Monday 5th January 2015

Back to uni!!!!!!

Today was our first day back at university, and I have admit I am looking forward to this, our last project.

After catching the early train in, I had a briefing for our new project, Ba8.  This is a huge project due for submission on the 29th May 2015!!!! I enjoyed this briefing because, like most people I had a good idea of what I wanted to do in the project. I am looking forward to displaying the new me through my work!!

One of the really helpful parts of the briefing was us going through each of the learning outcomes, picking apart each of them. I found this really helpful at the end of the last project when we were filling out our self evaluation form, so I am glad that we are going per them again. AND with my new organised notes section, I will be able to come back to these notes later on in the project to help give me some guidance and push me forwards.

The ideas of this project, as I had thought, is an accumulation of all that we have learn over the last two and a half years, With a key on demonstrating these skills but also pushing the boundaries which will help you achieve post-uni.

Following this briefing, I had a mock interview in preparation for my interview next Tuesday for teacher training. It was quite nerve racking, but 30 minutes seemed to fly past! The careers person said that he could see I had a real passion for teaching, I just needed to sell myself a little more, Talk a bit more and explain everything fully! :)

Content analysis write up for industry report..............

The idea behind completing a set of content analysis, was to gain a picture into the use of advertising opportunities in the textiles industry. Is craft advertised to its full potential, or is costly advertising not a necessity? The content analysis was set up over a period of two weeks, noting down the number of advertising opportunities taken by both large companies and small craft based business. As in research into this area, I found it difficult to distinguish between the two, as lines do get blurred, so I based large companies with the term mass production, anything smaller was craft based. 

At first, I completed a content analysis of a variety of newspapers, local and nation, free and paid, over the course of one week. The results displayed a clear correlation...... ....."............ There was a clear difference between local and national papers, probably due to the costs of advertising as smaller businesses are unlikely to have the money to spend on advertising. It did surprise me how much advertising there was of craft based designers though. As this research was carried out around Christmas time, it would be interesting to see if this is the case at other times of the year. 

After the work on the newspapers, I wanted to see whether this was the same idea in different form of advertising, so turned to the television to see what advertising was like on there. It have to admit, I did have an idea of the results, but I was pleasantly surprised.....?.....   This shows that although the majority of the television adverts were based upon larger companies, smaller businesses are getting some airtime. 

It is clear that in newspapers and on television, larger companies are taking more advantage of the advertising space than craft designers, but it is interesting to note one area that i did not touch upon, the Internet. This is a rich source of advertising opportunity, which is probably viewed more often than television of newspapers. Since joining Twitter in December, I have noticed that there is a lot more advertising of smaller designers rather than some of the larger companies. Craft designers are using free, online advertising to put themselves in the public's eye.

NEXT  STEP = fill in the gaps!

Later in the day, I had a smaller, kind of tutorial, about what I aim to do in this last unit. Well... it gave me a lot to think about. I will develop the ideas discussed today and blog more in depth tomorrow. Lets just say, I have got a lot to think about!!!!!