually anything online, given you can afford the extortionist international shipping, and it occurred to me after my lavish purchase that I just bought a device I’ll eventually use for communication, on a platform deigned for communication. It was an odd moment of clarity in the modern world.
It was amusingly ironic, but fascinating at the same time, that we can basically reach out to any built up area of the world and buy something with money that’s now mostly digital in nature (and, really, doesn’t exist in traditional terms, but that’s another discussion for another day). Not only is it amazing, but it’s unbelievably convenient. Harking back to what Adrian mentioned in the first ‘Unlecture’ about how rapidly technology has evolved since the 80’s, we now have a luxury of communication and economy that would have been thought inconceivable 50 years ago. You could have probably ordered for something to be delivered in the mid-20th Century I’m sure, but those purchases would have been much more scarce and much more thoughtful, as opposed to today where I can order a gummy bear weighing 5 pounds<http://www.vat19.com/dvds/worlds-largest-gummy-bear.cfm> on a whim.
You can update your mobile phone credit, organise your imaginary money, communicate, all of that internet stuff. It was really simply a moment of realisation of what it means to live in the modern first world, and how trivial geographic distance is now.
Blogging for the modern day lunatic
Blogging is generally a more alien thing for me. Over the course of my formal education at Primary and Secondary level the standard of archiving information was analog – paper, books, pens, pencils, filing cabinets, textbooks (redundant editions) etcetera etcetera – and with very limited motor skills in the handwriting department I became very quickly jaded of writing things down. Towards the latter end of High School I was long past sick and tired of having to manually scrawl out 2000 words using the diminishable and lossy medium of pencil and paper, where I could type the same 2000 words at least twice as quickly, ultimately leaving me more time for proof reading and editing. Unfortunately that was the standard, and it put me off my learning just a weeny bit because of it.
This left me with a rather sour habit of not taking notes on a regular basis, and subsequently, it’s made me very mental, quite literally. I think fast and talk fast, so analog inscription is insufficient for note taking or writing. Unfortunately, I have also neglected a digital medium to achieve this.
How does blogging come into this then? Well after about 6 or 7 attempts at it, all eventually failing by the ways of quiet starvation I feel this current blog – as a requirement to pass the subject, hence the degree, and I do want to pass spectacularly – will finally kick me in the arse and prompt me to properly articulate my ideas in the form of media be it the English language, visual, or aural media. Ideally this will encourage me to be more thorough with any ideas I have, and decide to capitalise on; blogging then, I feel, is the perfect medium for me to properly articulate them, share them, and best case, receive feedback and criticism, which encourages further refining of the original idea.
Likewise I am very glad that RMIT in particular is embracing a more digital mode of teaching – such as the recent addition to the system allowing us to print from any device to any printer – which simply gives us more freedom as students. A strong, multi-block wi-fi signal is immensely useful when outside of class for communication, and I would love to see the Blog become a standard for personal academic notation and discussion across all subjects, as to replace some more basic marking systems like weekly reading logs to force students to engage with readings, rather than encouraging them to relate it to their own knowledge.
Edit: I noticed after writing this Adrian poses reasons for using blogging in education (in a much more articulate way) and it’s benefits in his article Blogs in Media Education,