Tag Archives: Reflection

Coming to Grips: Project Reflection- Round 2

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Revised as of 12/5 to reflect feedback from Jill

At what point in your life do you acknowledge defeat? The project for Writing with New Media has proven to be quite a challenge for me. I feel as if my heads are still in the clouds, I have not quite successfully articulated in my proposal how I expect to complete this project. It’s very much of challenge to clearly define my purpose of this project as well as the deliverables. I have gone back and forth with trying to clearly state my vision of this project,  I think it is very much a work in progress. I feel that as I go along the project begins to manifest in a weird way. The project requires a lot of discipline which I have not given anything in a while because I have been focused in various places. As a result, it is forcing to rethink my management skills and also how I tackle a project. In a weird way this project is changing the way I think about the word project, deliverables and purpose. It is affording me chance to rethink the way I execute a task. Specifically, how I analyze and synthesize a project brief. I did not use my time effectively in the first rounds of this project and now I am at a hard rock. It is a incredible frustrating point in my project journey but it is a point that I need to be in. With as this built up frustration and confusion and exhaustion it is given me a chance to reflect on who I have been all my life. It is now requiring me to change many of my bad habits. This project required me to clearly define a proposal with specific guidelines and I have veered off the track of my timeline. I am afraid this project will not be as successful as I hoped. Also, because I have veered off my timeline there are elements of my project that I need to rework and clearly state the intent of the project.

My proposed timeline I should have completed the work for the week of the 11/27 which was to create and explain the best practices for HONY brand. I was to analyze their practices and will try to successfully recreate their approach to sharing a story within the online community of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

After a careful analysis of the photoblog Humans of New York (HONY). I wrote a guide of their best practices, this will be showcased on my ePortfolio site in a different tab.

For the week of 11/22 I went on a search from a student who was willing to share their story and was unsuccessful. On 11/23 I created my first project reflection of where I was in my journey to completing the project. I worked on defining what success means in my project. My analysis of a successful photo shared via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Black Attire Aficionado is by tracking the amount of times a photo was likes, favorites, views, retweets, reblog/repost, comments, shareability on other platforms, and if other users share their stories because of the image. In the Prezi presentation, I compared the photoblog Humans of New York and StoryCorps. Humans of New York blog a by Brandon Stanton that shares stories through PHOTOS by providing these individuals with a voice and cultivates a new type of visual experience. On the other hand, StoryCorps is a non-profit by David Isay that provides Americans of backgrounds and all beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve their life story in a VIDEO. These two photojournalism outlets provides two unique ways in which a participant can share their stories. I reviewed several posts of HONY, many of these images receive over 200,000 views and over 20,000 comments. I was fascinated by the scope in which participants who shared their stories received comments from various strangers who had similar experiences. This completely solidified my reasons for my project on storytelling. I became even more inspired to recreate images similar to HONY. After several feedback from my professor and peers, I decided it was imperative to remove the video blog  StoryCorps from my suggested proposal. It did not serve any purpose because I was not creating a video along with the stories that would be shared via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Black Attire Aficionado. I chose to follow the feedback because it would help to clarify any confusions and make the project goal more clearly defined. As a result of all of the feedback the timeline will change to reflect the feedback.

For the week of 11/29 which has been my most successful week because I found an individual who was willing to share their story within the online community of Facebook, Twitter and I am still working on the WordPress post to my personal blog Black Attire Aficionado. Since posting the image, I have received 11 likes and three comments on Instagram with just using the hashtag (#HumansofNewYork). For the next coming days I will engage with other hashtags and see how they play a roll in user engagement and track how it is perceives via those social networking sites. This is a paramount part of my project because it will show the success how I am able to use the HONY best practices to recreate an image. During that week I tried to find students outside of my class to participate in the creation of “Jodieann’s: Humans of New York,” I was unsuccessful. I think many people were hesitant to the idea because they did not trust me or they were uncomfortable with the idea. My plan B was to ask several friends of mine and one of my dearest friends agreed to share his thoughts on loss. The question I proposed was “Can you share your thoughts on loss you have experienced?”

