#ctec502

something I've been learning throughout the year so far has been reflecting on my work and managing my time more appropriately. questions I've been asking myself a lot now have been things such as: What am I going to work on today? what did I do yesterday and what can I do to make it better? what have I learned from my progress so far?

these kind of questions are things I've found quite helpful in considering my options and being aware of myself compared to the time I have. as I write this, Thursday at 11:21am, I'm still thinking back on what work I still must do and remind myself that I can go to playing games and relaxing once it is all done.

managing my time as I am right now however can also be rather taxing. I find myself being much more tired and stressed as I constantly play the things I need to work on through my head while doing said work. this can lead to difficulty doing any future work that may suddenly appear as one concentrates on managing the pre-existing work.

just yesterday, I was asked to work on a new blog discussing what I have learned over the past 8 weeks of BCT and I have difficulty remembering it. not only due to a lack of proper care to record and reflect on the lessons, but due to focusing more on the present work to be done, writing other posts, finishing my 2nd programming assignment, beginning work on my final project (a dnd character creator) and working to design my final studio project (a friend making app).

as such I think I need to re-orient myself and come up with a better way to manage time. as it currently stands, I have done so by simply remembering, but I'm seeing how much that taxes me. I think a better option would be to set reminders on my Calender and taking more notes, that way I can focus on the project soonest to be due and have everything I need to remember hints and tools to remember my other work between the weeks.

this is a lot to read but the "too long; didn't read" of all of this is, looking back and reflecting on my current way of handling my time, I see it has flaws that need solving and I may have a possible solution. I'm sure it's not the best solution, but that is why we have the internet. to help get information!

this brings us to the topic of reflection rather well. reflection is a rather useful tool in most parts of life. it lets us consider alternative actions and solutions to our mistakes while giving us a chance to congratulate our successes big or small. it gives us a moment of respite from the present that troubles us and lets us consider the past and future. and it helps us to act with hindsight.

I've found that reflecting on one's actions can be very useful, and very powerful, but one may find themselves using such a power dangerously, be it against others or themselves. reflect on your actions incorrectly and one may go about making excuses. reflect too often and one may find themselves either becoming arrogant or self-defeating. never consider your reflections in future choices and actions and one may find it useless as they continue life never fixing their mistakes.

Reflection is a tool we have learnt as we have grown but it can be abused or wrong. even I find myself using it in ways that lead to being critical of myself or simply making excuses for my actions. something we can do to strengthen our ability to reflect however is to learn from others.

Everyone has a different background and life. this changes how we see ourselves or consider the world. this can help us to better ourselves by learning from their beliefs and considering them alongside our own. we often can be very critical of ourselves, getting the opinions of others can help us in reflecting by giving us an outsider's look at our actions and a less biased understanding of our situation. do not consider another's opinion any more important than yours, however, as it can lead to many insecurities and a feeling of incompetence. this is something I can also say from experience.

Overall, we must remember something important in regards to both reflecting on our actions and managing our time. these are both tools that we use to better ourselves and make our lives easier. they have no say in how they are used and can be used for better or worse. they can be used too often or too little and we choose how we use them.

all I can do is give my understanding and give the advice I was taught and try to live by.

Help us see what you see, show us what's behind the eye candy.

Yearly reminder:

Personally i maintain that a small amount of tape in the corners of our winning structure shouldn't disqualify us from the extraordinary, and elusive prize that was the packet of fruit burst and half a packet of marshmallows but i'll accept the loss with modesty and grace.

The first of many lessons it taught me was impromptu speeches have a way of sounding very smug, and thats not ideal. especially when in the midst of it your unintended cheating is brought to light.

All jokes aside the teaching tool is a brilliant one.

It teaches you about teamwork and how you cant have deadweight, if you do have it its a great time to take that person aside (maybe after the challenge, you ARE on a clock) and mention that it wont suit them later in life to act like that.

It teaches that a few minutes planning can save you an awful lot of heartache in the future: we took 8 of our 18 minutes to plan how to put our tower together and even after the challenge when we stuck it all together without the cheating tape it still stood taller than everyone elses'. looking around the room, the people with non-standing towers were the ones i had seen going straight into it without a vision of what the tower could be.

In concert with planning comes testing. test, test, test, we tested each aspect of our tower prior to put it together. while others may have done so, they neglected to bring the marshmallow into the mix until the end stages, which as our lecturer pointed out was a bad idea. you need to keep all the potential issues in mind all the time throughout a project, just because you think it wont affect you now you cant just forget about it. which brings me to the most important lesson.

