The Random Word blog has been really useful to distribute course materials and broaden out the curriculum. The students have contributed a lot to it’s success and left very valuable comments.
Lets see where it goes next year! Creativity
Dave
The recent showcase of work by Design & Media students at North Ayrshire Campus was a great success. Work was of the usual high standard and received lots of positive feedback from guests and visitors to the exhibition.
I know that you media pros are really just going to be interested in the break-up of Katie Price and Peter Andre but there have been other stories in the news.
Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, has spoken out to defend the BBC licence fee in the face of political pressure from David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party. What is interesting is the insight into the way he sees the media landscape developing over the next 5-10 years and the way he’s positioning the BBC as a support for commercial media in this time of transition. The article, Director General defends BBC licence fee, is at the top of the TV & Radio section of ‘Media Downloads’.
However, the best story is the surprise winner of four prestigious Sony Radio Awards, Brixton prison radio station, ‘Electric Radio Brixton’. Their tagline is, “Making waves behind bars”. Brilliant!
Dave
Three new articles in the Media Downloads section that you may find interesting.
In the New Media section there’s the rationale behind this week’s shock story that The Guardian is dropping the print version of the newspaper and will henceforth publish on Twitter.
In the Discussion section we have a warning that social networking sites such as Beebo and Facebook could be causing psychological damage that will create selfish and deficient young people .
In the same section there is also a marvellous article on why teenagers do what they do, i.e. drive their parents up the wall! Dropping wet towels on the bathroom floor, arguing and staying up late is just evidence that teenagers are actually the pinnacle of evolution.
Enjoy
Dave
“More haste, less speed…” I’ve heard it since I was wee, I know the sense in it well enough, so why did I think it would be different this time…
A couple of weeks ago I put together a PowerPoint slide show to introduce a new unit I was teaching to the 1st yr Photographers. It was about Environment and the subject interested me a lot. Just what do we mean when we discuss environment in photography? Are we just talking about pretty landscapes or should we be thinking in terms of environmental issues? What about someone’s personal space or their working environment? Surely these are things that help to define a person so should the environment of a portrait be part of the discussion?
Brilliant! This was a nice, meaty subject to get into and an excuse to study stacks of fantastic images by photographers that I admire. So why the problem?
Well, I love looking at pictures. I get inspired by the insight and creativity of people who are masters of their craft. I’m moved by the stories they bring me and the eloquence of their vision and I look at the work and think, “I would love to have taken that. If only I had the time…”
And that’s the problem; Time! There’s never enough of it to do all the stuff I have to do. So, I look through my photo books and I search the web, I scan, I copy and I put together a magnum opus of a PowerPoint with stunning images that will excite and inspire my students.
Job done? Sadly, no. When I show it in class it’s running too long and as we discuss the topic I can see a better structure emerging. Ok, that’s to be expected and just a fairly straightforward editing job. The spanner in the works is that in my haste to put together the show I didn’t properly record all the caption information and references. Without that information I can’t make it available online.
I know from experience how difficult and time consuming it can be to go back and find sources and cross-reference for accuracy, and even as I did it I knew that skipping the references would come back and bite me on the bum.
Well, as I write this, it is now two weeks to the day since I made up that P/Point. It has taken me that long to gather all the information and track down the web sources. Ok, I’ve not been at it full-time, but I have had to push other things aside to do it. One thing that caused delays and really surprised me was the number of inaccurate accreditations I came across on the web. Not just people making errors with dates, (lots), but a fair number getting the title of a work completely mixed-up with another picture. There were even a few where famous images had been credited to the wrong photographer!
You may think it’s not that big a deal but stop for a moment to consider the implications. If I give twenty students the wrong information and they subsequently repeat it to friends at the camera club, publish it on their blogs and write it into their research, the error quickly propagates and becomes ‘fact’. After all, the students have been taught it at college so it must be true. That small error is now distorting history and the longer it exists the more damage it will do. That’s bad enough but if, as will eventually happen, someone questions it and points out the mistake, everyone identified with having spread the ‘fact’ will be tarnished as unreliable.
