Hi everyone, as I’m sure your aware PLP 9 went to Alberta over a month ago but we are still reflecting on what we learned form that trip. The trip was mostly focused on getting us to understand how place impacts certain types of people but that’s not what I’m going to be focusing on for this post. Instead I’m going to be going a little bit deeper into my work ethic on the trip and talk about what I did well and what I could improve on. I’ll also be using this reflection to answer the question that was for the PGP part of the Albert Field Study: How did you persist and manage your impulsivity on this field study in order to question, think, and gather data to complete your project and enjoy yourself? Since we were on this trip for over a week and went to many different places it would take way too long to list every single example so I’m going to talk about two good examples of my work ethic and two bad examples while reflecting on what I learned from each experience.
I’d like to start my reflection off on a good note and talk about one of the best examples of me using my time wisely and staying completely on track. That amazing example is when we went to the Spectral Illuminations for Beakerhead. There were lots of distractions that could have taken both me and my group off track and forget to get any interview from the artists that were showing their work but we didn’t. Instead we used the curiosity that we had about the different art pieces to help us drive our interviews with the artist who made them. The best example of this was an interactive exhibit where you could play electronic drums and make aliens dance on screen. Although it was very tempting to play which the exhibit and move onto the next one instead we spent about ten minutes trying to find the artist that created it and interview them about it, you can see a clip of it up above. That interview turned out to be one of the most helpful interviews I got. This example helped me answer our question for PGP because it showed how I was able to manage my impulsivity to get information and data for my project.
Now that I’ve told you about how I was productive and amazing at time management I think I should also tell you about a couple of my short comings. The first one I’d like to talk about is when we went to the Drumheller dinosaur museum. Although everything there was amazing and very informative I found that I was really overwhelmed. This was a problem when it came to creating our videos based on something at Drumheller, which you can see up above, I just wasn’t in the right mindset to create a quality piece of work that I was proud of. First of all both my partner and I spent about ten of our thirty minutes of filming time looking for something to talk about. When I finally found something to film and talk about it turned out that the lighting in that specific area was really bad and in the video you can barely see me. What was even worse was that we had forgotten to grab a microphone when we were getting our iPads from the locker room and were unable to get back in meaning our audio was pretty bad too. What I learned from this experience is to make a plan way in advance so you have lots of time to rethink original ideas or build off of them to make them better. Even more importantly make sure that your filming location works for what you are trying to do and make sure to have all the stuff you need. This experience helped me answer the question for this post by showing how not being able to persist and come up with solutions to my problem can be the downfall of your work.
My next short coming that I’d like to talk about is when we went to the second night of Beakerhead. Just like at Drumheller, Beakerhead was very overwhelming mainly because of the sheer amount of people that were there. Since I was in the artists group for my project I was supposed to go see if I could find an interview at Beakerhead that I could then use in my final video. There were two main problems with this however is that first of all there doesn’t even seem to be a single artist at this festival that would be able to talk with us, and second of all I’m too socially anxious to ask in the first place. And although extra information is always welcome in the end I did perfectly fine without anymore interviews but I was so stressed about getting another interview I was unable to actually enjoy myself at Beakerhead which was too bad. This experience helped me answer this question by teaching me that although school always comes first you should be able to have fun mixed in with that work.
I’d like to end on a good note and talk about how well my scavenger hunt group used our time while also having as much fun as possible. If you don’t know most of our visit to Studio Bell revolved around this scavenger hunt that was set on all five floors of Studio Bell. We had to go to all these amazing different exhibits and find the answers to the clues given to us on the scavenger hunt sheets. This activity had the potential to go in a lot of bad directions, like our group really enjoying one specific exhibit and spending most of our time there or getting really competitive and not enjoying the exhibits at all. Luckily neither of those possibilities happened and I had a great time while also finishing the scavenger hunt with non rushed answers. This helped me answer the question for this post by showing how we were able to question and think about the exhibits in Studio Bell while also enjoying ourselves as much as possible.
Overall I learned a lot on the Alberta Field School about a lot of things but some of the most prominent things I learned were about how time management can help you have fun while also doing quality work, which is also my answer to the question for this post. I hope that I can revisit what I learned on this trip in the future and use it for future successes and future trips.