Expect the unexpected. the marshmallow was the unexpected in this case for many, they didn't expect it to weigh a lot relative to the strength of spaghetti. Try and finish things in an appropriate amount of time so that you have time to make sure everything works fine and is in accordance with the rules. while you cant necessarily know what unexpected problems might arise, nor can you effectively plan for something you don't know about, giving yourself time is a buffer for that failure.

Just to make sure I’ve covered every base there actually is some points to be made with the creative reasoning stuff as well as some more general notes I’ve remembered, as well as some stuff I’ve remembered that actually applies really well here.

A super interesting concept I remember from Psychology/Sociology/Philosophy is the wisdom of the crowd. It’s the idea that when a middle ground of people’s opinions is found it tends to be the closest to the truth. The most common way it’s proven is by showing a large jar full of sweets and people are told to guess how many there are in the jar. Individuals tend to be all over the place and very inaccurate, but when their answers are averaged the answer is surprisingly close to the actual true answer of how many there are in the jar. And as more people’s opinions are gathered and are put into that average the accuracy increases. 

This I think can be linked pretty strongly with the “needs” of good creative reasoning. People approach problems in unique ways, applying their own balances of each type of reasoning listed and tend to have preference and skill favouring one over the others. So by having a group of receptive and precise people to bounce an idea off of will result in the wisdom of the crowd averaging that idea out to something significantly more effective than it would’ve been otherwise. 

As I said in the previous post our group has a surprisingly good balance in approaches and thought processes, as a result I’m confident that our iterative process with our Studio project will be a huge success. 

This isn't a negative post. I don't actually believe I'm not good enough, but in week six Ricardo gave me a lot to think about.

So let's get into that together.

Week 7 taught us about Effectuation Logic.

Effectuation Logic is logic solely based on the act of envisioning what can be possible given what is available. There are a few principles to this logic such as the Bird in Hand Principle, Affordable Loss Principle, Lemonade Principle, Crazy-Quilt Principle and Pilot in the Plane Principle. The specific principle that came into play this week was the Lemonade Principle. 

The Lemonade Principle encourages you to change your view on failures, to utilise the unpredictable and overall learn from the events or things you have perceived as a ‘fail’. This week’s ‘failure’ was my project pitch. My group and I had pitched our idea to our class peers and some of the teaching staff but our idea’s lack of originality and uniqueness caused a lacklustre response. They gave us helpful feedback on the idea but ultimately brought us to the conclusion that we need to go back to the drawing board. 

Admittedly, I was taken back a few steps at first. It was discouraging to be told an idea you were so passionate and excited about was actually not that great. I knew that what I was feeling was valid and reasonable but I also knew that it wasn’t productive to be stuck feeling like that. This whole semester, our studio and ICT lessons have told us that failure isn’t a bad thing and I have come to realise that more. 

The Lemonade Principle especially resonated with me. I thought to myself, instead of seeing this as a failure I should see it as a challenge. The main feedback given was that our idea could easily be reproduced with equipment that everyone already has so our idea wasn’t very practical. So, instead of changing the idea completely, I am going to challenge myself. My next step is to further develop my idea into something that cannot be reproduced so easily. At this point in time, I don’t know if that is possible but I have hope that it is. This form of thinking is actually applicable to the other principle, Bird in Hand. I am taking action based on who I am and what I know and have been told as opposed to going back to the drawing board and looking for some new inspiration. 

To start off my vlog I brainstormed how I wanted to present it. I went through ideas of stopmotion animation, simple pictures, a voiceover of me doing something or just talking to the camera with pictures popping up. I decided to settle on the last one so I could focus more on what I was writing. Also being new to editing trying to sync up other things would take me a lot of time.

After writing a script and going to record, I remembered I had a software called 'Facerig'.

Facerig is a software developed by a company called Halotech studios. FR tracks your face and allows you to embody different characters and creatures. I decided to use the base character Midori as other characters (like a dragon or a snowman) were a lot less flitting.

Facerig also used my mouth positions and audio coming from my mic to determine how the mouth moved. It wasn't extremely accurate but was still a lot of fun to play around with and use for my vlog.

For writing my script, I decided to split it into 4 sections.

The introduction (a little about me),

Part 1 (Why Uni/Why BCT),

Part 2 (My future/goals),

Conclusion (what is Creative technologies).

I believed this plan worked out pretty well, except for the Part 1 and 2 were a little too long, so I had to cut out the introduction. This was ok though as it wasn't very nessecary.

For editing I decided to use Wondershare Filmora. A friend had suggested it to me as it was very good for beginner editing. I picked it up and instantly it worked perfectly. In the end I made a vlog I'm pretty proud of. Though next time I'll work on my audio leveling as it was pretty quiet when I uploaded it to YouTube.