Tag Archives: symposium

Symposiums

Symposium #11

One of the last discussion points which was made was about the difference between design students and media students. The fundamental difference is in the way we are taught/learn and consequently how style of thinking.

As brought up, design thinking is becoming the ‘fashionable’ thing in business schools as it brings in a new perspective. Designers are taught to engage and make things through doing. They are trained to think in terms of making things that will have some kind of effect, an effect on the future. Cultivating a ‘What if?’ thinking to explore different ideas for the future and also encourages problem solving. So in turn they are a forward looking practice. 

On the other hand, humanities subjects like media are more grounded in history and the understanding of the past. The focus on the past and leave the future abandoned. What the teachers are trying to do is move us past the technical skills and into the more conceptual thinking and problem solving. Something that takes time to build on and develop. Technical skills like editing and camera techniques are important but easier to learn. Another major difference which was brought up was that design is now very collaborative and edit and edit and edit. They show their work from the beginning and get critic on it. While perhaps thats not always the case with the humanities and we guard our work more. Although in this course I have found that feedback and peer/teacher critic has been emphasised ALOT. The new studio modal at RMIT is meant to be part of moving us forward into a method of making to see what we can do and what it can look like in the future. Soon we won’t be looking in opposite directions anymore.

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*Image via Flickr credited to Susanne Nilsson

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Symposiums

Symposium #10

Revisiting last week’s symposium I wanted to recap on some of the points discussed about the essay and the importance of feedback:

Essay

  • In relation to our assignment: To start to write differently, to even start exploring using different forms
  • A tip was to start with the traditional essay form than start breaking off into different mediums (video, audio etc.)
  • Academic writing is evidence based knowledge claims
  • Although they can still be subjective, be personal e.g. use I, relate it to yourself
  • We need to be critical not just reflective and engage with ideas to make an argument 
  • Refining the topic: The (opposite) cone shape – to start broad and explore and then slowly narrow down

Collaborating:

  • Is the basis of the media industry
  • Continuing making and re-making of projects – sharing and getting feedback from your peers – basis of how we improve
  • Not to just show things when you think it’s ‘perfect’
  • Blogs – “public making, public writing, public learning”

 

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Symposiums

Symposium week 6

One of the questions from this week’s symposium was:

What is the untapped potential of hypertext?  Will we ever be satisfied with it?

It led to discussion about books vs. online and if they have shape. In last week’s symposium we discussed how everything online is equally distanced. So receiving news from the US would would the same as from the UK. This is opposite to a book of course as we can’t change the distance we have to a country physically. He went on to say that it doesn’t have a shape because it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end. I liked Beatty’s point that it “shape shifts”.

Code as the material from has shape but the content doesn’t have shape? Or perhaps we create the shape of the content. We chose which links we will go to next and where it stops and ends because there is no set structure. There is a point that can be made that it doesn’t matter if you read a book from page 1 then skip to page 10 but there is already a set structure within it.

Due to the form of the hypertext world, we are encouraged to link to other things, the more the better almost as we are fulfilling the form. There are new set rules for the medium that are different to books. They don’t need a beginning, middle and end because there are forever linking to other things. However we can choose when to stop reading or where we start reading and I think that is where part of the confusion comes from.

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Symposiums

First post

Last semester when we kept a journal it was easy for me to write pages of material. It was unfiltered and I was writing for myself. As mentioned in the first reading “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning.” by Adrian Miles, a blog needs more care put into it. It is opening us up to an ecology where we are connecting and interacting with different ideas and blogs. We become people who “participate” not just “consume”.

The one idea that I was unfamiliar with was the this term of seeding and in the content of the reading that our blog writing needed to be ‘seeded’ by a range of tasks. Adrian discusses in the reading this tipping point where our writing and blog “shifts from becoming assessable, teacher set activities to their own online writing spaces”.

At this stage it’s still the beginning.

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