Examples of Humans of New York post via:

Instagram :

Humans of New York Instagram

Humans of New York Instagram

Humans of New York Instagram

Humans of New York Instagram

 

His response:

Instagram:HONY

 

 

Facebook:

Jodieann's Human of New York Facebook

Jodieann’s Human of New York Facebook

 

WordPress: Black Attire Aficionado

 

 

 

ePortfolio

My ePortfolio site has not been updated since the last time I updated it partly because I like the simplicity of the site. I am partial to simplicity, it is who I am. However, my next steps for my ePortfolio is to update it with a new image since the one that I am currently using is not mine, it needs to be more organic. Over the weekend I captured several photos of flowers that I would like to be a part of my portfolio. I hope to make it as me as possible. I intend to update the site with a few more of projects I have completed as well as accolades.

Looking forward. . .

The next steps of my project will require me to be discipline in my approach to successfully completing this project on time. I will need to revisit the elements of the project such as the proposal, the new media composing experiment, project portfolio, begin practicing how to give a in-class presentation, work on the project reflection and  begin writing parts of the abstract.

After careful examination of my current deliverables it is important that I include another HONY image, one with a female narrative. I think it would be interesting to see how individuals react to different types of stories on loss from a woman’s point of view.

Next Steps

The next steps of the project is to chart the success of the image on Instagram, Facebook and WordPress by how I define success which is taking into consideration the definition of success that I defined earlier. I really look forward to the new approach that I will take towards this project.

 

The Presentation

Can Anyone Recreate a Humans of New York Image?

_____________________________________________________________________________

At what point in your life do you acknowledge defeat? The project for Writing with New Media has proven to be quite a challenge for me. I feel as if my heads are still in the clouds, I have not quite successfully articulated in my proposal how I expect to complete this project. It’s very much of challenge to clearly define my purpose of this project as well as the deliverables. I have gone back and forth with trying to clearly state my vision of this project,  I think it is very much a work in progress. I feel that as I go along the project begins to manifest in a weird way. The project requires a lot of discipline which I have not given anything in a while because I have been focused in various places. As a result, it is forcing to rethink my management skills and also how I tackle a project. In a weird way this project is changing the way I think about the word project, deliverables and purpose. It is affording me chance to rethink the way I execute a task. Specifically, how I analyze and synthesize a project brief. I did not use my time effectively in the first rounds of this project and now I am at a hard rock. It is a incredible frustrating point in my project journey but it is a point that I need to be in. With as this built up frustration and confusion and exhaustion it is given me a chance to reflect on who I have been all my life. It is now requiring me to change many of my bad habits. This project required me to clearly define a proposal with specific guidelines and I have veered off the track of my timeline. I am afraid this project will not be as successful as I hoped. Also, because I have veered off my timeline there are elements of my project that I need to rework and clearly state the intent of the project.

My proposed timeline I should have completed the work for the week of the 11/27 which was to create and explain the best practices for HONY brand. I was to analyze their practices and will try to successfully recreate their approach to sharing a story within the online community of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Also to describe the image using the Visual Literacies Guidelines which I trying to see if it is still useful for the project.

For the week of 11/29 which has been my most successful week because I found an individual who was willing to share their story within the online community of Facebook, Twitter and I am still working on the WordPress post to my personal blog Black Attire Aficionado. Since posting the image, I have received 11 likes and three comments on Instagram with just using the hashtag (#HumansofNewYork). For the next coming days I will engage with other hashtags and see how they play a roll in user engagement and track how it is perceives via those social networking sites. This is a paramount part of my project because it will show the success how I am able to use the HONY best practices to recreate an image. During that week I tried to find students outside of my class to participate in the creation of “Jodieann’s: Humans of New York,” I was unsuccessful. I think many people were hesitant to the idea because they did not trust me or they were uncomfortable with the idea. My plan B was to ask several friends of mine and one of my dearest friends agreed to share his thoughts on loss. The question I proposed was “Can you share your thoughts on loss you have experienced?”

His response:

Instagram:

HONY

HONY

Facebook:

 

 

 

 

 

 

WordPress:

 

 

 

 

ePortfolio

My ePortfolio site has not been updated since the last time I updated it partly because I like the simplicity of the site. I am partial to simplicity, it is who I am. However, my next steps for my ePortfolio is to update it with a new image since the one that I am currently using is not mine, it needs to be more organic. Over the weekend I captured several photos of flowers that I would like to be a part of my portfolio. I hope to make it as me as possible. I intend to update the site with a few more of projects I have completed as well as accolades.

Looking forward. . .

The next steps of my project will require me to be discipline in my approach to successfully completing this project on time. I will need to revisit the elements of the project such as the proposal, the new media composing experiment, project portfolio, begin practicing how to give a in-class presentation, work on the project reflection and  begin writing parts of the abstract.

After careful examination of my current deliverables it is important that I include another HONY image, one with a female narrative. I think it would be interesting to see how individuals react to different types of stories on loss from a woman’s point of view.

Next Steps

The next steps of the project is to chart the success of the image on Instagram, Facebook and WordPress by how I define success which is taking into consideration the definition of success that I defined earlier. I really look forward to the new approach that I will take towards this project.

 

The Presentation

Can Anyone Recreate a Humans of New York Image?

 

Progress Update 11/25

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I began my project a week ago and to be honest I lacked confidence in myself and the success I could bring to it. I combined and tweaked some of my strategies due to time constraints but they’re all still of the same genre. So my updated timeline looks more like this,

Week #1- Leverage trending topics. I will explore the moments and trending sections of twitter and engage in the conversation for at least 2 of them per day. Boost visibility by tweeting with at least three content based hashtags that represent a call to action.

Week #2- Fuel my profile with shared content. I will share and comment on popular stories to attract or raise questions about the content.Branch out. I will locate and attempt to engage with three professionals in my desired career field (marketing).

Week #3- Cross post. In the last week I will share my content from linkedin and open lab on my twitter to show professional work on my twitter feed as well.

Week #4- For the last week I will gather and assess my data, see which week had the largest engagement and overall by how much (if any) my engagement increased.

I mainly combined similar strategies and will be continuing to apply all strategies as I incorporate new ones. I started out with 27 followers, less than 50 views per tweet, 5 or less mentions per month and had never been added to any lists.

What i’ve done to date

So far, as I touched upon in class last week my tactics have been rather successful. As of 11/23 (One week since I began) I have,

  • Gained 6 new followers
  • Been retweeted 4 times
  • Been favorited 7 times
  • Added to two lists
  • Mentioned 2 times
  • Had an all time high record of 101 interactions per tweet

I actually surprised myself with how much my tweeting and interactions took off by using hashtags and joining into trending conversations. I chimed in about Charlie Sheen, Heart Health, Obama, Womens rights just to name a few. It was actually pretty fun and interesting, because I got to read all these people’s ideas on the subject to scroll through a category.

The biggest obstacle so far has been without a doubt keeping my content up to date with the ever fluid topics of twitter. I go to class or work for a few hours and now what’s on my timeline is eons old. So thats a challenge for sure. Otherwise I haven’t had any major roadblocks that I see as a threat to my project.

Critically though I need to be more organized and write down the results over every day instead of scrolling back through my timeline as thats really time consuming. I also want to sit down and really read through hoot suite and see how I can get that to really work for me because right now I still end up back on the twitter app because I’m so versed in it.

This week I think I did a good job of being on more regularly and reading through content instead of scrolling like a madman. Moments without a doubt makes it easier to see stories but harder to interact with individual tweets so I have to move away from using that and stick to the trending topics tool which is a little harder but necessary for this project.

Moving forward and looking ahead I look forward to trying the next strategy and implementing it in addition to week ones. This week I am sharing content like crazy, news stories, blogs, journal articles and more and then commenting or interacting with it by asking questions or giving feedback. I hope to have an even keel of both informative news sources and op ed interest pieces to balance out the kinds of interaction I get.

