At this point, I am thinking about the themes that I am trying to uncover, and to finalise specific questions. I am still trying to frame the research question and have gone from focussing on learning styles to really grappling with what it means to be in your comfort zone or to challenge yourself when you are learning a new skill or a new potential path with your subject matter/art-practice.
I’ve been talking to colleagues, peers at work and friends to find out how they see their practice and learn new skills in relation to working outside of what they know.
My original idea was to learn how to operate at 3D printer and explore this from the perspective of a digital immigrant. To possibly make a filmed element around learning how to use the printer and filming how it works. I made a film in lockdown about using blutak as a very simple technique to kick-start explorations. The theme of this was that you can begin a potential artwork by being playful and small-scale, which may feel completely in your comfort zone, but then the sky can be the limit and you can be hugely ambitious – for example by making a large installation from a million small-scale units.
The theme of the question then became how a digital immigrant can learn something well enough to enhance the learning of digital natives and to look at what resources are available to enable one to make this transition. Investigating these resources and gauging their effectiveness and offering views on these. This is important for others in a similar situation including students from digitally-poor backgrounds who may struggle. I planned to ask colleagues who currently teach digital skills and ask them if they consider themselves to be digital immigrants/visitors or digital natives/residents. These terms are open to criticism as are the learning styles and I did consider writing about the latter.
I changed to focussing on the comfort zone/challenge of the making process through getting feedback in group discussions in response to my talking about the question and realising that I have a strong concept of the comfort zone in my own art practice. Most of this year has been spent outside of it with the extreme challenges of the PGCert but I have learned so much!