Blog Assignment 3

Part 1

Acknowledging the Lizard means accepting the fact that your brain is telling you not to take the risks needed to succeed, but if you acknowledge that it's there you can look past it. Make Art tells the reader that whatever they do it will most likely involve an element of risk, but that's okay because risk is a good thing. Fail says that you will fail, and that when you do you must do it with grace.

Part 2

The layers stated here are connected to the blog that I am creating this quarter, however I think that there are much better ways to have the students experience the lessons taught in these layers than having them post in a blog where they most likely don't even care about what they are publishing. There are two reasons why I believe the layers could be better taught through other methods.

The first is that not many students would actually care what they put up on here. These assignments are just that, assignments. And I don't think that most of the people participating in this class really put too much of their creative talents towards making these blog posts. Most will start a few hours before the due date and then just rush through without any actual thought as to the quality. Eric himself told us in class that "if you do the blog you'll get the grade". If we actually want to learn the lessons from these layers then we need to do something that we actually care about, and that leads into the next argument.

Not many people care about what they put on the blog for another reason, NO ONE WILL SEE IT. This blog is not a public venue to receive criticism, or even a presentation to the small disinterested lab groups, it's a blog linked through a side bar of our TA's blog that the TA will just look at for the word count before giving the grade. People don't care about their work if they know no one will see it. Even the class presentations cause people to put some aspect of thought into their work (usually) that just wouldn't be present in these blog assignments. To learn these lessons we actually have to experience them though being judged on our work in relation to them. To learn to ignore the lizard, we actually have to experience ignoring it, and to experience failure we might have to present a failure to a lab group.

But the lab group leads into another issue that we actually have to have people tell us if our ideas or good or not. Having a class of kids, on Facebook, tell you something is good is not going to help people grow as creators. People need to hear that their ideas sucked and they sucked for these reasons. Nothing would make me happier than someone in class raising their hand and saying "I thought it was too X" or "It felt like a rehash of X". Creators need honest feedback, which is just something not present in these exercises.

To solve this we need just two things. Make us show ideas or projects to groups of people, and make those people tell us why our ideas are bad. I think that would make us grow much more effectively than an unread blog.

Thank you for not-reading.