Contribution and collaboration – describe what you did throughout the process of organising, delivering and publishing your seminar event. Describe your collaborative process and identify the strategies you used to solve any issues or problems that arose in the process.
Organising our seminar was a relatively painless experience – largely because the contacts we had made throughout our University experience were quite helpful (either contributing as speakers or pointing us in the direction of people who could), and we worked well as a team. My personal contribution involved “overseeing” the progress of specific elements of the seminar, i.e. keeping in close contact with group members via Facebook and phone, assisting with the organising and attending of meetings, sourcing/contacting/confirming our freelance radio documentary-maker as a speaker, and assisting with the packaging of our intro/outro/multimedia for the seminar itself. In hindsight, I could have made myself more available for particular sessions, but I was always very communicative about my availability, and because of the group size, I feel like my lack of attendance to two of our meetings wasn’t of a huge detriment to the project overall. I recieved help from Diana in compiling the running sheet, and was the timekeeper for the event itself (as well as overseeing setup). We were a tight-knit group, which worked very well, however it did mean that I felt quite “casual” about the seminar until a week or two prior. We had very few problems to overcome, with the exception of the technical issues on the day, whcih were dealt with pretty gracefully by all of us.
Overall Mark: 80/100 (HD)
Proactive Learning – describe the extent to which you took responsibility for your own learning throughout the process of arranging and delivering the seminar series. Did you actively seek to improve your skills by extending beyond what was presented in class and what you already knew?
In terms of “seeking out” my own learning experiences, I feel as though I got more out of the PNR than the seminar itself. While our guests were extremely engaging and insightful, my “personal learning” came from following up the seminars with interviews about my own personal career direction. Generally though, I got a lot out of the seminars (not just our own) – particularly the Eventception session, and took more responsbility for my learning in this subject than I have done in other subjects previously.
Overall Mark: 75/100 (D)
Participation – describe the extent of your participation in the seminar. Did you attend all, most or just a few classes & group meetings, the event and post-production sessions? Did you seek to engage with and contribute to class or group discussions? If not what do you think hindered this for you?
As mentioned above, I had some unavoidable clashes with my internship and new job throughout the semester, which essentially meant that I missed two meetings and a handful of the seminars. This was disappointing for me. I feel I did make up for this by assisting “out of hours” with the preparation for our seminar, and always engaged with class discussions where appropriate. I felt that idea sharing, particularly in this subject, was one of the strongest elements that we had in terms of putting our seminars together.
Overall Mark: 69/100 (C)
Connections & intersections – what do you see as the value of the seminar series? Overall what have you discovered about your learning, your group interactions and your networking abilities in relation to this series? How do you see what you have learnt about yourself via the process (and via the content) fitting into your future career development and future work?
I think the seminar series is an extremely helpful, hands-on way of “forcing us” (for lack of a better term) to make connections and contacts within the “real world” media industry. The interviewees we each organised for our own seminar were obviously of great help to us, but it was the connections we made with guests from other seminars (either in Q&A, after-discussion orina nother format organised afterwards) that were of most help to us. I have since chased up some of the interviewees from other seminars to chat with them one-on-one, so I feel as though I engaged with the course a lot in that way. I still have (like most people), no idea where I will be in five years time, but I feel that this course has given me a lot of clarity on where I could “possibly” be, and the avenues I could take in order to get there.
Overall Mark: 80/100 (HD)
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Aggregated Overall Mark for Self Assessment: 304/400 (D)
