As my senior year rapidly continues to pass, I’ve looked back at several things from my college career that have helped me understand who I am and how I learn.
A big factor for me is my learning environment. I have not done as well in classes that are massive lecture halls, but have tended to excel in a smaller classroom where the lesson is more discussion based and there is an active engagement with the professor rather than a passive relationship between the professor and myself.
I think this is why I’ve loved my time in the UNC Journalism and Mass Communication school’s advertising and public relations courses. I constantly feel engaged with the material and am interested in coming to class every day.
In regards to this, I was really struck by a concept development technique that I participated in the other day for my Advertising Workroom course.
In this panorama you can see that, while brainstorming for a brand identity, we were instructed to use multicolored post-it notes to write down our ideas and place them on the wall. The system seems very haphazard but I was amazed how the physical action of placing an idea on the wall allowed me to mentally register it and then move on to a different concept. I didn’t feel like I was constantly riffing off my most recent idea. I was also able to move around the room, and be further influenced by the ideas that other students had posted.
I really believe that this brainstorming technique helps your mind open up and become more efficient. In fact, I would expect that many more office spaces begin to feature this style of collaborative idea generation using products like IdeaPaint that turn walls into giant whiteboards.
Image via http://www.ideapaint.com/spaces/work/
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