Month: January 2018

Mukul Deva had to be, no offence to any of the other speakers, my favourite. Upon research prior to the session, I assumed he was another writer, just a little more successful than most of the speakers we had come across, but when the session began, it was more different than I could have imagined. He came across as incredibly well spoken, intelligent and in general someone I could relate to. Most of his books seemed to be based on south eastern countries like India and Pakistan above others, this along with his nationality itself allowed me to relate to him and generally was a large selling point when it came down to it. I also majorly agreed with his philosophies and general sense of self, it made sense to me and that had to be the main reason that I liked his session so much.

From the limited previous knowledge I had on artists as a whole, I thought that it would be an interesting, and entertaining, experience to begin with. When the session began, I can confidently say that I was not disappointed, he provided plenty of insight on being an artist and how hard it was to really, make it. Although his session was one of the most interesting ones we had been to, I did think that he could have spoken about his art and how he channeled his emotions into it, instead I found him telling the story of his life, which notwithstanding the fact that it was entertaining, it was somewhat unrelated to the topics that we expected to learn.

After a good amount of research, I came to the conclusion that Marc Nair was one of the more modern poets as compared to most others in his industry. During the session, I wound up with the same conclusion, he seemed to write poetry to help people understand his perspective o major issues and the factor of him essentially rapping his poetry to a tune, was just another piece of evidence. Personally, I really appreciated the way he expressed his opinions in such an open way, a lot of them were based on topics I could relate to and I found myself interested in different ways to make opinions on serious situations, sound engrossing rather than boring. Overall, I really enjoyed being able to interact with such a frank poet like him, it was an enjoyable experience.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jrzcmr_82kIji0FQDcgKOlBeUr810EInRfd4oQ_MtDc/edit

What assumptions did you bring into this session? What expectations did you have?

When I first heard that our speaker was Steve Dawson, I did kind of check who he was and do a little research about his background, thus I found several sites telling me that he was a sports reporter, this confused me because I was wondering what he could contribute to us but nevertheless when I got there it was more different than I could have possibly thought. He spoke about the 5 maxims of interviews, the right way to interview people and his session, overall, was extremely interesting. I was quite drawn to listening about his experiences above all as it’s something that really intrigued me, it was essentially something that I could relate to, and understand.

This lesson aided my understanding when it came to the news, previously I didn’t generally apprehend the type of article it was but rather the essential headline or subject in question. It also helped me understand that there isn’t really a black and white when it comes to morals, the topic seemed to be extremely controversial in it that there were two equally reasonable sides of the argument and sometimes choosing the ‘good’ as such simply depends on your personal perspective and past experiences.

This also caused me to question previous learning as previously when I had read the news, I didn’t make it a priority to find out whether the author was writing from opinions or facts. Generally I assumed that news articles from published institutions tended to be fact based and the newfound information I received in this lesson severely altered the way I viewed the news.

This lesson also inclined me to base research on hard news rather than feature articles or opinion editorials as they tend to be less fact based and more perspective based.

Despite the in depth lesson, I am still uncertain on how exactly to differentiate the three from each other at quicker glances, it’s something that I believe that would be a good skill to have and something I would look forward to learning.