5th POI Session feedback -Design Implementation Blogging

We had the fifth session on the online professional identities project last week with Mark Wells teaching Design Implementation - Blogging.

Although this was about blogging design, Mark integrated many of the topics from the previous session The Objective Design Process, and Mark found the feedback from the previous session really useful and constructive and was able to apply this feedback to the structure of this session. There were a few things that I thought worth noting, in terms of topics of conversation and areas of interest we could carry forward: 

Independence:

Students on the POI project expressed a need to be more independent with their online practice, professional identities development, they said they wanted to be taught this kind of ‘real world’ training from the beginning of their course and did not see the value of being forced into UAL web environments (like UAL blogs and e-portfolios) to create there professional online profiles as they saw this as pointless as they want to continue with there online web presence after UAL and saw transferring these environments as too problematic.

Web environments

The group really would like to do more work in understanding the basic of web environments; we talked about the pros and cons of different types of blogs and web sites:

• UAL and External environments (Free and Paid for)
• How much to pay? Costs, monthly costs how to keep price down e.g. go for fancy ready made website all bells and whistles and pay high monthly costs and have no way out or look into DIY approach, be more in control, get your own server (these are examples only not our recommendation: http://www.eukhost.com/ and http://www.justhost.com/  learn how to manage files (FTP), learn coding HTML and CSS, invest in one payment tempalets for all you bells and whistles - http://themeforest.net/ .
• Proprietary software and open source what are the benefits and Challenges? See What is a Drupal and what is open source.

Some feedback from the online form from PDP Staege 3 and MA students:

Did the ‘Design Implementation - Blogging’ session cover everything you expected, was it useful?

• I found this session incredibly helpful as it took me through a step-by-step guide on something that I knew was important but had never been exposed to or tried before. As someone who finds technology intimidating, I found this to be a very user-friendly class and one which boosted my enthusiasm for creating an online persona.
   
• Yes, this was my first of these sessions and I found myself feeling motivated during and after the session to put my work online. It was incredibly useful to have not only the practicalities of blogging but the idea of it broken down making it accessible as it wasn't before.

What other UAL or non-UAL web training & support like this are you aware of or is available to you?

• None

Any other comments/feedback please?

• It was incredibly helpful to have us work on our own blogs with our own laptops as it forced me into taking part - once I was thrown in at the deep end I realised that it was not as scary as I had always thought. This method of teaching was therefore highly effective.
   
• Sessions like these are incredibly important as they encourage students to think more carefully about their work, the way it is presented and the way it will be received. As a result of understanding how to put an online profile together, I believe that students will be more aware and motivated to understand and use the film and photography equipment on offer in an attempt to make their work look as good as possible and in turn the quality of the work being produced and being presented will reach a high standard equal to that of professionals. Well, one can only hope!

Some useful likes from previous session:

Please look at these online Web/Code training sites

• Lynda.arts.ac.uk
• http://jsbin.com/
• http://www.codecademy.com/learn
• http://www.w3schools.com/html/
• http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_intro
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element
• https://webmaker.org/en-US/
• https://www.khanacademy.org/cs