On another level, how would you feel if a fantastic picture you had taken was credited to someone else? That someone else could be getting paid or gaining reputation that should rightly belong to you. It’s not fair, is it? Try to use reliable sources and never quote information from a blog site as fact without cross-referencing. (This site excepted, of course! 
)
So, I’ve managed to remind myself, (again!!!), why taking short-cuts is unprofessional and always ends-up costing you more. It also confirms that I’m right to nag you lot about references and accuracy. It is important and we all have a responsibility and self-interest in maintaining high standards. Here endeth the lesson…
If you’re interested, the show has been edited and annotated and can now be downloaded from the Photo Downloads Environment section, here.
Enjoy!
Dave
So Graded Unit is finally here and HNC students (yes, that’s you lot) have the opportunity to produce a sensational piece of work to complete you course and for your portfolio.
I will be working with all four class groups - Visual Communication, Photography, 3D: Interior Design and Communication with Media, so am in a fortunate position to see the fantastic work being created right across our department. This also means I can help with a sort of ‘creative matching service’ - think about collaboration which might make your project easier, more professional or even just more fun!
Speaking of fun - the Vis Comm class want to organise a night out and you are all invited. Bowling was mentioned. Details to follow very soon.
Back to work. Your lecturers know all the strategies and tips for successfully completing this project. Do you? Please respond to this post with your top tip for other students and tell them what your project is going to involve. Also try to keep this post active and support each other over the next 10 weeks.
Janet (the bad cop)
Sorry for the time away from my post (geddit! ;-)) but we’ve all been very, very busy these past few weeks. So, to make up for my absence I’m reprinting the following article in full ‘cos I think it says a lot about where all the media industries are right now and the difficulties they have coming to terms with a digital world. This is the environment you’re all going to be working in and you need to figure out what’s just old media baggage and what’s going to give you a distinctive edge in a crowded, noisy, chaotic digital media cloud…
Dave
Andrew Brown
The Guardian, Wednesday 11 March 2009
The news that Google is spending $7m on newspaper ads all round the world makes me, as a newspaper journalist, feel as if it were Christmas: but a snowy, cold Christmas, and I am a peasant whom King Wenceslas has seen gathering scraps of wood with which to boil a nourishing pot of water.
Now the king - or Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman - rides out from his castle with his page and graciously orders him to give me a meal taken from the luxurious dinner in the great hall. Well, it’s delicious, all right. Don’t think I am complaining. But once the king has gone, and I am once more huddled in the draughty hut he will still be the king, and I the peasant sharecropper.
The great difference between a king and a peasant is not that one has enough to eat and the other does not. That’s important, but it could change, were it not for the really important difference, which is that the king can at any time take away what the peasant has to eat, whereas the peasant has no power against the king. He doesn’t even really own the products of his own labours, and he certainly doesn’t own the king’s snowy waste that he picks over for a few sticks of firewood.
That is where the newspaper business fears it will find itself as it moves online. In the new world, we will all be sharecroppers for Google. In the old days, people paid for their newspapers. In the future, so far as anyone can see, they will not pay for anything that they do not get direct from advertisers and the function of news is merely to attract people to advertisements. That has always been truer than journalists would like to believe. But in the new wintry world of the internet, this cold truth forms, like the snow, the background to everything we see.
Of course there are plenty of journalists who write for the attention. But I suspect that most of them have thought the attention was directed at them, and for their benefit; not at the ads behind them. Only the people who made money from newspapers understood how they made money. Lord Beaverbrook even coined a law expressing his secret: “Any journalist may be replaced by any other journalist.”
But the people who make money from news now don’t own the papers. They own Google and their motto might be one step beyond Lord Beaverbrook’s: “Any newspaper may be replaced by any other newspaper.”
