On Monday 6th October I arrived to the Hendon campus. I was slightly nervous about the day ahead as I wasn’t sure what to expect from the session, and found myself very overwhelmed by how big the University was. It gave me a realisation that I was actually doing an academic course and had started this new challenge.
Before we started the session we all introduced ourselves and explained a bit about what we were doing at the moment and why we wanted to do the course. It was great to meet everyone that came to the session and to hear about the different situations and backgrounds that people are coming from.
The main focus of the session was based around Web 2.0 looking at the question:
How do the Principles and practice of web-based communication support or challenge professional (arts-related) Practice?
We were asked to split up into groups and discuss this question in detail looking at the supporting arguments and the challenging arguments of how web-based communications can enhance or hinder our professional practice. Finding evidence to support our findings and then produce a power point presentation to the rest of the group.
At first our group was slightly confused. We weren’t sure where to start at first but once we starting discussing the question and started to think about how it related to us and our profession we came up with a lot of supporting and challenging arguments. We started mind-mapping our ideas and came up with three main questions. Here are some of our main thoughts:
Supporting Arguments:
- Great for Advertising/ Marketing ourselves
- Inspiration
- Ideas and suggestions
- Knowledge: Current industry news and Auditions
- Networking
Challenging Arguments:
- Privacy can be compromised
- Cannot control what information, photos of you etc. that is uploaded
- Copyright
- Become lazy and too reliant
- Getting a bias view rather than making your own opinion for example asking people about a certain company
- Reliability
- Balance of personal life and professional life is hard with social media.
Our Main Questions:
- How do we control what other people put about us?
- Are we too reliant on the internet?
- Would we be able to market ourselves/ our business as effectively without web facilities
Our mind maps
As we were short for time we could only focus on one of the questions we had. We chose.. Are we too reliant on the Internet?
We began to create our power point presentation and arranged how we would present this to the rest of the group. Overall we found that for every positive argument we had there was also a negative. We came to conclusion that we would be lost without web-based communications as it has enhanced our industry so much, however you need a balance and not become too reliant on asking for help or looking up something rather than actually going out and finding out for yourself. Use the reality that we are living rather than just using the internet all the time.
http://www.quotehd.com/Quotes/Words/Balance/15_25
Overall I found the Campus really useful. I enjoyed meeting everyone in person and gained a lot from talking through ideas and opinions with people and working together on something. I think you can gain so much with face-to-face interaction. I now feel more confident with the course and I feel I have a better understanding of what the course entails.
