Evaluation- Maryam Al Thani

[Maryam_A_T]

Evaluation


The reason we are all creating videos around the world is to elaborate on the different aspects that are shown by Thomas Friedman in his book 'The World is Flat', and the lectures he has made about his ideology. We were divided into four sectors with students in different regions in the world. I was put into innovation, invention and prediction and connecting the world online. I will show how i carried out the different stages of the design cycle below.
The first stage was the investigate stage, and at the beginning I was not completely sure what was expected from us with the projects so I struggled with the first step of the design cycle. After looking at people's videos and looking at a sample investigation I got a better idea of what was needed from us to connect and convey to people. I looked through the checklist making sure that I followed all the steps I could so that I do not get negative feedback from it, or have anything missing. I started getting an image in my head of the path I would be taking because it would be too general, I have decided that it is better to go into detail with one aspect of connecting the world online in Qatar than talking about it in general. I had chosen to follow through the path of telecommunication services, their innovation and focusing on the ones in Qatar. This was the first stage completed and I was glad that I had done it well and understood what was needed of us in the project. Even though I spent more time that was needed and it did not follow the gantt chart it was something I was okay with because I gained a better understanding of the project.
The next step on the cycle was the design stage. What I had to create in this stage are two designs. How I would do that is by following the format of the storyboard. To insure that I had good designs I had to make sure that I followed the design brief and specification. I analyzed both designs I created against the design specification, following the design cycle checklist. After creating my storyboards, I had noticed I was falling behind with time, and I needed to hurry up in order to have my plan and create stage finished in time. After following that, and choosing my idea with the telecommunication lines in Qatar. I had chose my final design and checked it against the list that I had. I did not have much time to chose the one I thought had the best Idea but what I needed to do was chose the board that was capable to be made. I tried creating two well thought out Storyboards but it was a little hard because of the time constraints and I already knew what I wanted to create, I envisioned it but just incase I made a plan b. The stage that followed was the plan.
Personally, the plan stage was the simplest to follow. This stage was based around strategizing the amount of time we needed to spend on each sector of the project. I had to create a table have a step by step plan and create a gantt chart (which was not compulsory). First I create a table with columns which showed the stage of the create cycle, the time I expected it to take and another column left blank on how long it actually took. After that I had a step by step plan on what I had to do it was like a checklist of things that were still needed to be done. It only finished two class periods which was the shortest step for me. I quite understood why we had to create the stage now after we had done some of them, because we did not know how hard or simple this project is until we had tested it, which is why this stage of planning come a little later on.
After that part of the create stage had been done, I actually had to film the video and edit it. What I had to include that was writing in the create stage were screen shots of the process that I had taken and the video also some process journals that kept up with what I am doing. Having completed the process journals I had used Movie Maker to create my video. This is where I reached serious complications that Mr. Jones tried helping me with and is the reason for why my video is not up to the best of its ability. The movie maker I was using might have been old because no music could be imported, which was a problem because it made it seem like it was more boring when the pictures were flowing. Also the video that I had created which was 8 minutes long and needed to be edited would not import to imovie or movie maker so I face a little problem there which we tried to fix in a whole lesson, but it wouldn't work. But I can take some of the blame because if I had time to edit it earlier I could have created another video and edited it, but the equipment I needed was at home so I couldn't really do that. After this stage came the evaluation which I am writing now, and it is good because it helps explain some of the problems that I had faced throughout creating my project.
The time that I had expected this project to take me had changed drastically and I had to spend a lot of home time doing some of the stages because commenting on the videos, writing on my blog adding my section and helping others out in the wiki and outsourcing someone's video took up most of the lesson time. But I feel overall that looking back at this project I have achieved my goal successfully of education people of the telecommunication lines and how the world is enhancing and things are changing, becoming more technological for better or for worse. I had fun and faced many problems which I learnt from this project, I got to know new people from Pakistan and Australia. Also I have learnt to contribute on the wiki and use devices in ways to benefit others and educated people who have watched my video which I am pleased, even though there were ways to improve it like music which I had tried but failed in importing I have bettered my knowledge in this process.