1. My first big "take away" was keeping calm when things go wrong. I've mentioned this multiple times in previous posts, but I am what you would call a perfectionist. When issues came up in the editing of our video, I'm not going to lie- I was pretty panicked. Thankfully, Andrew was very calm in all of these situations and his attitude encouraged me to stop worrying and focus on coming up with solutions. Being stressed when things go wrong doesn't help me to come up with solutions, and likely doesn't help the people that you are working with either (haha, sorry Andrew). This lesson will hopefully improve my collaboration skills, so that I can more effectively work with others (and on my own) to problem solve in the future.
My second biggest learning was in my communication skills. We both had some miscommunications during our time working with each other. One example was when Andrew thought that we were presenting our project to only our class, while I was under the impression that we were presenting to another class as well. Thankfully, we caught it in time, otherwise this could have lead to other issues down the road. I think that we were both a little bit surprised that we had had such a miscommunication. We talked quite a bit, and thought that we were both on the same page. So how had we ended up having such different ideas of what we were doing? I think that this happened because when we talked, we would discuss what we were doing or where we were going without double checking to make sure that we had both come to the same conclusion or that we had heard everything correctly. This mistake helped us both to remember to clarify and confirm our plans in the future. I think that this will not just help me in future projects, but whenever I am talking with other people in general.
2.One of our biggest challenges was definitely during the editing of our video. We were using a new editor that neither of us were familiar with, so we didn't anticipate some of the little "quirks" that it had. To name a couple examples, it wouldn't accept certain images and it had a very large watermark that appeared in the middle of the published video. The second issue was pretty easy to solve. We were able to find a solution relatively easily. However, the first issue required a little bit more thinking. We had to consider all of our options (eg. changing the format, not including the images at all etc) and try and choose the one that would be best for our project. In the end, we decided that the images were essential to the video and Andrew used another software to convert the file into one that would be acceptable to our editor. I learned a bit about how to convert files and what to do in this sort of situation, but beyond that I learned about finding creative solutions to issues instead of just "googling" what to do. Although it was a bit nerve wracking at the time, I am very glad that we got to work through all of our issues together because it will be a great help in future problem solving.
3.
a) During our "Dream it" stage, I think that we worked fairly well. We came up with our proposal very efficiently and collaborated equally throughout. When it comes to the quality of our proposal, I think that it was pretty good for the most part. We were missing a couple of small things (eg. how we were going to document our process),but once it was pointed out, it was easily added. Other than that, our proposal was fairly detailed and had some good thought and depth in it.
b) For the "Do it" stage, we had both good and bad moments. We got our research done ahead of schedule and we found it to be thorough and complete as well. However, after that we did get a little bit distracted and didn't make as much progress as we should have in the next few days, but we did get back on track once we realized how much time we were wasting. During this process, we did have a few communication errors (mainly regarding the method of presentation), but thankfully they were caught before any major setbacks occurred. I found that we worked very well together as partners and I learned a lot from working with Andrew!
c) As I mentioned in my last post, I have looked back to find that a lot of my reflections are more a description of what I did with some reflections mixed into it. Although I don't necessarily think that it's a bad think to recount what you did, I would have liked to see more reflection involved. Something that I have also noticed about my reflections is the length. Again, this isn't a bad thing as long as I remember quality over quantity (which I don't always, but I'm working on it :)) However, the length has allowed for most of my reflections to be very detailed and thorough. The "reflection" parts of my reflections were generally pretty thoughtful. I know I put my best effort in all of my reflections.
d) The video in our presentation was not as good as we would have hoped. It had multiple issues with it that resulted in it not being as convincing as we had planned (eg. watermark, mismatched speech). Once the video was done, we did a better job with the prezi portion. Our prezi looked pretty good and for the most part we had our presentation memorized. We looked pretty at ease while we were presenting, though I think that a few of our points were a little bit confusing and could have been made clearer. However, I think that the best part of presentation was the discussion afterwards. I liked how we both had equal opportunity to answer questions. I find that it is sometimes hard to equally divide an unplanned portion of a presentation, but I think that we did it pretty well. Thinking about the answers that we gave, for the most part we answered the questions well. Although not every answer was perfect, I know that we tried to the best of our abilities to give complete and detailed answers for each question. I also liked how we kept the focus on our project instead of trailing off ( though not all tangents are bad) because it helped us to be able to answer as many questions about our project as possible.
e) When I think about our original purpose for the project, which was to bring awareness to the influence in media, I feel that we accomplished what we set out to do. Did everything turn out exactly the way we had planned? No, but I think that the details of what we did matter less (though not unimportant) as long as we fulfilled our intention. All of the challenges that we had along the way helped us to learn and grow from our mistakes so that we could do better in the future.
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