Speaking From Experience - Rationale.

The Brief:

Produce a graphic response that gives advice about your experience as a first year.

Media:

• Video. 
• Booklet.
• Digital Files e.g. walk throughs pdf of screenshots and step by step instructions.
• Printed posters and materials with information.

Content:

Informative and educating with an undercurrent of giving advice.

Considerations:

• Message
• Overall this would be 'how to get the most out of blogger as a first year'. 
• This would ultimately become a tool of resource that future students can learn from to kick start and/or improve their blogs and blogging skills and know how.
• Audience
• First years students joining in September 2011 onward. 
• Some of the current first years will benefit from the research that i will carry out as well.
• Content
• This would be common issues and problems that first years will encounter when blogging and how to avoid, solve or rectify these problems. 
• The problems will be identified in my research. 
• It will also include the basics of blogging for anyone who needs help getting started with blogger who hasn't used it before. 
• This will aim to bring them up to speed so they can get into a good habit of documenting their work.
• Media
• Small info booklets that will be put in the studios by the Macs for quick reference as people are blogging. (Like the digital print sample booklets). 
• Online resource for the VLE. 
• A range of printed materials like info posters or useful tips and exercises people can try when stuck with what to blog. 
• Possibly a video tutorial about the basics of blogging.

Research:

• Questionnaire on the Facebook group.
• Talk to the current 1st years which is a good way to get an informed response.
• Write up a personal review of my experiences of Blogger and learning about it and how i dealt with problems that i had along the way.
• Look into the technical requirements of the are on a need to know basis to make your blogs work e.g formatting photos and work, settings for embedding, settings for time and date, storage space, managing layouts.

Background:

• Emotions
• Excited (to be a student living away from home)
• Nervous (about doing well and meeting people)
• Intimidated (by the courses reputation and the amount of good designers on the course)
• Overwhelmed (by the prospect of the work load to come).
• Setting up the blogs
• Took longer than it needed to
• Was very confusing
• Would advise using student email accounts as blogger accounts as well so you can check your student email without having to log out of blogger
• Linking the blogs wasn't easy at first.
• Running out of space
• Major set back.
• Solved by buying more space which is quite cheap and is paid annually.
• Formatting photos
• Compressing to save space.
• Making sure they are rotated the right way up.
• Keep the quality consistent.
• Embedding videos
• Took ages to understand how to make it interpret the embedding code.
• Also acquiring the embedding code in the first place.
• Labels
• Didn't know what to label or how.
• Learning how to label in batch.
• Knowing what to blog and where
• It was difficult to identify what should be blogged to Design Practice and what should be blogged to Design Context.
• CTS was more straight forward.