Documenting the learning process
As an educator involved in not just teaching the conceptualization and production of cinematic media but also designing courses and education programs that attempt to engage more fully with everything cinematic media can be, its often very easy (somewhat ironically) to become divorced from the learning process itself. In other words, spending so long as the teacher focused on the teaching that you lose an intimate sense of what it is to be learner and the process of learning.
I stumbled across this blog site, called
Video Student Guy, which i have found enormously fascinating as a way to see in detail the journey-like process of learning through the direct eyes (or, rather, the podcast voice) of a student. The author is a student at the
Centre for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston Universityand he posts a very regular podcast on-line detailing what he has learnt that week both technical and conceptual his thoughts, ideas and even philosophical musings on the moving image and the process of learning how to create it.
The truth is much of the author's perspectives on the media production industry are very naive and ill-informed. But this is absolutely not a criticism, instead rather its actually the point! The power of the podcasts from week to week is the steady evolution of the author's ideas, knowledge and perspectives. Seeing how they grow, mature, expand and evolve is watching the learning process in action.
The blog really is a superb example of the empowerment of self-reflective learning; I have no doubt in believing that the blog's author will gain far more form his education as a result of making the blog and indeed may well learn more form his own blogging analysis than he will from the classes themselves. Perhaps not immediately but certainly in the long term.
In the meantime I already feel a better educator from being able to step outside the teaching box every now and then to watch, from a students perspective, the process of learning about the moving image.
Posted at 01:00AM Jul 25, 2007
by Mike Jones in media education |
