Reflective Practice

Reflective Practice is a way of looking at your own work or that of others, to critically identify what we are doing and how well we are doing it. It's obviously very important that we do this so we can identify our strengths and weaknesses, and build upon them to improve in the future. We can also look at other people's work to either see why it was successful and how we can be successful in our own work, or the opposite and find out what we should avoid doing ourselves.

We were shown Gibb's Reflective Cycle which outlines how you can effectively criticise your practice/work. I find that it is a good guide to follow, and in the future I should refer to it more often when talking about my work especially when I am struggling on what to write. I think it will help me to easily identify what has gone wrong/right, and allow me to improve in the future. 

Effective Presentation Tips and Combating Presentation Anxiety

A long, long while ago, I sat through a presentation on how to give a good presentation. Where as I found a lot of the information to be self-explanatory - such as making the visuals easy on the eyes (easy to read and not using harsh colours for text/backgrounds) - I found the presentation to be extremely useful. It stressed the importance of knowing your audience,  and speaking to them as if they knew nothing about what you were presenting. This would encourage you to be informative about who you are and what you are doing/talking about, all the while being concise. But your slides shouldn't be a replacement of you, but instead be used as a way to point out key information in which you can build upon.

So Basically:

- Know your audience
- Know your subject
- Prepare yourself
- Don't use bullet points (irony)


We were also given a presentation on how to combat presentation anxiety shortly after. The nature of the presentation was practically the same, and basically told me to practice my material and try to remain calm though I did find this presentation to be a massive help when it came to doing my presentations for both Disseminate and Reflect briefs. It reminded me that I had to practice my material and to make sure I knew what I was talking about (which in hindsight I should have done more for my Disseminate presentation) and to remain calm.

Copyright ©

In yesterday's PPP session we were taught about copyright. I was aware of it's existence and that basically you shouldn't steal people's things and copy it and make it your own, but I never really knew a great deal about it, as you've probably already guessed from the description of copyright I just gave.

So lets rephrase it.

Copyright basically means that you can't copy, adapt, rent, lend, or distribute an authors work without the owners permission. If you are using the work for non-commercial reasons, for example things like education, research, private study, you don't generally need permission to use it, but you can not make copies without an agreement.

But then again there are different types of copyright that have different leways, which I had no idea existed. One example is Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a non profit organisation that provides legal frame work so that people are able to share their work and ideas. It basically allows others to take your work and tweak and distrube it provided that they credit you and licence their new work under similar terms. So basically it's a good way of getting your name out there the way I see it, as the minute the new work becomes copyrighted and they start taking credit for the entire work they are infringing the copyright licence.

I found this class very useful as I didn't have the foggiest when it came to copyright. If there's one thing that I took away from the talk is that I should start putting the copyright "stamp" on works that I am proud of, especially when I reach my second and third year of university, and because there is no registration system in the UK. So why not?

Tips for Reflection and Evaluation

Yesterday's PPP presentation was dead useful. We basically went through the do's and dont's of writing evaluations and were given some tips for when it came to reflecting and giving presentations. I have wrote quite a lot of evaluations before, but I have been out of practice for a long, long while, and I doubt that any of them would have been as important as the ones I'm going to have to write, so it was very helpful to me that we went through that, especially because I can sometimes struggle with lengthy writing tasks. It also helped clear up exactly what it is that I need to do in terms if blogging. It's something I've never done before and I've been unsure of what to write as well as what I have written being "correct". It made me realise that I am at least roughly on the right track. 

The class was short and sweet but gave me so much useful information, and made me realise the importance of annotating images and work, as well as DOCUMENTING EVERYTHING. 

So Apparently I'm a Protector?

In yesterday's PPP lecture we were analysing ourselves in two different ways. The first involved deciding on whether we considered ourselves to be an introvert or an extrovert, whether we had "sensing" or "intuition" factor, e.t.c, by looking at lists of characteristics. The four letter "word" that was generated from the choices we made was our unique personality type. The second way we did this was by looking at different aspects of our life (for example family, finance, energy) and rating them on a scale of one to ten. The purpose of this task was to see how in balance we were.

I didn't really find the first of much use. For me it was hard to decide which letter I truly fell under as there were many different characteristics that could have easily applied to me. I also felt that the descriptions were purely situational, and it was hard to choose which was the most relevant to me as it would have depended on the situation I was in. Then again, I did find it interesting to see what I was considered to be-I got INFJ, and apparently I'm a protector?- but I did however, find that the second method of self-anaylsis was much more helpful. Again, I reckon a lot of the answers I gave could have been down to the mood I was in at the time, so it wasn't necessarily more accurate than the first, but it did make me think about what I'm like as a whole and that I should consider trying to maintain or even improve the relationships I have to try and keep me content and at my happiest, and try and convert some of my negativity into something good, so I can feel more accomplished.