Category: Reading Responses

Writing stuffs week 5 Reading Response

Taking away from this weeks reading, what I found interesting and the main feature that stuck with me afterwards was how schools teach us how to write essays and how to analyse Shakespeare’s plays and Sylvia Plath’s poetry when they should be teaching us how to analyse current events and how to write more beneficial work such as business reports and briefing strategies etc.

When I think of an essay I think back to high school where Essays revolved around books and poetry we read and how we had to write 1000 words on the symbolism of blue in Sylvia Plath’s poetry and what is the meaning of the children killing Piggy in Lord of the Flies? This weeks reading touches upon beneficial teaching in high school and how when we go for jobs we don’t know how to write up a report in excel because how would we, we only learnt how to write essays in high school.

Having the ability to write an essay is good for passing your uni course and getting a good mark in VCE, but realistically having the ability to write an essay does not mean you will know how to write up a business plan for your future career.

I do agree that essays and the strict structure that you must follow whilst writing an essay, especially when in school, helps develop organised thinking and does allow us to understand and explore the ideas behind a topic, however I feel that we must keep our children up to date with the structure of todays world where we don’t write essays for work, we write reports and fact sheets and having those abilities will help us obtain jobs. Not being able to analyse poetry to the point of understanding what the double entendre is.

 

Design Fiction

I never really got into science fiction as a kid. I wasn’t interested in Star Wars films or Star Trek, however as technology has become more advanced I find  I am more interested in the future possibilities that lie ahead. I don’t know if that has just come with age or the fact that whilst in the depths of the internet it’s easy to stumble across ideas and design concepts.

It is a lot easier these days to communicate your concepts and show them to the world with the click of a button compared to let’s say ten years ago where you had to publish papers and know the right people in order to get your work noticed. Nowadays anyone can create a design concept of science fiction which could well and truly be reality in years ahead.

For example in ‘Space Odyssey’ an American 1968 science fiction film, there are scenes of what looks like the subjects of the film are holding iPads way before Apple had even developed the concept or produced their iPad. Back in 1968 this was such a futuristic concept that was considered so undoable at the time it was science fiction. Now many families own iPads and other similar technology which doesn’t faze us because that is where our world is in technology at the moment.

Dubai has probably one of the fastest growing businesses and are constantly developing designs that were once consider science fiction but now just amazing architectural work! For instance the underwater hotel in Dubai breaks all boundaries and presents such an advanced hotel experience to the public. The work is not finished, the design has been made and construction is currently being undertaken.

If you told your Grandparents, or even your parents that you could go and spend your holiday sleeping under the ocean surface, they would laugh at you because it ‘wasn’t possible’…well guess what, more and more is becoming possible everyday! Even the development of a hotel in space is under way! Who knows what we will be achieving within the next ten years!

Space Odyssey vs. Ipad

 

The Discipline of Noticing

I found that ‘readers guide’ to Forms of noticing was pretty straightforward and was just a repetition of what I already knew, however spiked my thought in regards to the forms of noticing, essence of noticing and the more technical terms of noticing. I was however interested in the types of noticing- i.e ordinary noticing- Seeing something that you can recollect afterwards and make a ‘mental note’ to remember for future reference. Whether intentionally or not.

In relation to how to remember what you have noticed, I found that part of the article interesting, however, I do that already. So found myself wanting to skim over the section in search for something that I didn’t already know.

What I liked about this reading, is that it made me think back over my day and I tried to force myself to remember the visual things that I did and saw. I remember the visual image of sitting on the tram and looking at Federation square, however I don’t know why my brain chose to remember these visuals considering they are unimportant to my daily life. Yet it made me consider the fact that I catch trams and have to detour to federation square almost everyday, so the visuals that I see have been somewhat engraved into my brain as I see these surroundings very often. I don’t notice that I am noticing if that makes sense…

As well as noticing my environmental surroundings I began to be very conscoius of my own actions. My room mate pointed out to me the other day that I have a certain ‘stand’ when I’m in the kitchen. When she pointed that out to me I found myself doing it everywhere! I would stand a certain way whilst waiting for my tram or whilst waiting in line. I began to think of all the other things that I do that I don’t notice, but other people do.

Let’s just say I am very conscious of noticing things at the moment because of this reading! However, like everything, I will soon forget about noticing the little things and go back to living like I did before.

This lead my thoughts onto memories and what our brain chooses to remember. The earliest memory I can find is the memory of sitting on our old leather couch in Malvern with my best friend and next door neighbour when I was about five years old. That’s it, that’s my memory. It’s not a drastic part of my life and I guess I have no real reason as to why I should remember this part of my childhood, but I do. As I tried to consider the possibilities as to why my brain has chosen to remember this I began to wonder whether we have control over our memories.

Do we remember things because we have seen pictures and this confuses our brains into remembering the event? And why do we remember some things and not others?

Blogs in Media Education

I chose to explore Blogs in Media Education mainly because after reading Chris Argyris’s ‘theories of action, double-loop learning and organisational learning’ the encyclopaedia of informal education, I found this article to be more my range of understanding as the technical terms in Chris Argyris’s reading were too complicated and confusing for me to understand.

I was particularly interested in the mention to ‘google’ and how everyone googles everything these days and google is our source to find and discover blogs. An interesting point made was how we as employees google our employers before job interviews but don’t consider the fact that they google us too. They find our Facebooks our personal blogs or tumblr’s, and this, a lot of the time can help convince or deter businesses from employing us.

Another interesting point brought up was how when we created blogs or repost links on public forums or social websites, we rarely think of copyright and who made it. Not sure if I should be ashamed or not as I have a tumblr account which is a popular form of blogging and reposting pictures, videos, audio tracks and gifs which I frequently ‘visit’ to show a  representation of my interests and likes etc. I never think of the source of the image and simply aim to collect work (images mainly) that share similar themes and relationships, or simply because I liked the look of the work.

Interestingly, I like how universities like RMIT university are taking a radical change to their education and using blogs in classes for students which is a modern and easy way for students to post their work without having to print off and hand in their works and opinions which can be very time consuming. I have also found being a first year Media student, when I have group assignments in class, we immediately add each other on facebook and create an event in order to post comments and important notifications in relation to our project.

I don’t know if blogs are just a fad at the moment considering almost everyone has one these days, but can’t imagine what new form of media will overtake blogs. It is becoming easier and easier to create blogs as the templates are already encoded for many and all we have to do is ‘customise’ the page to make it our own. You don’t need to be the smartest cookie to create a blog page anymore which is why more and more people are creating them.