Digital Diary - VAPD

One of the things that we need to do in Visual Arts is to keep a diary of our processes. This should articulate our ideas and images, record our media experiments, study the ways other artists have responded and track our solutions that we develop to our own artistic problems. The Visual Arts Process Diary is a place for the art student to reflect on their artistic processes. This is not something that normally comes naturally to boys. Reflection is not something that they do well and we have struggled in the past to get them to record anything but the absolute basics.

We have started to use our laptops as a way of documenting this process. So, near the end of each lesson the students get an opportunity to photograph, blog, podcast or video exactly what they had been working on that lesson. They might discuss or illustrate techniques, solutions to a problem or just document where they are it in the production of their idea.

The idea was that anybody could pick up their video and see how their work went from idea to product. We have never had responses like this. These are the most comprehensive and reflective diaries that we have ever had. The boys can see why we should record this type of information and are even starting to make links between the artists we study and their own work without it being explicitly spelled out for them.

Here are some small snippets from Digital Process Diaries or activities recorded on their laptops;