A timely reminder for our current third year students (and all students really) regarding the importance of maintaining your course blogs. When you're drilling down into your projects, updating your blogs can feel like 'extra work' or the bit of the course you can allow to slide for a while. I just want to re-clarify the role of your blog for any of you who are underestimating its value - or more likely, have just become a little bit on the lazy side about updating your stuff.
1) Your blog is an assessable component of your project submission. In other words, the quality, consistency and effectiveness of your blog matters and if your blog is good and healthy in these respects you will get more marks - it's as simple as that.
2) Your blog is a real-time receipt of your project's progress; it diarises your output and your attitude. It turns your errors and mistakes and dead-ends and 'deleted scenes' into assessable content.
3) Should you experience catastrophic hard drive failure or similar (as one student always does at some point on CAA), your blog enables us to mark your work. If you haven't been blogging (but you have been working) and then you lose your work, there is no evidence of your hard work, and your tutors have no choice but to assess your work (or lack thereof) accordingly. If you're not blogging your creative progress, you're not 'saving' your work - if you're not saving your work in this way, you are incredibly vulnerable.
4) I am currently sharing some 3rd Year blogs with potential employers - for example, I was able just today to share two third year blogs with the Head of 3D at Glassworks. I'm able to do this because those blogs are fully up-to-date and thus 'advertise' those students very favourably as suitably professional people.
5)When your work is assessed, your tutors are obliged to share your blogs with the External Examiner - this is the external tutor who scrutinises our marking of your work, and for him, the blogs are a fully transparent way to see into the complete story of your project's life-cycle. If you're missing content, so is he - and so are we.
6) I love sharing your work in the Post With The Most. I can only share what is being made available. I want to share much more of your student work because you're all developing fascinating stuff - but some of you are making it very difficult for me to celebrate the rich diversity of output. Just a reminder too - the PWTM is mailed out to lots and lots of companies, alumni and other interested parties. This is why I spend all that time putting the PWTM together every month (it takes me ages btw) because I'm keen to put you in front of as many people as possible - as often as possible.
7) If you're not blogging frequently, I can't share your updates via Twitter. When I share your updates on Twitter, you'll see the number of views on your work will go up appreciably.
8) Please see #1 - Your blog is an assessable component. If you're not blogging, you're doing it wrong and you risk creating real problems for yourself in the future - please see helpful diagram below!
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| This is you if you're not blogging routinely as per course requirements... |
As a footnote, I am also promoting your blogs to employers in my quest as CAA Careers outreach guru... for example, the studio manager at Axis in Glasgow has recently forwarded the PWTM to all Heads of Department, so there are definitely potential employers out there looking at your work! :)
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