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Trevor Young - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

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Trevor Young

Today I wanted to highlight Trevor Young’s blog. Trevor is a personal development learner on the illustration course.
With Trevor’s background in digital visual effects the technical side of setting up and keeping a digital learning log probably didn’t phase him but relevant to all students are the working methods and systems Trevor has developed as he has progressed through the exercises.

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Learning Logs

Your log is used to record your experiences, thoughts, feelings and reflect on your learning activities such as; courses you went on, exhibitions visited, books read, discussions had, internet sites browsed, TV programmes watched etc..
Rather than just record what you’ve been doing, it’s important to add your personal comments, what do you think about the material you have encountered and how does it help you with your studies?
As you develop your ideas and ways to produce and present your practical work, use your log to record and reflect upon the development of your work; problems you have encountered and solved, or not solved and what you have learned from these activities.
Over time your learning log should develop to demonstrate that you have an increasing grasp of the context of the subject you are studying; that you have seen various artists’ works, or read about theories or concepts which relate to your subject or your creative projects.
The learning log is a place to record day-to-day project and exercise work but is not simply a diary of what you’ve done.

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Trevor’s blog is easy to navigate, it’s clean, it’s sharp, everything is labelled – it looks good.
Within each post Trevor documents his process, he writes candidly about what what he is doing, why he is doing it, why it works and why it doesn’t and he illustrates his working out with clear imagery.
The addition of ‘Hindsight notes’ on his posts allow Trevor to reflect at a later date when he has had a chance to digest the work, this is a really important in adopting a cyclic approach of evaluating and re-evaluating.
As Trevor progresses through the exercises he starts to adopt more explorative methods of working and documenting his learning. Introducing Trevor’s video diary;

This is a really nice way of humanising the learning log, it enables the student to speak about the work as they are in the process of making and it allows us to take a sneak peak into their working space.
As Trevor continues through the course he experiments more with video and documenting. This is a great resource, when someone asks “how did you do that?” you just need to hit the play button. It’s possible to come back to your video at a later stage to reflect on what you did and use it almost as a visual dictionary for techniques, marks, mediums and surfaces.
Peruse Trevor’s blog here
Students wanting their work featured on WeAreOCA should email blog@oca-uk.com
Why not send a video diary?
All submissions will be acknowledged and reviewed but we cannot promise all work submitted will be featured on the blog.


Posted by author: Joanne

7 thoughts on “Trevor Young

    • Thank you! It really is lovely to get feedback (especially when it is complimentary!). I’m disappointed that people are finding they can’t leave comments. I tested it and it worked, but maybe that is because it is my site. There are comment links on the site, do they not work or are they not visible? I will endeavour to sort it out.

    • Just a quick update. I’ve changed the setting on comments on my site now. So there is no sign up/sign in request.
      Just be aware; when you first click on the “leave comment” button, it does reload the page to reveal the comments box (I wish it just had the comments box revealed in the first place, so I’m looking into it).

  • It’s so interesting, creative and quirky – loved the fox particularly. The videos are a great extra as well – explanatory and easy to listen to and watch. I would have liked to put a comment on the blog as well.

    • From a few days to a couple of months, it very much varies (sometimes I would learn something in an exercise that I thought relevant to a previous one).
      I found it useful in the absence of direct feedback to put some more emphasis on self evaluation by coming back to previous work with fresh eyes.

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