Study – Graham Clements

Advance Australia Fair

Graham Clements — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 20:01:00 +0000

This video is a remediation of Advance Australia Fair made for my BA in Internet Communications. The remediation uses the anthem to critique Australian society.

Study, writer’s festival.

Graham Clements — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 23:39:00 +0000

Once again, it’s been a long time between posts. Two months at least. My BA in Internet Communications is really eating up my time. I am now in the third period doing my fifth and sixth subjects. One of those subjects is an introductory subject to studying at Uni that everyone who studies at Curtin, at least everyone doing a humanities degree, has to do. It focuses on how to write essays, reflective or critical thinking, working in groups, and we have to give an oral presentation. I am having a bit of trouble figuring out how to do reflective writing, although my tutor said my second practice attempt was excellent. I have always found it challenging to get my voice heard in groups – hey, that is one reason why the independent life of writing appealed. I don’t like giving speeches either. So, the subject is going to have its challenges.

The other subject is New Media, focusing on participatory culture and remediations. A remediation is changing one media object into another, e.g., turning a book into a film. We have to create our own simple remediation. I plan to remediate the national anthem by making a slide show of its words that critiques Australia.

I recently got the results for my second-period subjects, a distinction for The Internet and Everyday Life, which I loathed, as much of the time, I felt clueless about what I was doing. For that, my major assignment was an essay on how the internet enables people with disabilities to advocate effectively. For Interactive Web Design (a second-year subject), I scrapped in with a high distinction. I built a website on disability-friendly housing that had a slideshow, interactive tabs (accordions), a menu that moved down the page as a user scrolled down it and tooltips or hotspots where when the cursor moves over an object on the page, information comes up.

I went to the Melbourne Writers Festival, which luckily started on the weekend between the second and third study periods. My primary interest was to see Justin Cronin, author of the superb and critically acclaimed Passage trilogy. He considers the trilogy science fiction – not horror. I saw him in two sessions. The second was him with the creator of the excellent horror/fantasy/sci-fi series Glitch, made for the ABC. I am very glad to hear that they are making a second series of Glitch, as it had a huge hanging ending. Interestingly, they both mentioned liking the American series Leftovers, which has as its premise 5% of the Earth’s population suddenly vanishing. It is a very different series, based on novels, and the novels have the characters moving to Australia in the third series, so it is going to be or already is filming in Australia.

Another memorable session at the writer’s festival was with Geoff Dyer. He is a writer who has written many diverse books, from nonfiction books on yoga and tennis to biographies to novels. Just about every book he has written has been with a different publisher and editor. He said he hates the writing process.

Due to the course, I have been doing very little writing—just a few minutes a day as I redraft a novel. I have not finished reading a novel this year. I started reading and enjoyed the third novel in the Passage series on the train back from the writers festival.

Well – it is time to get back to study.

I’ve been busy.

Graham Clements — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:28:00 +0000

It has been about six weeks since I posted anything on my blog. I have been extremely busy with my degree. I am currently building a new website for one of the web design subjects. It has interactive elements, i.e., things that move on it, like a slide show of pictures and hotspots that reveal further information when the cursor rolls over them. It involves using JQuery and Javascript, which I had not used before the course, so it is a steep learning curve.

This is a Photoshop mock-up of what I am trying to do:

And that is just the homepage. It needs to be completed in four weeks. Those little arrows on the side of the slideshow took hours to figure out.

I have done alright in the course so far. I scrapped in a high distinction for the previous web design subject and a distinction for the other communications subject. It is nice to get high marks, but that is not what I am doing the course for. I am doing it to learn to build websites from scratch using code.

I have been averaging 40 hours a week studying. Add to that two hours per day exercising and time spent gardening, I then have little time for writing. I do a few minutes every day. In about five weeks my subjects for my degree will change to more theory, so there will be less spending of four hours trying to get an icon to brighten on a web page. Then, I hope to have more time to write and read, I rarely have time to read for pleasure these days.

Studying…not much writing.

Graham Clements — Fri, 13 May 2016 06:32:00 +0000

I’ve been extremely busy with my course since I started it. I reckon I am averaging 50 hours a week on it. I have developed a nasty habit of persisting on a problem until I have solved it, e.g., staying up until 2 a.m. or waking up in the middle of the night with possible solutions to problems and turning on the computer to try them out—e.g., at midnight one night, and I kept going until 4 a.m.

I am learning a great deal. One subject requires me to create a website from scratch using HTML and CSS code. The other is more theory about social media, but the final assignment is all about creating a web presence; in my case, I am making a blog on Wix connecting Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Wattpad accounts. All these connecting social media have to be new, not existing accounts, and all have to be viewable by someone who is not a member of those applications. All have to have a similar appearance, i.e. the header image and title, and all have to be based on the same theme.

I was wondering how well the Curtin University course is rated. Recently a newspaper article said that the communications department at Curtin, which runs the course, is rated in the top 100 communications departments in the world. That should give you an indication of how challenging the course is. I have a Master’s in Creative writing, where I wrote essays, but I have had to learn how to write a proper essay for this course.

I am doing well considering the challenge, but not surprisingly considering the work I put into the course. My three graded assignments so far have been a distinction and two high distinctions. In the web design subject, I now only have to get 0.1 marks for the final assignment to pass as I have 49.9 marks out of 60. In the other subject I am sitting on 13 out of 15.

