In the Beginning

Today at college I have researched a wide variety of information about a fictional story author known as Charles Dickens. The reason for doing this is that we have started our first assignment. This is about a listed ‘British’ candidate that has accomplished something in their life. So far I have visited a number of sites using the ‘Google’ search engine to find more sources of information that I can evaluate. I will then use this to find the correct information I am looking for.

The things I have learnt today can be quite useful in the future of planning. For the start of the assignment I completed a production sheet, which is a time management document to help me split down the assignment and manage the task in easy manageable sections. Also I have started to produce weekly time sheets that will show effective time keeping each week as we progress through the assignment.

We also had a seminar (feedback group), where we had a discussion about our opinions on our work so far and the sort of work we should be aiming for. In the seminar we discussed the project goals of this assignment and realised the main goals besides completing the assignment, are to make a file/webpage as small as possible. Having a huge file size will slow down the rate of download. The screen resolution was also a factor, as screen sizes vary. We also had a chance to view some sketch books from previous students of the 1st year to give us a better example of what we should be putting in to our sketchbooks. The length of time taken in the seminar was 30 minutes, which in my opinion wasn’t enough time. The amount of time I would prefer would be around 45 minutes to 1 hour as I would have liked to gain information about more topics related to the assignment.

The most effective part of the day was gaining some understanding of the sort of things we should be looking for in the assignment. This was also discussed in the seminar in groups, which made things a lot easier because we were able to share our own opinions.

Thing I could improve on:

- The speed of my sketching. A presentation flies by pretty quickly and it is hard to gather all the information you want to successfully understand what’s going on.
- My research skills. Currently I can search through a number of sites and gather the correct information, but it would be better for me if I could do it more speedily to give me more time to understand other tasks.
- My language skills. Every now and again a piece of unrespectable language seeps its way out. Due to this I have had a fellow student and the tutor tell me to watch my language.