The sights and sounds of graduation

Last Friday (28 November) I graduated with an MSc in Digital Education from The University of Edinburgh. I completed the programme part-time over the course of several years, and surrounded by some tremendous people. For me, one of the finest qualities of the MSc in Digital Education was the encouragement and validation to experiment with new ways of representing ideas and knowledge. Closely tuned to the evolving nature of academic literacy, we were prompted - provoked, even - to consider how to take a digital approach to the construction of knowledge, but in a way that would be simultaneously scholarly and aligned to the changing nature of the resources to hand. 

With this in mind, at some point in the days leading up to graduation I decided to try and capture, rather than simply experience, the ceremony. This felt like an appropriate way of drawing to a close my student involvement in the Digital Education programme. Using my Fujfilm XF1 and the Voice Memos function on my iPhone (and with assistance from my sister seated in the audience), I gathered audio and images to represent my transition from student to alumnus.

As the video shows, I captured and selected images that depicted sources of light, in an appropriate if not particularly imaginative way of representing the enlightenment that comes through education. This can be seen in the various street lamps, fairy lights and glowing ceiling fittings that are captured in the video. 

With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been interesting to also have attempted to represent the notion of light through recorded audio. For instance, I might have captured the increase in conversational volume in the graduation hall as the spotlights came to life ahead of the imminent commencement of proceedings. 

Nevertheless, I'm happy that the assembled audio and images manage to capture a sense of what graduation felt like. It's a decent memento, of a nice occasion, at the end of a brilliant, digital, adventure.