Welcome to theRoot

It has been a week or so since I have posed anything to my blog. I have not been able to put together a paragraph or even a sentence that in summation represented what I was feeling or what I was working towards. [Were the words used in the previous sentence outside my understanding?] The reason for this is simple. As readers may have noticed, I have been working without drive and direction recently. The question is why?

I have been thinking a lot in the last fortnight.

Questions like, What is it to be on this course?

What, exactly, does a degree in 'Graphic Arts and Design' mean one has studied?

What is the purpous of the learning agreement?

And, How can I motivate myself?

I will start with the penultimate question. Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in. I find myself considering events way after they have occured. A number of times, following a VisLEX, the day after the meaning of somthing they have said has finally dawned on me. I do this with conversations I have too. Someone may say somthing, I'll reply, thinking I have understood the posing of the question and hours later, once my brain has assimilated the event, including bodylanguage, I'll think, "Crap, what a stupid answer". [This last sentence was written on-th-fly] I don't think I'm dumb, but it takes time for things to sink in.
Anyway, moving swiftly towards the point. It now seems obvious to me why this course if different to a course that focuses more on the technical side of things or on teaching a 'house style'. The point of this course is to teach you to THINK creativly; not regurgitate somthing you've been taught. So when people ask "Why aren't we taught Flash and Photoshop?" I think I understand the answer to this question. The courses assesses us by gauging our understanding of the Graphic Arts culture through our own work. Our work becomes the vessel by which we communicate our knowledge of design. It took me a while to get my head around that one. Why doesn't it matter that we aren't taught photoshop? Well, because if we were, we would have 120 students producing the same piece of work. By not being shown technicals we develop our own methods independantly [provided we do any work].
"XML Schemas express shared vocabularies and allow machines to carry out rules made by people." *1
This is a quote I read recently that reminded me of the purpous of the learning agreement. If you replace the words 'machines' with 'examiners', 'people' with 'students' and 'XML Schemas' with 'Learning Agreements' the sentence makes a lot more sence.
[I know, that was daft, but I thought i'd put it in anyway to show I understand what the learning agreement is primerily for]
I'm going to split this post into two posts. The following post will be about my work.

*1 http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema - W3C XML Schema, 13th January 2008.