WELCOME

• You are successfully logged in.

• Please make your yourself comfortable and grab a cuppa before we start at 6.30pm.

• If you haven’t used Zoom before, do familiarise yourself with how to mute your microphone.

Learning Logs

DURING THE PRESENTATION PLEASE MUTE MICROPHONES TO LIMIT BACKGROUND NOISE.

DO FEEL FREE TO ASK QUESTIONS AT ANY POINT – JUST UNMUTE!

What is the learning log?

• Covers:

• Context• Reflective Thinking• Critical Thinking• Analysis

The learning log is possibly the most essential part of the student experience, however at times it can be the least understood aspect as students embark on a course.

At its most simple, it is a log of the learning taking place. For photography students where a blog is a mandatory part of the course, there is a misconception that the blog is the learning log,and this is not the case.

The blog is the vessel, for want of a better term, the place to record all your work completed for the course. The work on the blog will be made up of:

Coursework – projects/exercises from the course handbook

Assignments – work produced in response to the assignment brief at the end of each part of the course

Learning log – the log is everything else

What is the learning log?

“Life is what happens to you,While you're busy making other plans,”

JOHN LENNON – Beautiful Boy

What is the learning log?

The learning log is what happens,when you’re busy working on your course.

What is the learning log?To expand on the log – it can feature:

• your own independent research• reading around the wider subject of photography and visual/creative arts• thoughts on topical stories• write ups of exhibition visits or programmes/podcasts viewed or listened to• ideas for future projects• details of your own side projects• plans for pacing your work through the course• reflections on your progress (this includes summaries from Forum/Hangout

chats)• a pace to vent frustrations and celebrate successes

How?

How?

• Write blog posts as part of your learning log to document your work in progress.

• Setting a regular schedule to write a check-in post can be helpful if you are finding that you are adding infrequently to your log.

• Try weekly or bi-weekly post where you reflect and then plan ahead.

How?

• It can document how you got from A – B(maybe you went via C & D!)

How?

• Think of it as you would doing a maths problem, where you show your workings.

How?

• Flip chart/Post It Note Planning

How?

Chalkboards/Whiteboards

How?

Notebook

Sketchbook

Exhibition Journal

How?

Record Cards

Great for essay writing

How?

Written notes/sketches are invaluable for planning longer projects/assignments.

David Hurn writes of the importance of using notebooks and reviewing contact sheets to plan a project in “On Being A Photographer”

From “On Being a Photographer”

”For example, say you decide to create a picture essay on a particular club: you start going to the club, sitting down and spending an evening there, looking, absorbing, being part of the atmosphere. When you leave, write in a notebook 12 headings or however many images you need to complete the project. You might jot down “loneliness” (because some members seem to spend the whole time alone) or “people in conversation” or “competition at the pool table” or “heavy drinkers” or “flirting” or whatever stuck in your mind as an impression. Of course, this list will depend to a considerable extent on the personality of the photographer.

This is your memory of the event.”

From “On Being a Photographer”

”Then you go back to the club and attempt to photograph those headings. This means that if there is a club with a stripper in the corner you do not spend nine weeks out of ten photographing the stripper and one week photographing the more difficult headings. You may photograph all of the 12 headings on the first night. Then look at your contacts and when you get a photograph which fits one of the headings tick it off and do not photograph that any more. You then concentrate on the other 11 headings….

When you complete the list of 12 headings, you know you have finished the project. …”

From “On Being a Photographer”

”You have the story It is bound to work in a personal way, because that is how you remember it. That does not mean that you cannot branch out from your chosen 12, or six or 20 headings. If something exciting happens in the corner, which is not on the list, of course you take pictures. But it does mean every time you get stuck you have a framework to go back to, and – most important – it does mean you know when you have completed the story.

With this method you do not spend five weeks shooting pictures desperately hoping that the story will somehow make sense. You do not end up with 80 percent on one situation and 20 percent covering the other dozen or so equally important happenings.”

Cindy Sherman – Notebook and Contact Sheet

Record Cards

Great for essay writing

Planning longer projects

Tony Ray-Jones – Notebook and Contact Sheet

Record Cards

Great for essay writing

Planning longer projects

Tracking Progress

• Use your log to help track progress and keep momentum on your course.

