A bout of illness meant I could tackle the materials by mid-week. For the first time, I noticed some shonkiness. Missing images referred to in the text, misspellings of key names (Stieglitz and O'Keeffe). The kind of thing that students would get hauled up for at uni... Otherwise the standard has been high but it made me think that if a concept of MOOC is publicity for a uni, you need to make damn sure you proof-read it properly.
Still, the week's topic of portrait photography was great and there were a range of artists right up to present day Cindy Sherman. Once again, I was ready to go off at tangents and learn more...but there are no suggestions for further reading. Is Google it really the answer? It is in the sense that you can find examples of artwork and maybe a biography, but not so much to find criticism or ideas or appreciation of the artist. Surely there must be some good articles on Cindy Sherman out there? Yes, I could probably track one down if I had enough time but how encouraging to have had a link right there and then... There is an iTunesU version of the course which has more of this kind of thing. I'm not sure why they would have stripped it out for the MOOC?
Another issue that cropped up is pictures of people and getting their approval to post them online. No mention of this at all in the assignment brief, but in the forums others pointed out you can get apps now for in-the-field approval from people to use their image. Again, it would have been good to know best practice, even if it was not applicable for us as stumbling beginners.
I managed to cobble together an assignment this week by deciding to do something a bit ropey rather than nothing at all. So I'm still hanging on in there...determined not to be in the quitter MOOC demographic!
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