Finally sent the material for November assessments to OCA. Following my Tutor's responses to Assignments 4 & 5 I took further advice and was fortunate enough to have a face to face tutorial of almost 2 hours that was of enormous help. It is so much easier for the parties concerned to pursue the matters that are important and directly relevant in such a meeting. Learnt a lot.
Re-worded Assignment 4 so that it was easier to read and took out the results of poor editing on my part. I was tempted to re-write the whole thing but felt that I would have been false to myself particularly in style but also in content. At the end of the day you have to go with your own judgment giving full account of the opinions of others.
I sent prints for all assignments (except 4 of course) and used Epson Premium Lustre paper as it is a finish and quality that I think adds to the final product. It was suggested that for black and white prints a Matte finish paper was more appropriate particularly where the subject matter is landscape. It was also suggested by my tutor that about half of the prints I had submitted were too subtle in approach for the purpose. I therefore decided to replace them with other images I had taken for the same project and that were more direct in their approach. Although this changed the message I had set out to portray of 'creep' rather than the 'dramatic' in the degradation of the landscape by the effects of man's work I agree that the end result has more impact because the viewer is not left guessing.
I printed the 'new' set of prints on Matte paper. It is a matter of personal decision as to whether they are 'better' printed this way but it makes viewing the images so much easier as there is no unwanted reflections.
One other matter that was discussed at the face-to-face was the blog. I have to agree that it is difficult for assessors and others to follow any particular thread that may exist in the Blog. Personally I use the Blog as a personal record both for the Projects/Exercises that are required but also as a way of marshalling my thoughts about how well I think I am doing at any particular point. For the projects/exercises I use a more formal style but for the more personal thoughts it is more a stream of consciousness form of writing. I have been thinking about whether there is a way that the needs of the assessors can be met whilst keeping the blog as a personal record. An imposed structure would work for the formal elements but is less likely to do so for the personal entries. Furthermore the problem is made worse by the chronological form of presentation imposed by the software so that there is no way to clearly link a thought process over a period of time that would be easily accessible. One possible way would be to run two blogs - one to record the required work and a second for the personal type entries where the student could be encouraged to follow through on ideas and thoughts raised earlier in a Course.
