Media Industries 1 Learning Outcomes Breakdown

So I thought it would be a good idea to give the learning outcomes in the Course Guide a good thorough analysis and break it down so that I can understand exactly what we'll be doing in the course, and position myself to realise my own personal goals for the course and the skills and knowledge I want to acquire from it.

Here are some of the notes I have gleaned from attacking it with my pen:

The course is designed to help us to:

• Develop knowledge of the media industry
• Help articulate into the industry after our degree
• Look into future possible direction
• Contextualise individual interests
• Network
• + DO A WORK ATTACHMENT

(I have not yet arranged or completed any of the 80 or so hours we have to complete in a work attachment to graduate. Cue panic)

I am particularly interested in these areas because I have been giving particular thought to my career in the media of late and realised...I don't really know where I'm going after I finish my degree. I do know that I want to work in the media, particularly social media, and I also know that I want to move back to the US to work within the Entertainment Industry in a media capacity soon after I graduate...but I don't know much more than that. So researching the media industry, both in Australia and globally including the US, will give me more of an idea of the positions available to me and the issues surrounding the media industry everywhere.

Particular Learning Outcomes that will be addressed include

• Media Industry processes
• Collaborative research
• Publicly communicating professional research

I think these learning outcomes will be beneficial for me in a few different ways. First of all, I honestly have fell a bit out of touch with the happenings of the Media Industry as of late (a little too much adventuring overseas I think) and need to update my knowledge on it's processes.

I'm traditinally not a big fan of collaborative projects, mainly because I usually like to have complete creative and production control over something I'm working on so that it's completed to the degree of quality I expect from myself. However, heading into a career in the media industry with this mindset is just downright stupid as most projects are collaborative, and so this will help me ease back into working in a collaborative environment.

It's been a while since I've done some academic research, and I'm actually thirsting for it. I want knowdlege, I want statistics, I want dry research journals and articles and I want to know what's going on. I want to feel informed and well educated on the contemporary mediascape I'm trying to find my way through.

I've never had to publicy communicate professional research before, so this will be a learning curve and one that I am looking forward to. Publicly publishing research like this is a great asset to have in my portfolio and to present to employers, and even after I've completed Media Industries 1 I want to keep up to date with the happenings of the Media Industry and keep publishing my findings. My research after this might not be so grand and in depth, and I may just publish it in an ongoing academic blog, but this project will open me to the different ways professional research can be publicly communicated.

Capability Developments include:

• Analyse media industries, theories and practices in Australian, international and cross-cultural contexts
• Identify, analyse and solve problems relevant to media practice
• Work collaborately and take leadership within teams
• Evaluate social and media developments, and learn how to adapt my practice in a complex and changing world.
  

WELL. There is so much packed into those four little dotpoints. The first two stand out to me the most, things I really want to take away from this class and that I touched in earlier in this post...

I really want to UNDERSTAND how the industry works in a number of different capacities, including practice and theory.

And another key learning curve I want to dive into is the ISSUES surrounding the Media Industry, a lot of the things that pop up in media discussion that I feel like I don't know hardly enough about. Everything from copyright to privacy issues to censorship to media convergence. I want to know everything about them, how they occured, how they affect the industry, possible solutions and how they might affect the future mediascape. And I'm excited to know all of this.