Tag: reflection

Podcast Reflection

Over the summer I was obsessed with the game called Don’t Starve. This survival game took over my vacation time as I explored it more and more. Moreover, I fell in love with the minimal yet meaningful plot line of the game. Thus this game instantly popped up in my mind when we had to choose a game to analyze. After briefly explaining the structure and the main idea of the game, my partner, Christine, agreed to settle down with Don’t Starve. Thus we began our process of creating the very first podcast of our own.

Before we could do anything we needed to make sure that we were both on the same page. Thus Christine played and watched some of the walk throughs to get the idea of this game. Then we brainstormed all the tasks that needed to be complete for this assignment and created a checklist. Some of them were very practical, such as renting mikes from the library or picking a person who we will interview in the podcast. Others were more of a content based: which term of Bogost’s we will analyze and composing an outline. We tried to do all of the tasks together, collaborating either face to face or working through google docs. For example, when we were writing our script we met and wrote all of it together.

We realized that the time was our biggest constraint as the deadline was fast approaching. As well as that midterms were in the full swing. Thus we decided to be as swift as possible so that we will have some time before it was due for any last minute changes. We were very successful with that. I personally felt that having checklists and adhering to the schedule helped a lot. As well as that we communicated a lot and made sure that the work is equally shared. Although we were friends before we started working on this project, I feel that we got to know each other much better.

Besides time I felt that the technological aspect of this project would be hard as well. I felt very comfortable in discussing the game, talking about the Bogost’s term and drafting the script. However, when it came down to recording it, I felt uneasy. Although I downloaded Audacity and read instructions upon how to use it, I still felt that I am stepping out of my comfort zone of a sort. But in the end it was not as scary as I thought it would be. We managed to record it and even have music of the game in the background. What helped us was that the availability of Professor Morgen as we could ask a lot of questions directly as well as refer to his websites for the basic FAQs.

For the future I would use the same strategy. Being the lead producer does not mean that that person has to do more work. Sharing as much work as possible helps a lot, because that way you collaborate more and realize that each person has different perspectives. I feel that this makes a big difference when it comes to insights of analyzing the game. As well as that working ahead of time is crucial for this project. What I would like to do in the future though is experiment with the technological aspect. Maybe add more different snippets of music or add something new entirely. However, that is for the future, and for now you can check out the freshly completed podcast about Don’t Starve here.

Gone Home Reflection

Gone Home was one of the more intriguing games I’ve played so far. Right from the start, I felt a mysterious and eerie vibe just from reading the letter from Sam taped to the front door. I thought this was a great way to start the game because the player is immediately hooked by the ambiguity presented in that letter.

The game takes place in the aftermath of Sam’s escape from her unwanted reality. This reverse chronological structure is the first I’ve experienced in a game and its effects on the gaming experience is monumental. All I was thinking of was where’s the next clue or hint? The fact that there were also multiple locked doors at the start of the game pushed me to keep playing so that I could somehow discover what was being hidden.

The series of Samantha’s journal entries or letters addressed to Kaitlin also provides a unique narrative experience. Each letter exposes some kind of detail pertinent to the big picture, especially those messages that uncovered the mother’s affair and the father’s terrible childhood. This also ties into how the player must explore the house and find those clues that reveal crucial details about what happened while Kaitlin was absent. The freedom to roam around and make one’s own decisions during this game enables the player to take one’s time and absorb everything. In conclusion, Gone Home was a tragic but complete video game, one I won’t forget.

Final Portfolio Outcomes Essay

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Graffiti spelling out "look book"

Due: Your final portfolio is due Friday, December 9 between 3 to 5:30 P.M

(that’s when our final exam period is scheduled)

As the semester comes to an end, you will organize the work on your course site into a portfolio showing the work you have done this semester. Make certain that your entire course subdomain looks complete, coherent, and like you’ve given some thought to its overall design and aesthetics. As part of that process, you’ll write a portfolio cover essay about 750 – 1250 words (3-5 pages) in length, discussing your own learning and the improvement and progression you’ve made in the course.

Reflective Cover Essay

In this particular case, the reflective essay should take as its topic your relationship to the writing process and should explore the improvements or progression you have made in this course. Over the course of your essay, you will link to and discuss each of the major projects you’ve published this semester, along with some of the best of your other work.

