Reflective Writing

[BrendanC_TIGS]

Communication between team members was really needed during this assignment. We needed to communicate to make sure people were adding the right information to the wiki page and to make sure the videos that had been uploaded worked and had what the person that requested the outsourced video wanted. Communication also allowed us to learn more about other topics by talking to members of other teams about what they were researching. The Flatclassroom ning had an online IM feature which helped greatly with communication and because IM is almost instantaneous it can be more effective than email.

Email to/from the teacher was useful for this assignment because we were able to be reminded of any extra work that had to be done by a set time. Emails helped to remind me about any extra work that had to be done and also allowed for an extra avenue of assistance in that if we needed help with the assignment we could simply send an email and be able to get help without having to wait until another class. I found this most useful while working on the multimedia artefact.

The multimedia artefact was probably the most arduous tasks in the assignment because of all the issues that tended to occur such as microphones not working and importing and saving issues. I learnt that video editing isn’t that difficult when you get an idea of what to do and find quicker ways of doing them. The only thing I would do differently would be to start working on the video earlier to avoid any of the issues I had with editing and uploading. The wiki and also helped me with this.

The wiki and ning helped me for the video by letting me see what other people had done in the past and gave me ideas for what I should do with my video. The wiki was also useful because it allowed me to look at previous wikis on the same topic and use them to gather information for my topic wiki. The ning was very helpful also by allowing another medium for students to leave feedback.

The IM feature, being able to leave comments for others to view on the ning and also the discussion tab on the wiki all helped with getting feedback from other students. Being able to see the feedback from other people on previous FCPs helped to see what I should or shouldn’t do in my video and on the wiki page. The IM feature was also very useful because it was an instant way of getting feedback and ideas on what could be changed or improved on.

I did not really make use of the discussion tab or RSS feeds. I did not use the RSS feeds because I felt I could find better information without them and the discussion tab wasn’t particularly used at all by my group. Although others may use RSS feeds and the discussion tab I did not see them has necessary.

There isn’t much that I think could be improved on in the FCP and because it has been used previously by other people the methods currently in use are probably the best. Even though FCP is international there weren’t many issues with online connectivity or uploading and downloading videos. The only improvements of FCP I can think of would be to make the ning and wiki easier to navigate through with things such as finding groups in the ning and finding the right topic on the wiki because at first it was kind of difficult to navigate through everything just to find you’re teams topic wiki but even still that would only be a minor improvement.