Refection Time…(The Project is Finally Done)
Hello everyone.
To Stefano, Luis Carlos, Farhad, and Gino, who I have been working with in the last couple of months from Columbia, Virginia and Kuala Lumpur, I just wanted to say that I have had a lot of fun making this video and that it would not have been possible without all of your help.
On Friday (today is Monday), our teacher asked us 4 questions about our videos which I am now going to answer for all to here.
This post is about my reflection on the finished video on terrorism that I and my world-wide partners worked on for the months of March and April. I think that overall we did an excellent job in putting together all the different pieces of this of this massive project.
“What have you learned about your topic?”
One thing that I have learned about my topic is that terrorists would most likely not have committed these crimes, had they not been pushed to the edge of there limits. Had the world helped them in there time of need in a different way other than bringing troops into their country and killing people, things might have turned out differently…
“What have you learned about collaborating locally and internationally?”
Collaborating locally is much easier and different than collaborating internationally, as I found out in the last two months. When you are working with any group of people that are any distance away from you, it makes things more difficult because then there is the matter of communication. You may want to go and do something one way and go ahead and do it, then find out the next day that you buddy wanted to do something else instead. Doing projects this way has the advantage of getting many different points of view and that many more heads for ideas but it also has its draw-backs about having to confirm everything with the other people that you are working with which makes the process move a whole lot slower than normal.
“What would have made this project easier/better/more interesting?”
The project would have been better if there was an easier way for me and the other kids in my group to communicate better, but other than that, I doubt playing around with computers and learning to handle this new kind of soft-ware couldn’t be any more fun!
“What have you learned about telling a story combining pictures/text/music/video/voice?”
For me, I always hated it when a teacher assigned the class to hand write a story about this or that. But the world and the way we do things is changing, some things for the better, and other for the worst. But from my mind’s eye’s view, text and story telling has defiantly changed for the better. I have learned so much for doing this project that I don’t think I would have enough time in the day to write it all, so I will just give you the more important things. One, I learned how working with people form other parts of the world is like and how much fun it is to hear different opinions and ideas. Two, I learned how to gather information for a video, put it all together and put it out on the internet. Three, I learned to work and run computers and computer soft-ware.
