eLearning in the Design Studio

Well, I was supposed to be setting an example here and regularly blogging each week. Here we are at the end of November with a very poor showing indeed. I do have lots of excuses, as you might expect, (it been a very busy term... and all that) but the bottom line is - I haven't done it. So now, to make amends (if I can), I promise to blog more regularly and to review some of the great student blogs out there. I was recently told that students at the University of Sheffield are now blogging and I will try to get some links. It's also possible that landscape and garden design students on other courses are also blogging, so if you know of any, send the details to me and we'll try to get a link exchange going. OK, I now have a list of things to do: make a list of Greenwich student blogs, collate the survey results and report back, make links with landscape courses who are blogging at other universities. That should keep me going for a while :)

I'm now explaining to the BA students how easy it is to publish a new post using Blogger.

Here I am demonstrating how easy it is to post a new article using Blogger. I think that went reasonably well. The Dip and MA students seem "up for it". I also asked each of them to complete the Internet Survey questionaire. It will be intersting to see if the results are different this year.

After the tremendous success of last year's blog project, I'm broadening it out this year to include more students. Tomorrow I'll be introducing the project to Diploma, Masters and Degree Landscape Architecture and Garden Design students. Fortunately, I the experience if introducing the project last year and (fingers crossed) there will be fewer mistakes. Still, it all adds to the fun of what is essentially an experiment.

As students/young reactionaries in landscape architecture and garden design, I guess you all have participated in at least one guerrilla gardening event. The state of many public open spaces is enough to upset even the most hardened urbanite. Now is exactly the right time of year to start putting together your arsenal or seed bombs and organising night-time recces. Or maybe you'd rather stay in with a mug of cocoa. See Guerrilla Gardening.org for details.

Question: do you listen to music while you design? Are you the kind of person that cracks open a party pack of Bud and sticks on your favourite Extreme Noise Terror CD or are you more likely to be sipping red wine accompanied by some Debussy chamber music? OK, so it's not just music is it? Somehow, design, music and alcohol just seem to go together like Tomato, Mozzarella and Avocado. In fact, toss in a Tricolore Salad to the mix and you're in heaven... right? Or does none of this mean anything to you? Are you sitting, quietly absorbed in your own thoughts, painstakingly redrawing that masterplan for the nth time, listening only to the scratch of your felt tipped pens echo off the walls? So, here's my hypothesis; designers like listening to music while they work, especially when accompanied by their favourite tipple. It helps those creative juices to flow, it frees our minds and it makes us more daring. I like to listen to music I know well when I'm doing creative stuff