Tuesday, December 7, 2010

This media course has been a great benefit to my skills as an artist. I enjoyed the introduction to the idea of New Media towards the beginning of the semester, as that may be what many people are going to move towards. The in-depth historical basis for moving pictures, like the zoetrope, was quite fascinating to me and it sort of shows how technologies and mediums of art are are really just a reiteration of what has come before it.

I would have liked to see specific examples of lenses, I did not think this was hands on enough, I would have liked to see one taken apart. I also was curious about light lenses and filters and would have liked that section to have been a bit more hands on as well. Replicating a studio and the lighting of a subject was a great exercise that introduced me to some of the real world applications of lighting concepts.

I was certainly not crazy about the portfolio template given to us. It suited it's purpose, but I would recommend having 3-4 base templates for students to choose from, and then encouraging customization later in the course when learning HTML and CSS.

Readings were hit or miss, sometimes I found them quite interesting, but many times they felt somewhat unnecessary, especially some of the content out of the textbook. The textbook actually did not seem all that necessary to the course, in hindsight. I much preferred the links outlined on blackboard.


It seemed to me like everything about the browser and HTML could have been explained in half a class, and that some of it was a reiteration of things earlier in the semester or from Media 180. It was great information, but just a little long.


The lectures were very effective in teaching. It was useful for me to go through the slides on my own in review. The specific components of the still image was what best stuck out for me as new and exciting, and I will very likely take it with me and consider the components in any future picture I photograph!