So back to being the student rather than the teacher again. It has certainly been a little while since I was this side of the desk but things are beginning to come back to me slowly, and of course the lovely practice of actually writing down my reflections begins again.
So what do we go with this time? A little bit of Gibbs? Throw in a couple of Schön’s? Bang in a Kolb every now and again for good measure? Or just stick with my usual Greenaway approach?
Or do I take heed to the suggestions and just follow the advice of the course leader, Jamie White (2021), and go with “feel free to exercise your own creative judgement!”. Yeah lets go with that shall we.
So Week 1 is pretty much at an end and thankfully I had the half term break to be able to fully engage with it. It covered all of the usual start up aspects that you would expect with any course but also had some content to digest and do something with. There was the dreaded introduce yourself task where you have to talk about yourself and try to make sure you gauge your introduction correctly so that you do not come over as either useless or over compensating, or both. Thankfully I am old enough now to not worry too much about what I am putting across so was able to plough through this quite quickly. Just went with the basics but did have to start thinking a little about my motivations, so that fuse is already lit.
Next was a couple of nice videos about Time Management and Agile Development. So straight back to my happy place. Agile is something I use, I teach, and is basically something that is built in to my everyday functioning. Watching the videos just made me feel excited about being able to apply my skills in this straight away with no mucking around. So I cranked up Hack n Plan (https://hacknplan.com/) and immediately set about planning my life (on the course) for the next two years.
So as you can see I have already put in all the modules as milestones and then broken the first module down into sprints, because this is how it is being run so I did not even have to think about this. I also added in all the weekly tasks we have to complete. Which was the next task at hand.
A chance to crank up WordPress again and start writing a reflective journal. This is it, you are reading it. Once I got started it all came flooding back so within an hour I had this all set up and running. Need to tweak it a little over the course but it fits its purpose for what I need at the moment.
The next task was a small creative challenge activity to create an avatar for yourself using objects from around your home. The objects had to tell a story about you so here is mine.
This actually came together quite easily. I wish I could have done something a little more creative with the layout rather than just dump them on a table but once I got started I just hit my usual ‘get it done’ mentality and this is the end result. Each piece has multiple meanings and it was fun trying to think about myself or my traits as objects as a way to describe them.
Then it was time for the first gathering, our first conference with the tutors. I sat in silence for most of it, just observing and absorbing. Its strange being on this side of the desk, they do things differently to how I would do them, they are playing to a crowd of different knowledge levels, interests, goals and many other things. It was weird, not sure I liked it,
But I did take something out of and it and that was the main purpose of these reflective posts. Keep your goals, aspirations and careers aims in mind. Well that’s easy. I am doing this course because my 20 plus years of experience means nothing to Academia without a qualification to back it up. Well in my day, when I started out there was not even Game Development undergraduate courses, let alone postgraduate so I would not have been able to get a qualification even if I wanted to. I got my first job in the industry after my mother applied to an advert in a local newspaper for me. That job advert simply stated “Wanted – Video Game Nut” and I got an interview. 3 weeks later I started my first industry job as a member of the GOD Squad at Electronic Arts (their development side testing team).
But now in order to further my career I need to have a higher level qualification that I currently have. So that is why I am here. But. And this is the big but. I do not want that to be my goal for gaining this qualification by the time the course ends. I want this qualification to mean something else to me, something more personal, something that I want to achieve for myself and not because it means I can write a new degree for my employer. So that is my new goal. To take out of this everything for myself. I want to learn new things, I want to see how other people do it, I want to innovate and discover. And most importantly, I want to change.
References
White, J (2021). Development Practice Week 1 Support Webinar – Wednesday 02th June @ 19:00 UK Time. Available at https://recordings.reu1.blindsidenetworks.com/falmouth/fcb99e0a9b4185d2dee9bc2854337e7d1c2989a2-1622656756831/capture/ (Accessed: 02/06/21)
Figures
Figure 1: Charlish, R (2021) ‘Hack n Plan image’ Created on July 4th 2021
Figure 2: Charlish, R (2021) ‘Personalised Avater’ Created on July 1st 2021
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