Monthly Archives: January 2014

Learning to blog

We spent our Networked Media class on Wednesday learning some simple skills to make the design of our blogging better.

As I’m also trying to learn to code at the moment, it’s a little easier for me. Although there aren’t options to change things like font and size of font through the ‘Add Post’ application, I can do it through the option to use HTML.

So things like changing font and changing the size of font and even the colour of text, is relatively easy.

Lucky me. Maybe soon I’ll be adding mini web apps?

On design fiction- my first impression

So, design fiction. Who knew that was a thing?

I’ve contemplated what the future will look like, both online and off. What new things will exist, how will they impact the world and how will it all impact me-particularly in the work force?

I mean, the iPhone didn’t exist until just seven years ago and look at us now!

I really think it’s interesting that, as Matthew Ward pointed out in this article,  everything that we create now, is not for now. It is for the future. The plans that we have for our ideas are all fictional, until they either do or don’t come into reality. If an idea actualises, it will be seen, read and used in the future; and will have implications, however small, on other work for years to come.

It makes sense to fictionalise a world in which our idea lives and breathes. To prepare. To adapt in advance. To better the idea for the future before it even exists in the present.

Design fiction has a lot of benefits. By moving from reality into a fictional narrative, new realms and possibilities are unleashed. As Ward says:

“By focussing on the speculative and fictional, design is no longer constrained by the practical reality of todays material and economic restrictions.”

There’s also the fact that with design fiction we can predict and prepare for the success or failure of an idea.

For me, personally, I think it’s important to design a fictional industry in order to prepare for it. The industry that I have always planned to work in is advertising, but the ad industry has changed profoundly since I fell in love with it and will continue to change as I prepare myself to (hopefully) enter into the field.

Design fiction could be a way of preparing myself for a rapidly changing industry, to be ready for everything because I’ve fictionalised the changing world in advance. Design fiction could also play a part enhancing my ideas while I study and learn.

And just check out this design fiction from the other reading.

It is taking a product that doesn’t exist yet, but may very soon, and is already looking at how it could work and the impact it could have on our lives. Very cool.

My Work

By day I’m a uni student, by night, weekend and the very early hours of the morning, I’m a freelance events photographer and videographer.

This is an example of what I do.

In the process of doing what I do, I’ve become better at it, as with everything that people do.

Something I’m not the best at is promoting my work online. I don’t have a large online presence in relation to my events work other than basic adverts on particular websites.

I hope to use my freelance events work as way to practice what I learn in my Networked Media class. It is extremely relevant as far as professional progression of my current occupation and might also help with the development of a career in advertising which I hope to enter into.

But I’m stuck, I don’t know where to start. My interest range is so broad and wedding videography is so distant from both social media and advertising that I’m not really sure how to connect them. That’s something I will need to overcome and I’ll have to generate ideas in order to do so. And soon.

From Mr Adrian Miles himself

The other reading for our Networked Media class was on the benefits of blogging in media education (link here).

This reading is, of course, a little more relevant to our media course than the one I blogged about in the previous post. It is after all the explanation as to why the students in my Networked Media class are all writing blogs so closely interlocked with what we study in class.

I do definitely see the value in keeping an academic blog, the use of which Adrian Miles really pushes for in the piece. Even if no one else reads it, it is a great resource for I alone; particularly with tagging and categorising, the blogging community, the ability to create different media content and make use of the other technical aspects of blogging.

My issue with it is exactly as was pointed out in the reading,

“…even with the best of intentions if the use of the blog is not strongly integrated into the learning and assessable outcomes of a subject then students will, deservedly, recognise that it simply isn’t worth their while and will treat it as a rote activity.” (Miles, p2)

I need to know that I’m utilising the blog to my greatest advantage, and to do that takes more effort than I might sub-conciously be willing to give to such a new and long term tool. Long term in that the profits of blog use would be long term rather than short term rewards, which makes habits so much easier to stick to.

This is my blog, my academic blog and not my personal blog. It seems wrong to separate the two and I’d prefer not to, but I have to. I’ll link my other blogs in my blogroll later today.

I hope to use this blog in particular to my fullest advantage for learning. Not just learning the things we cover in Networked Media, but also things that I want to learn for myself. I’ll use it in the ways that we discussed in the workshop and as Adrian Miles discusses in the reading for this week.

My other concern with this is that I keep forgetting that it is public. I feel as if I’m writing to myself and so I’m writing as if I am. I forget that there is an audience, even if it’s an audience of one they don’t want to read something that sounds like my journal.

Or perhaps that’s just my style of writing?

It’s 1am, I’ll find out tomorrow.

Noticing… what?

In all honestly I’d never even taken any special notice of the word ‘notice’ once at all in my life before reading this weeks reading. I’ve never seen the word come up so many times in a novel, let alone each paragraph of Mason’s piece.

I agree with Mason that we don’t notice most of the stimuli which we encounter in each day, but I think it would be less productive than more to start noticing pens and doorways as he suggests.

I really liked what was said about conversation. In any conversation that I may not be interested in, or having heard a friend say something that I don’t agree with, I often notice my body language change despite my own efforts to seem positive and engaged. It’s something I notice but something I can’t change.

So in a way, noticing personal action might be good but it also might just enhance anxiety. Who knows. I really think I ought to talk to my psychologist about this.

Any reading that needs to be brought up with my psychologist is either very good or very bad. And where is Mr Wilde in all of this?

It is in my practice to interpret readings into my own language and point of view in order to learn, and this is what I took from Mr Mason’s ideas:

  • Notice beauty, enhance your creativity.
  • Notice new things, interesting things, to enhance creativity.
  • Notice the language, spoken and unspoken, of other people, to understand them better for selfish reasons and unselfish reasons.
  • Notice yourself, your behaviour, to better yourself.
  • Take note of those things that happen that might be of some significance to you in the future, and reflect on them to gain full use of that incident.

I really don’t see what this has to do with my learning though. Self-development, maybe, but learning information, not so much.

I have however noticed myself not noticing things more than usual recently, so I will in the future try to be more ‘mindful’ than ‘mindless.’

The article, Researching Your Own Practice, by John Mason, can be read here.

Networked Media and I

This post should really be titled, “The Internet and I”. It has been a long ride; the Internet and I were both born in 1993, we grew up together.

The first encounter that I can remember between the Internet and I was when I was very small. We had a huge, chunky desktop computer sitting on the floor in a vacant room in our house and I would use it to play Pong. Then Mum said that we had a new-fangled thing and we dialed up and connected to the Internet.

It was extremely limited at the time. I can’t even remember what I accessed. Back then you consumed content from the Internet, you didn’t create it. It was too boring for me.

The next encounter that I recall was the exhilarating website, Neopets. It was also my first experience with social media. And this was where my obsession with the internet began. I was hooked from www dot.

Then there was, Myspace, a brief and embarrassing stint with Bebo and Wikipedia. Then I realized that I could actually learn something from the internet. I discovered blogs and followed link after link, saving pretty picture after picture through the shallow surfaces of the Internet.

And of course, there was the invention of Facebook. It changed everything, and developed at around the same time that the smart phone changed everything. Now everyone has a Facebook profile, I use it to keep in touch with my friends in India who can’t afford a phone.

The Internet is the future. It can’t be denied. But what exactly it will look like in the future no one can know. It, like me, has grown and changed and learned so much in the past 20 years of its life. I’m looking forward to the lessons in Network Media that might help me to keep up, I don’t want this magical and complicated thing called the Internet to out grow me.