I feel that after having a summer break and not needing to reflect on my whole life over summer, it had affected the quality of my writing in the reflective journal. I still feel I expressed myself well in my writing and try to cover most things related to the Foundation Degree and life at college, but the whole structure of this seems a little bit more descriptive than my writing last year. I also feel that a lot of these entries remain unfinished, because the reflective journal can be a hard thing to concentrate on for long periods of time, so I could have digressed onto something else.
Another thing that is worth noting is the lack of entries on the reflective learning journal before Christmas. I think this must have been because the reflective learning journal didn't feel as enforced as before, and I think I felt reasonably happy at college in this part. Still, it would have been nice to have looked back on the projects I was doing at this time, as I remember they were both very fascinating projects that I really enjoyed doing. It would have been interesting to have seen the progress of these projects, what problems I faced, and what had improved since the first year. I remember I could definitely work much quicker than I could in the first year, even though I couldn't remember all I had learned in Maya.
As with the final journal of the first year, there are a lack of pictures to explain my work and the progress of my work. To be honest, looking back, this is something I definitely should have included in my journals as it would have made the journal easier to follow and to understand for the reader.
However, it is good that this journal remained much more positive than previous journals, despite the lack of entries. I felt a lot more involved with social discussions in class, and this could have been because there were less people and more friendly people in the class than there was in the first year. I also came up with some really good ideas for projects, and approaches and inspirations for these projects. e.g. the Dragon Mascot project, and when drawing the different designs asking for public feedback from a local football team, who I was designing the mascot for, and my friends on Facebook. I have since also found Pinterest very useful, not only for my projects this year (especially my dragon project), but for personal use and interest as well (hence why it is called P-Interest. it's very Pinterest-ing.) Another thing which I feel adds to the beauty of Pinterest is that all your favourite photos are saved online, rather than on your computer storage space, and knowing from personal experience, image files can take a lot of storage space on a computer.
I also feel that I was getting on much better with the students and Neil, and I found it much easier to get to know some of these students during this time. This could have been because there were less students in the Contextual Studies modules than there were last year (The class was at this point divided between the art and digital media students) and so it was probably easier for the lecturers to help us from this point.
