This should give my students something to think about:
So. What does it all mean? Well, for those currently studying in Higher Education it means things like these:
The idea that your education will be finished when you leave University is patently daft. You will need to train and retrain yourself many times during your working life.
You will almost undoubtedly changes jobs many times. You may also change careers more than once. The only constant will be change.
Consequently, the most important skills you need to master are a) the ability to bootstrap yourself whenever necessary, and b) the ability to critically evaluate new information. The principle function of a university degree is to teach you how to do these two things. You need to learn how to learn.
Clare was also the outright winner in the ‘Web & Interactive Media’ category of Computer Arts magazine’s Graduate Showcase 2007:
Again, very well deserved and completely justified. Clare has a great range of skills: she’s a sensitive and talented designer with a good range of technical knowledge to back up her artistic flair; she does a mean presentation and is therefore really good at selling her work; she’s a very nice person who works well in a team environment. All of which would be meaningless without the fact she works really hard at it, she puts the hours in…
Her Major Project submission was an interactive web site built using Flash and called mythicalwales.co.uk. Clare’s attention to detail and instinctive design sense are well in evidence, as is her great appreciation of the use of sound in a multimedia object (which, for me, still remains the least-developed aspect of new media production). There are some fabulous touches: check out how she manages going through the front door, and compare that, say, to the way the same thing is handled in the early Resident Evil games. (OK, it’s not really a like-for-like comparison because the RE sequence is basically masking a background load operation, but stylistically the comparison is 100% valid.)
Anyway, you can check out all of Clare’s stuff at summonfire.co.uk. Well done Clare. Best of luck.
Here’s a short film I made showcasing this year’s BA Multimedia graduates from the School of Digital Media at Swansea Metropolitan University: Clare Hale, Sam Jones, Juliette Tessyman, Geoff Taylor, and Peter Boelen. There’s some excellent work on display here, so well done to all:
As with my last post, this was a project where I made heavy use of screen capture software. This time, because I made the film at home and it was therefore done on a Mac, I used SnapzProX. This seems to be the screen capture software of choice on Macs, and I must say it worked very, very, well. The unusual interface—i.e. there isn’t one when it’s in action—seems to cause people a few problems, but I must say I found it pretty straightforward from the off. We could either say that the guesses I made about its operation were correct, or that the software has been designed in an intuitively correct way…
Toby Godden is a Year 2 student on the BA (Hons) Interactive Digital Media course at Swansea Metropolitan University. Toby has a highly fertile brain that effortlessly spins off more ideas than he can cope with. He totally ‘gets’ the Internet, and has a portfolio of domains that illustrate his creativity and diversity:
