Social Media in Govenment Project Reflection
Overall, I think that our project was a success. Although it might not look like it from the outside, I think that a lot of effort was put into the project. We spent most of our of time researching information for our info graphics and presentation. All of our info-graphcs were interesting and provided a lot of information. The final presentation was well organized and engaging.
I think that one of the major flaws in our project was the lack of writing. In the planning process we didn’t really think to include a writing aspect of the project and never really thought of this until the end. We did write a few paragraphs about our individual info graphics, talking about how they worked and our analysis’s. We also did write a great amount of information in the document but it wasn’t necessarily writing. Although there was a major lack of writing in this project I do not think that had in impact of how much we learned.
To be honest, I think someone looking at our project without us explaining to them what we learned would expect that our learning was minimal. I thought that we would only be learning about senators and how often they use twitter, which I thought was interesting but I was worried I wasn’t going to learn as much as the other groups would. I thought this way too, until we started digging into the project a little more. It started with research. I learned so much from something as simple as copy and pasting information into a google document. I never knew how many senators there were until I actually had to find information about each and every one of them. I even started to recognize and sometimes memorize some of their names.
Even though it may not show, I think the google document we made with all of the information about the senators was the part of our project that as a group, was put the most effort into.
When we started making our info-graphics, the project became not only about civics but about geography, math and history. For example, for my info-graphic was shown on a map of he USA. On it there are two little twitter birds on each state, representing the senators. If the birds were blue, that meant the senator is democrat, and if red the senator is republican. Not all of the U.S. senators have twitter accounts so for those who didn’t, I put black X’s in place of the birds.
I also made an info-graphic about how many times the 100 U.S senators tweet per day. Making this was also a very long process. During the making of this info-graphic and also the U.S map info-graphic I learned about the different types of image editing software like “Gimp” and “Keynote”. I also revisited geography by learning the names and places of the states, which now I have semi memorized again. I also did a great amount of math figuring out all of the percentages that went along the it.
I think that group participation really showed in the final presentation. You could tell that some of the group members put more effort into the project than others. I think this really has to do with them being motivated and interested in the topic. At the beginning of the project Anthony was the leader and told us his opinion about how we should go about the project. He had the original idea for the project, he was the leader. Once we got to the the actual research and were putting information into the document, I feel like some of my group mates started to get bored and Anthony and I had to tell them what to do constantly. I also saw them constantly not working on what they were supposed to. When it was time to start brainstorming ideas for the info-graphics we decided to each make individual ones at first. I feel like we had plenty of time to complete them and yet David and Sofia could have put more effort into theirs. Also, made them a little more different, as David’s was a lot like mine. I think he could have used another way of showing his information and not make it look very similar to mine. Also, While we were all checking in with our group about our info-graphics throughout the period, Sofia didn’t. I was thinking she just wasn’t showing us her work but at the end of the project I almost seemed like he had done nothing. In the end she didn’t even make a info-”graphic” she ended up putting a bunch of words and numbers onto a slide the night before the project was due. Like I said, you could tell who put effort into the project. In a way it seems a little unfair that I spent hours and hours on my portion of the project and some of the other group members didn’t seem to care about theirs.
I think that our project did meet it’s expectation, but in different way then what we originally wrote on the document. We definitely learned more then we expected and made more info-graphics then we expected. We were originally going to make a documentary but ended up not because we thought it would sound better live to the class and also, we just didn’t have the time. Also, we were originally going to focus the majority of our project on Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. Besides those minor changes, we met our expectations and went above and beyond what we wanted to learn about.
I am proud to say this was a very unique project. It was something I would normally not think about as a humanities project, but ended up really liking it. I learned a lot and enjoyed learning it. I think the project was an over all successes.
