My reflection essay for Making Media course.

Before this making media class, I had high expectations that I would learn many interesting things in my first semester as an RMIT student. But the results after studying exceeded my expectations. Let me show you what I learned after this course.

Although I am also a person who makes media products for fun, I have seen media products in many other forms since this class. Our first assignment was to do a podcast, which is quite new because I've never tried it before. Our instructors taught us how to use Audacity and zoom recorder and other tools to get the final podcast's best sound quality. The next exercise is to do a small 12-page magazine. I really keen on this exercise because it has elements of photography and color. We are also allowed to be creative as long as we implement the magazine with the same theme as the first assignment. Finally, we learned how to make a personal website. This is also a very good thing in this class that each student will be shown personality on their own products. In addition to her exercises, Linda also teaches many basic photography skills, how to use Photoshop, InDesign, Lightroom to support homework and the future career.

I was enlightened with a lot of knowledge and skills after this course. This course is extraordinary as it requires people to work in groups during the first exercise. This partly motivates me to be more open to getting to know other classmates to expand my networking and work together. When working in a team, I myself realized that I have to have a high sense of responsibility to get things done and not affect our team's effort. If everyone did well on their part, then teamwork will make dream work. Something else I recognized and it made me need to attempt new things is software diversity to make a perfect media product. These apparatuses are valuable yet require the user to dominate certain abilities to take advantage of them. The last important thing I realized is practice is sometimes more receptive than learning theory. The evidence is that when we are practicing photography, knowledge such as shutter speed, aperture or ISO becomes more clear than when learning the hypothesis.

Nothing I learned from this class is redundant. All knowledge and skills learned are very useful because after this class I can start practicing with some design software to improve my skills to practice how to look at the beautiful artwork and how to implement it properly. The value of these experiences is priceless because I had the opportunity to experience new things with wonderful friends. If I can study a course like making media, I still want to work with my current teammate because we work and play together very well, without any conflicts at all. I think the reason I could say this is because I have immersed myself in this course all the time with all my passion and curiosity.

With my new knowledge from the Making Media course, I can continue practicing my skills more. To further develop this skill, I will learn from my predecessors and learn by myself on internet sources. After that I can create my own portfolio with my training products to become a freelancer in photography. The initial two tasks have shown me how to assemble connections just as a significant collaboration to any project we will take later on. Thanks lecturer Linda for guiding us from zero to hero through this course. I hope I will have the opportunity to work with you in the near future.

Word count: 611 words