So I do not have much time to write. The most I have done recently occurred when I put an old story on the website I am building. I wrote it about 15 years ago. It hasn’t dated because it is about time travel (haha). It is one of the few attempts I’ve made at writing humour, and I really enjoyed it (yeah, laughing at my own jokes), but I was fixing up things as I formatted it for my website.

Otherwise, my writing is going so slow only a time-lapse camera would show some movement. Every day, I spend a few minutes redrafting my novel just so I can feel like I am still a writer. I am currently about a fifth of the way through the redraft.

One of the huge ironies of this course, with its emphasis on the web and social media, is that I now have very little time to play with social media and check out what my friends are up to. So please don’t feel neglected. I am neglecting everyone and everything not course-related, except for my exercise program.

Hopefully when I get into a routine and get an idea of what is wanted is required to do well at this course, I will have more time to spend writing and engaging with others online.

Studying/Writing

Graham Clements — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 10:21:00 +0000

I am now a full-time student, studying for a Bachelor of Arts (internet communications) through Open Universities Australia. Most of my course is conducted online through Curtin University in WA. I only found out last week that my Austudy had been approved – eight weeks after I applied. Surprised the hell out of me. I had had conflicting reports from Centrelink about whether I would be approved. One document said yes, another no, and one call centre person said yes, and another no. One Centrelink CSO at the local office said yes. One Centrelink manager on Facebook said yes. It was just as well I persisted with my application. I can only afford to study full-time if I receive Austudy.

The course so far—six weeks in, and two assignments done, one for each subject—has been a real challenge, especially the second-year subject Intro to Website Design. I knew nothing about Photoshop, so I had to quickly learn how to make mock-ups of the website I have to build for the subject. The huge first assignment for it was a blueprint of the website.

What made the challenge greater was I have been sick. First, my ulcerative colitis became active, and the drugs I take for it make me very tired. And then I had a kidney stone that hospitalised me for three days. It is still in there. My kidney was infected, so they could not reach the stone and zap it with a laser. So they put a stent in it to force the tube open. I need to go back on the 19^th on this month so the doctor can go back in and have another go.

So, with all the studying and messing around with Centrelink and illness, I have done very little writing in the past two months, just a bit of editing/redrafting nearly every day. I have almost caught up with my course – hopefully by Monday. But assignment two is due for web design in just over two weeks. All I have to learn to complete the assignment’s draft of my website is HTML. And then I have to write an essay for the other subject in the two weeks after that. Last week, I spent around 52 hours on the course. I think this week will be about the same. So, I don’t think I will be doing much writing for a few weeks. I have also stopped critiquing on Critters. But maybe in a month or so, I will get into some routine that allows me to write for an hour or two a day.

My (changing) Writing Efforts in January.

Graham Clements — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 03:03:00 +0000

January was a very moody month for me. I had a great break in Melbourne for a few days. I stayed in St Kilda and played tourist. I went to a one-day match cricket match. I thought Australia would lose, but Glen Maxwell hit 94 runs, and Australia beat the Indians. I had my birthday and got a couple of books I wanted. But that same day, a letter was being signed, informing me that the writer’s program at Divine was being scrapped. I rang the editor; she confirmed that the website is changing to more of an information site, so few, if any, articles will be published on it. I was nearly in tears.

After 52 articles over five and a half years, I am no longer paid to write for Divine. Although I had a few ups and downs while writing for the site, overall it was a great site to write for. I got to write on many different subjects and in many different styles. I interviewed writers and actors with disabilities and a professor who had programmed robots to aid people with disabilities. I reviewed films about people with disabilities. I wrote about personal experiences, such as what it is like to look for work with a disability. Through my research for articles, I discovered Australia has one of the worst attitudes in the world to people with disabilities. We refuse to employ them or show them on our television screens and seem to be satisfied with condemning many of them to live in poverty.

I was so involved in writing for Divine. I was always reading about disabilities in the media. But now it is gone. I can only hope I get another opportunity to write such wide-ranging articles for an organisation that cares about more than clickbait.

So I was on a real downer after I read that letter. But even on that day, I started planning for my next stage of life. I had been thinking about doing a website design course for a few years and using my writing skills to create awesome websites. I did some research and found there is a high demand for website designers in Australia – I had thought the opposite. I then found an online course full of website design subjects through a government-approved provider, Open Universities. I found out I could get not only fee help but a commonwealth-supported spot in that course (if I enrolled on time). I rang Open Universities to ask some questions and ended up enrolling. If it turns out to be a captain’s pick, I can still withdraw before the census date at no cost. Now, I am going through the process of claiming Austudy.

With all that going on, I have done little writing. I am still in chapter ten of the redrafting of my novel Branded. I added about 2500 words to it in January. I did not critique anything in January. Twice I printed out stories from critters.org and read them once, but I did not get around to reading them a second time and scribbling all over them. And I read very little fiction in January, maybe 50 pages on the train to Melbourne. I am still too tired at night to read.

If my Austudy claim is successful and I start the course, I will need to devote about 30 hours a week to study (the study guide says 20-24hrs). So, it is going to take some determination to ensure that I make substantial progress in my redrafting of Branded. Hopefully I can.

Oh, and I did get one last article up on Divine in January. It’s a review of Accessible Melbourne, a free Lonely Planet travel guide for people with disabilities.