• Try regular check-in posts where you review and reflect on your work

Find a quick way of writing for you

• Bullet points are good

• Abbrv.

[Abbreviations and symbols are good]

• Think brevity[Learning log posts do not have to be fully finished sentences.]

What are assessors looking for?

The following is from a WeAreOCA post for painting students.

5 different examples.

Which one do you think shows greatest evidence of context/reflective thinking/critical thinking/analysis?

What are assessors looking for?• 1. Lovely day so made up a flask and put my paints in my rucksack. Had a great

time painting in my local churchyard.

• 2. Painted in local churchyard. Used sponges instead of brushes – great fun.

• 3. Churchyard painting using different tools. Interesting to experiment and try new things. Sponges make nice evocative marks.

• 4. Churchyard. Part of ongoing investigation of tools / markmaking. Sponges expand range of marks – more scope for wider vocabulary. Research Expressionism / Ab Ex (ask tutor name of surrealist / frottage man). NB Piper = churches.

• 5. CY – Is gesture more ‘authentic’ AbEx / PModern? C Greenberg R Rauschenberg. Remember depth. Contradiction btwn surface and illusory space –how resolve? (ask tutor). Don’t overstate architectural detail – focus on main planes and light.

Work in progress

• Use draft blog posts to make notes if you are not ready to publish.

Work in progress

• It is better to get brief notes down on a regular basis.

• Try to keep your log in ‘real time’ rather then writing long posts reflecting retrospectively.

• For work on paper, simply photograph/scan the pages and upload – no need to type up.

Research/Reference Material

• Keep an open post to use as a bibliography of your reference/research sources.

• So much easier if you track this material as you go.

Research/Reference Material

• Trying making a quick 30 second summary of source material.“THE 30-SECOND RULE”

• Having a quick summary of each source is useful to refer back to (particularly when you want to come back to a source at a later date).

• Link to a great article on this is in the bibliography.

Summary – Use your Learning Log to:

• Document

• Plan

• Review

• Reflect

Remember it is all just experimentation.From ‘Only Artists’Roddy Doyle in conversation with Anthony Gormley

First speaker is Roddy Doyle asking the question.Second speaker is Anthony Gormley.

Lastly - Back up your work!

• It is well worth having a back up of all your work.

• This includes your blog and images.

• Use a cloud provider and/or portable drive.

Follow up

• Do add your thoughts and any questions to the Forum thread.

• A copy of this document will be made available after the talk.

• The audio clips are not available in the PDF but links to the sources are in the bibliography.

Bibliography• Dyre, E. (2012) Learning Logs: what assessors are looking for. At: https://www.oca.ac.uk/weareoca/education/learning-logs/ (Accessed 19/11/2019).

• Hurn, D., Jay, B. ((2008) On Being a Photographer (Third Edition). USA: LensWork.

• John Lennon (1980) Beautiful Boy. [Streaming] Santa Monica: Geffen Records. At:https://open.spotify.com/track/5URfZHMlUWTWxPvvSBWcPk?si=x1sFMDsNQ0qU1Pf0_A71Og (Accessed 19/11/2019).

• Only Artists (2019) [Radio Programme] Radio 4 13/11/2019 At: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b4w9 (Accessed 19/11/2019).

• Norrington, A. (2018) The Learning Log. At: https://www.oca.ac.uk/weareoca/photography/the-learning-log-2/ (Accessed 19/11/2019).[This blog posts contains where to find more OCA material on Learning Logs]

• Scott, R. (2015) The 30-Second Habit with a Lifelong Impact. At: https://observer.com/2015/08/the-30-second-habit-with-a-lifelong-impact/ (Accessed19/11/2019).

• Southworth, P., Carpani, J. (2019) ‘Phoebe Waller-Bridge reveals she types ideas in draft email as she worries about losing notebooks’ In: TheTelegraph 06/11/2019 At: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/06/phoebe-waller-bridge-reveals-types-ideas-draft-email-notebooks/(Accessed 19/11/2019).