Update 1

As we don't have studio access over the Easter holidays I have a few weeks when I can't do much in the way of animation. I thought this might be the best time to make a few plans and catch up on some written work.

At this stage I have identified a few areas that will require some pre-planning. I will need an audience (or focus group) so I can assess the level of audience engagement. I feel that this is needed as I will be too close to the work to judge how effective it is. I would also like to ensure that even though the work is abstract in nature a wide audience will be able to relate to it in some way. Accessibility is important to me as a great deal of my family and friends are not involved in the field of creative arts and I would very much like it if my audience isn't required to have any prior knowledge in order to relate to the work.

The 1st step is to get the NUCAma site up and running by encouraging more traffic. I asked Emma Hazel to send out an e-mail inviting all of the MA students at NUCA to join the network. This will serve to not only help the MA's feel less disjointed but also to test the effectiveness of this particular platform before I decide if it can be used for my own purposes.

I think we have all been feeling a bit lost since the loss of the Graduate Centre so maybe a virtual platform will help. If it takes off we can use it to organise activities and meetings and try to keep some semblance of unity without a real world 'place' for us to mingle and discuss work. A network allows us to get to know names and faces, which is useful. I have found that learning names is certainly facilitated by social networks more so than it is in the real world. In a virtual environment we recognise a person by their avatar/image as well as having a virtual name badge to remind us of their name. With any luck we will recognise each other around the college and our virtual network will turn into something that will be of value in the college environment. At the time of writing this we have 10 members on the network, I would imagine that we will need to double that in order for the network to be an effective critiquing/discussion tool. I have also added a forum post about blogs to see if anyone else is blogging and if they would like to share. I'm relatively new to blogging so I would like to see some other examples if possible.