Project Project Blog-Round 1

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At first, the final project for Writing with New Media seemed like this big pile of confusion. I completely misunderstood the entire project, I was lost in translation. I started to toy with a few ideas and then I went off the wrong path and landed into a ball of confusion and frustration. My initial project proposal was surrounded on the idea of visual rhetoric and culture and new technologies has led to the creation of various online communities which play a role in shaping visual rhetoric and culture. I wanted to examine how many individuals used photos as a way to use visual rhetoric/ visual storytelling to quantify themselves. I wanted to explore if photos needed content and if different cultures play a role in how we interpret images. Specifically, I wanted to probe the question “Has our cultural beliefs affected the way we interpret a image and why does it affect the way the see a image? I believe that many of these images has shaped the way we see the world and it has been reinforced by new media and leads to misinterpretation. My contention was that phycology, environmental factors, traumatic events, fear, and age are major factors that play a role in how our psyche interprets an image.  Although this seemed like a phenomenal topic to explore, it was not what the project asked for. What I was imaging was a complex psychology topic which would require world class psychologist and a massive research center. Again that was not the project. I started to get frustrated and shut down.

Then take 2. For the second revision I tried to revise the project using the same idea– not a good idea. In revision number two, I approached the question “Can Photojournalism Changes Our Biases?” This was just like the first proposal, it was more of a proposed theory, there was no practical deliverables for the project. This one was even more emotional based because it would require a psychoanalysis of what happens to me when I review a image and if it changes my biases. Again this was not the assignment.  Slowly but surely, I realized that I wanted my project to center around the ideas of photojournalism and storytelling. Once I discovered that these ideas could potentially blossom into something unique, I ran with it. The next stop of the project was to find sources that supported my idea that I was still nurturing. The annotated bibliography gave me a chance to dig deeper into research that would support my ideas. Within my research that I composed because of the annotated bibliography, it was made clear to me that I wanted to explore how individuals are able to successfully share their stories via new social media platforms and have a voice for the first time. This project is meaningful to me because by learning what makes a story successful will contribute to my memoir. I intend to publish a memoir in my early 40s, and if I can learn the ins and outs now– it will be very successful.

Now that I have gathered together my proposal, I am waiting for it to be approved and then I can get moving. Looking forward I want to begin my work on the week of the 15th because I am very much behind. I need to begin researching the photo blog Humans of New York and clearly define its mission statement. I will analyze a image that successfully captures the ideal storytelling in a photo from the blog then analyze it deeper by using the visual literacies guideline. Also, I’d like to begin writing parts of my reflection piece.

Goal checking- to successfully stick to the timeline that I’ve carved out for myself.

Tumblr : What you need to know about fandoms

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Tumblr: What you need to know about fandoms

Fandoms are an essential part of the Tumblr discourse community. They in themselves create smaller discourse communities within Tumblr. They achieve high levels of participation and attention generation. They also create vast amount of various medias. In this presentation I will be showcasing my findings of how the Tumblr fandom communities work and how the fans interact within these communities. Fandoms are critical part of the Tumblr community in what they offer both in both creativity and production.

Reflection

Prezi was a new an interesting experience to say the least. I found the software to be very new and exciting. It was very different from the other presentation software that I had used before. In my eyes it seemed a bit more creative in the way it bounced around and the color schemes it offered. Although, it was a new experience and a good one at that I do not think I would be using Prezi again. The way it bounced around, zoomed in and out was hard to toggle with. The constant in and out motion was hard to follow and confused me. I wish that there was some sort of tutorial that help me understand the software more indepthly.

I experimented to the best ability with animations, transitions, and audio. I saw some similarities with the software that I have seen in others before; however, I wish that there were tabs to indicate functions instead of clicking to find out what functions were actually available. All in all, I found the experience to be very different yet very creative. If all the problems I encountered could be fixed I do believe Prezi would be a go-to site for me presentation.