Assignment Allegiance

The day where everyone was waiting for, where we kick off the start and begin with a new project. Bare with me that I didn’t know anyone in this minor, so there was no obvious group formation. This was both scary and interesting. You learn to meet new people, but would these people not jeopardize your plans? It’s totally not me to say this, I always try to look at the good side of people and let that shine, rather then bring the bad side in the spotlight. But, surely it’s important for me that I separate people I’ve worked with into two categories: good and bad experience. Experience here symbolizes the communication between me and the person.

When I know I will be working on the next project with a certain person I have a good experience with, I look at what assignments are available and tell that person what I would like to do most. That person will do the same and we will have a discussion about what assignment we are going to take. For this minor I will be making that decision on my own.

Social Constructivism

To come back where I interrupted myself: After seeing the movie ‘’Accepted’’ I got a whole new look on the way we learn. Basically the movie gives you the largest scale of what would happen if students themselves decide what they want to learn. So, you decide what you want to learn, not the teacher.

When it comes to my own opinion about this way of learning I can agree I like this better than the traditional way. But, if you put it on a scale like in the movie there are downsides to it. For instance, maybe your biggest wish would be to become a skydiver: How can you even think of becoming one if you never even heard of the word yet? So my final judgement would be the healthy balance between the new learning and the traditional way, you need certain guidelines to see what the possibilities are.

Here at CMD we are actually maintain this ‘healthy balance’. You can decide for yourself in what ways you want to develop yourself. Now I like this way so much, or better said: I envy this way of learning. It was the most important point for my decision if I wanted to continue here, or find another education that would look like this one. So I talked about this with my mentor and I asked him if there was any other location where the same way of learning we have here at CMD is used, and after some research he told me there wasn’t. I had to continue my education here, I was afraid I would find myself in the traditional way if I were to go to another school.

I guess it all depends on how you think about this and how disciplined you are. This way of learning requires you to be disciplined or to develop that skill at a high rate, if you can’t keep up with that, you are probably going to hate it. But if you are, you would fit in just fine. I myself would never want to go back to the traditional way of learning.

Once I tasted the honey, I wanted the whole beehive.

My bad!

I totally forgot telling you about what we did on the first day of this year. This is quite embarassing cause this one is quite important. To make everyone feel a bit better in this minor, it wasn’t just left with the regular indtroduction where you say your name and where you come from. No, instead we played a ‘game’ together: Daniel Ofman’s Core Quadrant Game. As the punchline says: ”A unique and inspiring way to get to know yourself and others beter.”

This is how a Core Quadrant basically looks like. You fill in a certain word in each square that fits your personality. The black text in the picture are the words I chose for my Core Quadrant.

 

Now you see a total of four squares representing different aspects of your personality. We got the core quality, where I started my circle, when you have too much of your core quality you find yourself in the pitfall. Your challenge is the positive opposite of your pitfall. If you got too much of your challenge you will become your allergy and taking the positive opposite of that will take you back to the core quality. It’s a vicious circle, wheras I start mine at core quality, others will start at example at pitfall.

So taking you trough my core quadrant I’ll start with core quality:

I chose compassionate as my core quality, I care alot about other people, especially my friends. But sometimes too much which will bring me to my pitfall sacrefice. If I care too much about other people I have to make sacrefices and in the worst case scenario I will get used by the person I care too much about. My challenge is to be more careful about my compassion, drawing a line and know when someone crossed it. When you are too careful with this you will become heartless which is my allergy. I can’t stand people that don’t even give a tiny bit if people have problems.

In my opinion this was one of the most fun and interesting introductions I’ve had in my life. I felt like I would fit in here perfectly. Some would say that putting your doors wide open to everyone is a flaw, but I tend to think the opposite of that.

 

Good morning…

So, the holidays ended and my first day of my second year would commence. I had to move from the middle of the country to the northern part, this journey covers about two hours. And of course with my luck I missed my second train, because of the oh so rare delay on the first. When I entered the classroom they already started and I excused myself for being late, I then introduced myself to everyone and immediately the teacher asked me to tell why I chose for this minor. At that moment I thought of something quick and told them that my first choice was ‘Concepting’ because I wanted to learn how to cover the basics of a project and that this was my second choice, but that I took it with the same reason. I then saw how the teacher looked at me and was thinking: ‘’Right…’’.

After I took a seat we got informed of what this minor was really about and it got me so excited! ‘’You mean I am actually going to know myself better?’’ That’s one of the many things I am recently interested in. I seriously began to think it was mend to be, being classified for this minor.

In the passing week we saw a movie ‘’Accepted’’ and we were assigned to think about the way of teaching as was shown in the movie. The day following I heard we had to make a weblog which will cover any changes made to your own personal development. Now after this very short introduction, there will be exclusively posts about just that.

What’s up?

First of all I want to introduce myself to you. I am Thomas van der Meer, currently residing in the Netherlands where I was born, learned how to walk, how to ride a bicycle and a whole lots of other very interesting stuff that you surely would like to hear more off. The reason I am making this weblog sounds like a rather dull one: school.

Now I don’t want any prejudices about this so I’ll make this clear right away. At this very moment I am in my second year of a study called Communication and Multimedia Design at the NHL. Now this sounds like a regular school where you go trough endless lessons of what’s on the other side of the moon, where coffee tastes like water and most important: where the teachers, clueless repeating the same story they heard in their youth to the students of today. Wrong. This school works on different terms than the traditional way of learning, if I would translate this directly to English it would sound something like: ‘The new learning’. This means the students, like myself, are having so much more freedom then the regular schools we know in the Netherlands.

The past year, when I just started this education I found out this was so different from what I had on my previous school, it was so much more fun being able to fill in the times you went to school yourself, or at least for the largest part. Then I heard we were going to work on a total of four projects in this year. Doing a project meant you had to work with approximately four or five people to find a solution for different assignments. What I really love about this part is that it gives you a perfect chance to develop your social abilities.

Now to give you an impression about what kind of projects these were I will list the four I took part of the past year.

- Developing a product to increase the number of visitors for a cinema with the use of multimedia.

- Developing an educative game for the elementary school to increase the number of visitors for a local zoo.

- Developing a campaign to influence the behaviour of people compared to the current environment.

- Developing a product to entertain the visitors of a local theatre during the breaks between shows.

 

Now about this freedom part: In the first year here at CMD (Communication and Multimedia Design) we receive a list with numerous abilities we need to master in one year time. A few examples of these abilities would be: Being able to make a website, being able to do research, but also abilities like: Being able to work in a group, keeping track of your personal progress. Now comes the best part: You can do them in any order you wish. If you don’t want to make a website in the first project then don’t, in fact: don’t even go to the colleges about making a website.

This pretty much covers what I have been doing the last year and how I developed myself in the abilities that we require to master to accomplish this education. Now I am not one of those perfect students so I got a few abilities from the first year that I still need to master. Luckily I’m not the only one here, at the start of this year I’m going to master them with two other students.

At the end of the first year we had to choose from a selection of so called ‘Minors’. A ‘minor’ is a period of half a year where you work on a certain ability in a greater degree than what we did last year. Now I had to make a first and a second choice. My first choice was ‘Concepting’ because I was looking to develop myself in the more basic things of a project. My second choice was a random one actually, I didn’t really look what I was going to face if I was classified for that Minor, but at least I knew I would learn about multimedia in education, hence the name.

Guess what happened, I heard I was classified for ‘Education & Multimedia’, my random second choice. The other guys which I was hanging around with last year were all classified for ‘Concepting’. So I was sad because I wouldn’t see them as much anymore, but it was also a challenge for me to get to know new people and learn how to cooperate with them.