Reflective Practice and Blogs

Now that the opening of The Winter's Tale draws nigh, my attention is turning more towards what I have done. I believe that throughout this project I have been far more self-aware than I have been previously. Part of this greater self-awareness has come from the fact that I have been blogging about my process - this blog - throughout. Having to make my thoughts more coherent for someone else to read helps focus me on what actually is important rather than letting myself ramble on too much. Also, having Google Analytics installed helps me to keep updating my blog regularly to see if you are coming back to read what I am writing or how many new people are reading my pearls of wisdom. And - because the act of writing something makes it more clear - I am also finding ways to solve my problems and am gaining the heart to face them.

I have, however, encountered two particular problems when I have been blogging: having an advertising blog and actors' anonymity. My Current Projects Blog is designed to advertise the production. So, obviously, it would be inappropriate to mention certain things in there. Then, if I am having problems with certain actors, I must be very careful in how I speak about them. Particularly since there may be nothing inherently "wrong" with what they are doing but there may just be a personality clash in which I myself am not completely blameless. Then again, this is a general point about blogs: what you write is in the public domain and may remain there in perpetuity so if you bag people you may be looking like an ass; in looking like an ass, you write yourself as an ass in indelible ink.

Web 2.0 Playing

At work, we have had some time set aside for playing with web 2.0 strategies. I went to the first session on Friday. Whilst it is fun to just have a play to see what different things can do - I experimented with avatars and flickr - I couldn't help but feel the blog we were using as a guide, see here, didn't seem to take the power of these strategies into account fully. Whilst it did mention the requirements for using each strategy - such as what systems were needed - so librarians could cater to their patrons needs, the site did not go into how patrons could better harness the power of these strategies for their own requirements.

For example, with flickr, it is a great site for finding source materials. Indeed, I have already used it for my 400-level Advanced Directing paper to provide provocations for rehearsals. I also use it to find creative commons photographs for Critic. With my interests in theatre in mind, it seems like a good website to explore its power for presenting a performance in pictures. Can flickr be used to create such a performance? Or, perhaps, there may be too strong a feeling that performance can still only be done by live, present people.