Day: June 5, 2017

Last Updates!

Now that I have finished my multimodal project, it’s time to look back and reflect! Last time, I discussed making a drawing and possibly filming the process, showing you a sneak peek at the drawing itself. Here’s a reminder.

Since then, I’ve enhanced this simple drawing by adding bright colors, more small drawings, and turning it all into a short video. This sounds easy, but it was anything but. I ran in to MANY technical problems with lighting, angling of camera, capturing video, glitchy phones, splitting up videos, transferring them, and finally editing. Overall, it took about 2 hours to create this minute and a half clip. So worth it right?

The final video turned out great and I have little regrets, but there are a few key things I learned.

1. Prepping for filming is hard and lengthy so leave yourself some time and have extra patience.
2. Have a map or a guideline of what you want to do, because you only have one shot when creating fast-motion videos.
3. Be proactive in testing out ways to edit and export your video, whether that be filming in smaller portions to send through email or placing it into Google Drive.

Ultimately, this last CTW assignment gave me a little freedom to be creative and innovative in presenting the same, old information in a fun, new way.

Thanks for reading!

This is How Far We’ve Come 

Finishing up the second section of Critical Thinking and Writing, I realized we’ve come very, very far in writing, reading, research, and English in general. Yet, the most impactful and interesting things I’ve learned has been related to research, specifically the methods and ways to conduct it efficiently. (Yes, I know we’ve gone over this a lot but it’s the last time. I promise!)

Inquiry-Based Research

One of my favorite concepts to rely on when it comes to researching is having a question and inquiry in mind when diving in. By doing this, it not only provides a good sense of direction but also what to look and not look for in terms of sources. For example, this method helped me significantly when I made trips to the Santa Clara University Archives, a place exploding with key material and valuable documents.

In the archives, I found it extremely challenging to sort and arrange all the potential documents for my research papers. However, this inquiry-based mindset I acquired allowed me to have a clearer sense of what sources would be key to my argument as well as those that could be used as naysayers, taking my paper to the next level. I realized that this method was more useful for working with large databases and groups of material rather than a smaller set of information. Overall, I found this tool extremely useful and hope to use it again soon!

Thanks for reading!