The Independent Study Guide
Please refer to the Independent Study Guide for Digital Arts. This gives you all the information you need in order to undertake and submit your Study. This will have been sent to you, as an e-mail attachment, by Helen Holmes. If you have not received it, please contact her (h.holmes@worc.ac.uk) or David James (d.james@worc.ac.uk).Devising a topic
The first stage in your Independent Study is to identify the general topic you want to investigate and the particular approach you want to adopt in order to realise it it. In this module, you should develop workable ideas and then discuss them with one of your lecturers who you think will be able to help you as your tutor for your Independent Study. The tutor does not need to have taught you but should be qualified (in terms of their area of expertise) to supervise you. The formal allocation of a supervisor comes later. You should collect an Independent Study Proposal Form from Registry (or download from SOLE), and arrange to meet the tutor. It is your responsibility to arrange this meeting.
Getting support for your Proposal
Do this no later than semester 2, prior to entering your final year. It usually occurs in this module.
The Independent Study Proposal Form requires a tutor’s signature to indicate that you have discussed your ideas with her or him and that she/he thinks the topic is realistic. These are the matters you should discuss with the tutor when you meet. You should also complete the ethics checklist, and discuss any ethical issues or health and safety requirements that your topic may raise at this meeting. The tutor will then sign the Proposal Form and the checklist, and you can submit them. (If the ethics checklist raises any concerns, it will be forwarded to the appropriate department for their consideration).
Submitting the Independent Study Proposal Form
As you must do this by week 10 of semester 2, prior to entering your final year, you must bring your Independent Study proposal form to your tutorial in this module in week 9 or 10 (you will be advised of this in the sessions). Your module tutor in CDME2008 can then review it with you.
You must ensure that your supervisor has signed your form. It must then be handed to Helen Holmes, who is the Independent Study Tutor for Digital Arts.
How you should approach the Independent Study
Remember, you are undertaking an investigation into an aspect of your specialist subject. Therefore, your proposal should be in the form of a question. For example, ‘What are the elements of a successful motion graphics sequence in the context of a television series?’ or ‘How is the postmodernist condition defined in an image that appears on a screen, as opposed to the same image that is mounted as a print, in a gallery?’ Your final artefact, as a competent piece of design, animation, motion graphics, photography, or whatever, demonstrates your assertions and your Independent Study 3,000 word reflective learning report provides your contextual and theoretical arguments.
It is this question (the “why?”) that you should be investigating, and researching, in this module, not how it was done.