About fifteen years ago, I was fresh out of high school, and embarking on my first year of Art School. The structure of learning in that degree was to attend lectures where we learnt about techniques, and then spend time on our own producing a cohesive body of work that we would present at the end of the semester to a panel of lecturers. These ‘critiques’ would involve setting up the work that you had completed over the semester, along with your journals and visual research and answer questions about the work and receive feedback form each of the panellists. While most of the lecturers were supportive, these feedback session would be very stressful, especially as they were passing judgement on work that sometimes dealt with personal issues and were the product of hard work, tears and sweat. I remember feeling very nervous about each one and often felt like quitting based on the feedback. The point of this story is that we each bring personal experiences to giving and receiving feedback, which can definitely influence how we feel about it and how we present feedback to others.
Giving feedback in this unit was made very easy by the blog structure of the assignment. Each student’s blog already had the mechanism in place to allow others to add their thought and opinions. Our group, however often chose to use email as well. This meant that we felt more comfortable discussing things that we might have felt were not appropriate to discuss in a public forum, including questions about specifics of the assignments or requests to review things that were written. On both forums, the feedback received was always supportive, informative and helpful and I found it very comforting to have contact with people who were having the same experiences.
I think the feedback I gave could have been more consistent, especially when commenting on the blogs. I found myself forgetting to read the other blogs in our group, as they were not always checked, like I do with email and Facebook. I struggled sometimes to comment constructively on blog posts, and I felt that some of my responses were not really helpful at all, unlike some of my peers who were able to make some suggestions, especially about issues like proof reading and technical problems such as videos not working.
I think feedback is a very important aspect of a professional career. Without it, it is hard to judge how you are progressing, where you might be not meeting expectations or completing tasks successfully. However, those giving feedback have to careful about how it is delivered and how it affects the receiver. This is increasingly important with the popularity of social media and forums such as blogs and message boards. My experience in this unit has been extremely positive and supportive and I appreciated the nature of the assignments and the opportunities to create mini- communities of peers within the subject.
information+learning 