Digital Practice - Week 1A

During our first session in digital practice, I was quite nervous. The reason for this is because it was a completely new course and from the slides that I read, everything seemed really complicated. However, Charlie went through the slides and explained with details how the course is going to roll.

What I found really comforting, is the fact that our tutor took some time to introduce himself and actually talk to us about the kind of work he has done. It is always really important to know who is teaching you, in order to be able to build trust with them. Apart from that, it's nice to see and learn from the work of a fellow artist. Inspiration is really important in this industry!

The lecture was three hours long and it was basically separated into four parts:

• Introduction
• Digital Research 
• Explanation of the timetable and the assignments
• Discussing and planning our digital adventure.

As I mentioned before, at the beginning of the lesson we talked about the course but also for Charlie's work. 

In order for us to understand better what we are actually going to do in this course, we got separated into groups of five and we were assigned with different questions. My team had the question:

"What was the memex machine?"

As a team, we had to create a Google Document and start finding information about the memex in fifteen minutes. Even though it was a really interesting topic to research, and I definitely "absorbed" all the knowledge that my team and I wrote down, I would prefer it if it was more interactive. More specifically, it really bothered me that we were all sat in front of our computers, not talking at all, and just exchanging information through a digital document. If we had to do this activity again, it would be nice to split the time between the screen and actually talking in real life. Personally, I believe I would have learned more things and I would have the chance to discuss this topic with my teammates. 

What made this experience worth it though, was the fact that the majority of the team worked and found the information needed to answer the question, when usually in a group project there are one or two people doing the work. Thus, the course is actually called "Digital Practice" so it's obvious that we are going to use online forms to complete different tasks. 

Here is a picture of the memex and a screenshot of what information each of us found:

                                                                   Source: Here

From the four different fonts, you can tell that it was edited by different people.

After all the teams finished researching their topics, a member from each group shared with the class the different answers that their team found and with our tutor's help, we got a thorough answer to all these different questions. 

During the third part of the session, we talked about the following lectures and what is going to happen next. Our schedule seemed pretty straight forward and actually pretty well organized. 

Apart from that, Charlie explained to us how we are going to work around our assignments and the due dates. At first, it made me really nervous to think about all these stuff, but a few minutes later, he gave us full details on how we are going to make our blogs and how we are going to operate them. I've never made a blog before and I find it so interesting and entertaining. I'm not going to lie, I feel like I'm exposing myself, sharing all this information but at the same time I know that it's something made mainly for my course. 

Overall, I can say with confidence that, even though I wasn't expecting it, I gained a lot from my first lecture: from what a memex is, to actually making my own personal blog and run it myself. As far as it concerns the fourth and last part of the lecture, there will be a different post about it, explaining in detail what we did, what I learned and how I reflect on it. 

See you on my next post:)