This doesn’t make Google malevolent, any more than the sainted King Wenceslas was malevolent. He owned his castle, and his peasants, and if he didn’t, someone else would. Sure enough, the real Wenceslas was slaughtered by his brother, and though Google looks much more secure than that it would be silly to bet on its still being the company that owns the marketplace in 50 years’ time. By then people may not even know that they are entering a marketplace when they type, or talk on to a screen or perhaps a holographically configured section of the local air. They will just suppose that the air is full of magic. But it’s a sure bet that someone will be making money off the magic, and it won’t be us.
And now Google is moving into the book trade. These advertisements are part of its plan to digitise the contents of almost all the important libraries in the world and make their contents available for free. The copyright holders, at whom the legal-notice ads are directed, will be paid out of a licensing arrangement, as if they were musicians being broadcast over the radio. Speaking as someone who last year made £37.50 from public lending right, I can see a snag in this plan, but that is hardly Google’s fault.
If new book publishing ever moves into purely electronic forms, writers will be even worse off, because printing a book turned out a really resilient, simple, and widely accepted form of copy protection. If books are ever as easily copied as digital music, it will be dreadful news for anyone who writes them.
A brief and frightening glimpse of the future there was provided by the bankruptcy of one of Amazon’s suppliers in Bristol last month, who left a warehouse of books for anyone to collect for free. Sure enough, hundreds of people turned up and filled their cars. Does anyone really think these collectors will spend more money on other books as a result? Yet that is the argument that boosters of music piracy constantly make.
No: for a market to exist there must be laws and the means to enforce them. Peasants feared bad kings, but they feared anarchy more, and with good reason. Google, like Wenceslas, seems set to be a good, wise king, strong and not too rapacious. I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords.
Andrew Brown blogs for the Guardian at Comment is free: belief
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Hi Everyone
Just to say that this is the first time I have used a blog and I like it!
I managed to visit an exhibition which was held in the Peoples Palace in Glasgow.
It was an exhibition of work of Higher Art Pupils from across Scotland.
Although the exhibition was small it was really great to see he diverse nature of the exhibits and to note the general standard of Higfher Art work.
Particularly of interest was the research work leading up to final pieces.Im always banging on about research to my classes as it is such an important part of the creative process -ideas dont come out of the air and land on your desk you have to get your inspiration from sound research. The eureka moment usually happens during this process.
It was interesting to see the rest of the exhibits in the Peoples Palace but Im afraid it was all a bit tired and dusty and in urgent need of an overhaul.
I also enjoyed seeing Templetons Carpet factory which is now a business centre in fact I worked for a design company there called Doges Design ,this name coming from the Doges Palace in Italy on which the factorys facade was modelled.
Well I hope this is of interest =.
Hazel
Yup, it’s a fact - you are eighteen weeks through a thirty six week academic year. Amazing how quickly the weeks go by! I thought it might be useful to mark this halfway point by asking you all to take a little time to review how well you think you’re doing and what you think of your course. This should be a useful exercise all round and I would appreciate the feedback. We have new courses running this year and there will inevitably be things that haven’t gone quite the way we expected, both from your point of view as a learner and from ours as perpetually grumpy lecturers. It’s important that we get your perspective.
When you post your comments think about where you were when you started. Are you surprised at how much you’ve done in four months? What have been the highlights? Do you think you’ve made the most of your time here? Can you remember all the new things you’ve learned or are you still confused? Have you had moments of revelation? Have you made new friends? Are you more confident? Is the course what you expected?
Stick your course title at the start of your comment. You can post anonymously if you wish but I would hope you all feel involved enough in the School that you can speak freely. Be critical where you think things could have been better but please try to be constructive. This is an opportunity to try and change things for the better, not to indulge in a thoughtless rant. “Think before you ink”, is a useful adage in these circumstances. Equally, let us know what has worked for you so we can try to do more of it.
Dave
While Dave’s away the Photographers get to play… The worksheets for the 5×4 and Photo Reproduction tasks are available from the drop.io site. Password: jwc100
The files to downlowd are:
I have also emailed copies to Greg and Janet.
Enjoy!
Dave
