Fashion Week Group Presentations

One word to some up our group presentations - embarrassing!

the week before last we watched the presentations for Milan and New York, and last week it was our turn with London and the other group who did Paris. All of the groups had a t least 2-3 people within their group who where absent on presentation day, and some people had had trouble logging into their Pebblepad account to upload their work so they had to use a word document to support their presentation.

I think that most people find giving presentations incredibly nerve racking and embarrassing, but I think that was made worse as none of the groups had got together to practise their presentations, and it showed.

I think because we had all just met each other and our teams where selected at random, we all held back a bit, I know I did. I volunteered as a 'team leader' with Becky because nobody else wanted to do it, but I did not want to start the term bossing everyone around and telling them what to do. As the oldest student on our course, a mother, an ex-learning support assistant and a generally bossy person, I know I can be prone to playing mother duck. But I didn't want to rub anyone up the wrong way at the start of our next three years together, as I know that first impressions can stick.  I set up a Facebook group to help our group to communicate outside of uni, but nobody really used it, including myself. So as a team leader I failed miserably.

Having said that, I believe that the research that I carried out and the work that I uploaded onto Pebblepad was of a good standard. I read through several different show reports and websites for information on each designer's collection, and used this as well as my own opinion on each collection to form my webfolio page. I also picked images that illustrated some specific pieces in the collection that I wrote about, so I was able to point these out to the audience during the presentation. I also researched and uploaded the Overview page for London Fashion Week. I made notes to refer to during my presentation, rather than just reading off of the webfolio page, and made an effort to make eye contact with the audience. Owing to the feedback I received, I believe this helped to make my presentation more engaging to the audience.

I think that doing a group project together at the start of the term is a good way to get us all to interact and mix as a group, and I think that is achievable within the structure of the teaching environment. But after all the initial flurry of work and good intentions, and because we knew that it wouldn't be formally assessed, for a lot of students it got placed on the back-burner and forgotten about until d-day approached, and by then it was too late.