Category Archives: Electives

This Visual was created using the Tagul Word Cloud Art generator website. I used this write-up and my own choice of image to generate the cloud.

Usually, when asked to think about what my metaphor for education would be, I’d say a growing tree of knowledge, where the things we learned are the nutrients that help the tree grow and in terms, helps us grow. Or I would say a classroom metaphor for me would be a Chef’s Cooking Pan, where all the ingredients are different students who enter the classroom, and it’s up to the chef/teacher to bring the best out of each ingredient/student, to make the best possible dish. However, this time around, for my visual representation, I chose to use the image of a campfire to metaphorically represent what and how I’ve learned in this course.  I chose a campfire for various reasons, some academic, some not so much.  My non-academic reason is simply because it’s the summer, and so it’s camping season, so bonfire season. Though it’s not what I would usually do during my summers, it’s what most people think of when people think about summer which is also when this course is taking place.

My academic reasoning for choosing a campfire is due to the metaphoric process of keeping the fire burning. I pictured our class as the ring of people who would surround the campfire on a cool summer night, and the whole campfire experience as the learning that occurs. The firewood are the weekly contents and readings that we covered, and the process of adding the wood to keep the fire going are the discussions that we conducted for our weekly topics. Our weekly reflections are our own occasional or frequent actions of adding the logs to the fire to keep the fire going.  And finally, the warmth that we each receive from the campfire as the knowledge we gain from this process. I picture our campfire to grow even bigger with more time, perhaps to the point when it’s big enough to be considered a bonfire.

From the readings, I gathered a few points that were of interest to me. I also just so happen to meet a friend over the weekend whose job was in post-production for some films. He happened to have mentioned that he was working on a Marvel film that’s coming out in the next year or two, so of course, my friends and I started to flood him with questions about the film and his work. From what he told us, media production is often very hard work, CGI artist can spend hours on end to work on a scene for a project that might only see very short screen time. Like how he worked on a scene for 2 months but the director only used 2 seconds of it at the end. From what he explained and the readings, it seems like each project is broken down into different components that overlay. Traditional methods for media production would be done in more linear methods, completing pre-stage, prod-stage then post-stage in that order. But now, the stages can be blurred, and multiple stages can be going on at the same time. My friend said he has been working with measurements and data for scenes and characters in his scenes without ever meeting the actors, and though he knows the storyline, his team aren’t the only ones on the job.

The three stages of media production do not only apply to films but any type of Media production.  Even making a short presentation to be used for the public on powerpoint would require the same stages. Teaching students that technology is just a tool would limit a students’ perspective and mindset about what can be done with the technology. Before the computer age, new technologies may really have shortcomings and limitations that need to be brought up as there were no such things as “updates” for technologies. It was always one item replacing another physically, and eventually, the old item becomes obsolete. But with the digital computer age, replacing a technology doesn’t necessarily mean we are creating more obsolete items anymore. What can’t be done today in one application doesn’t mean it won’t be able to tomorrow. Students need to be taught that they can still dream big, even if what they want to do can’t be done at the moment, it doesn’t mean it can’t tomorrow.