You might ask and answer the following questions:

  • Has your process for writing changed over the course of the class?
  • What insights have you gained into yourself as a learner?
  • Are there new strategies you now employ that you had not previously?
  • Are there areas you have identified in your writing process that still need work?
  • What part of your exploration of your writing process do you feel has been the most successful?
  • What have you learned in this course about writing that you did not know before?
  • What have you learned about yourself as a researcher, as a person who engages in argument, as a person who cares about inquiry?
  • What have you learned about collaboration with others, or about giving and receiving feedback on your writing process this semester?
  • How has the work you’ve done this semester helped you to fulfill the learning objectives for the course?
  • How has the you’ve done this semester met the criteria for successful writing according to the terms we’ve established as a community?
  • What is your best work for the course? Why do you think it’s your best? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your other work?

Your reflective essay will address these kinds of questions in some way and will make use of the artifacts (your writing projects) you include in your portfolio as evidence to support your answers to the above questions. A reflective essay does not need to have a specific thesis but should have an organizational framework that takes the reader of your essay though your ideas effectively and clearly.

Writing a Reflective Essay

Because process is such a personal part of writing, in this reflective essay feel free to use first person and write a narrative of your experience, rather than an argumentative essay. You can present your discovery by:

  • Telling a story,
  • Exploring each piece of your writing process and the role it plays in producing a final product,
  • Discussing your failures and how they turned into successes, or
  • Starting with your successes and then discussing how you intend to improve in other areas needing further developing.

However you choose to structure this reflective essay, it still needs to have a purpose. That purpose need not be defined by a thesis but perhaps might have more to do with acknowledging what you have learned and what you are still learning.

What is most important is that you engage with your writing process in three ways.

  • First, engage with the process of writing some of the artifacts you included in your portfolio. Describe your writing process. An important part of composing a work whether in a digital space, on paper, or orally is figuring out the process you, as a composer, need to go through in order to effectively create a text, artifact, or presentation. It can include many of the techniques that your instructor may have mentioned: outlining, word webs, response paragraphs, and blogging. It can also be much more informal: emailing a professor about an idea, sketching out notes on a napkin at a coffee shop, or talking to a friend about your ideas. Ultimately, your writing process includes each step you take from the coffee shop napkin to an outline to a first draft and eventually, a final product. Discovering and being able to articulate your own writing process will help you become a more effective writer/composer as you progress through college.
  • Second, engage with the process of curating the portfolio as a whole (which pieces you chose, what order you put them in, and how they represent your learning/discovering your writing process over the course of the term).
  • Third, consider talking about the different genres or literacies in your final portfolio. How are they different from one another? How did you figure out the genre conventions that were appropriate to each artifact in your portfolio? What skills might you use to identify genres of writing beyond this course?

Because you are talking about the process of writing/composing each artifact and the portfolio as a whole, you should think of your portfolio and its artifacts as texts to be analyzed (like you would a piece of literature or an article not written by you). Quote from your writing. Use it to show your process and describe how the writing itself demonstrates your learning.

Imagine that the audience of your reflective essay has not read your writing before. You need to teach them about the artifacts themselves and how your writing process directly your portfolio.

Describe the assignments you composed in this course that allowed you to practice writing for an audience. Make sure to discuss what you learned in those assignments. Also, consider the challenges of writing to different audiences and how you managed those challenges.

Nuts and Bolts

New Index Page

The reflection should become the new index page for your course site and should begin with a note indicating that the site is an archive of the work that you completed as part of ENG181.06 at Emory University during fall semester 2016 and include a link back to your primary domain, should a visitor want to go see what you are up to currently, and a link to the site for this course, so that a reader who is going through your work can easily find out more information about the course you were in.

Student Learning Outcomes

Notice that each of the Student Learning Outcomes outlined in the course site is a separate blog post, with its own separate permalink. As you are going back through your site and writing your reflection essay, consider how each piece you worked on met one or more of those learning outcomes, and then add a link someplace on that page to whichever outcomes it applies to–feel free to follow the example in the previous sentence and simply add a small parenthetical note with links to whichever outcomes apply.

Adding those links will create pingback comments on the Student Learning Outcomes posts on this site, and will therefore become another nonlinear route for exploring the work we’ve all engaged in as a community this semester. In order to make sure this works, first log into your own dashboard and find Settings > Discussion and the first check box, which is probably unchecked, says “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article.” Check that box, then save your settings.

Formatting

Your reflective essay should conform to the same hybrid of MLA guidelines and conventions for publishing on the web that you’ve used for your other writing this semester.

Your reflective essay must include visual elements. You have lots of freedom to decide the nature of these visuals, but one good choice available to you is to take screenshots of the projects on your site and use those as images for the major projects as you discuss them. You can also repeat images from your projects in your reflective essay. Or, you can use Flickr advanced searches to find CC-licensed images to use in your essay (make certain that you link back to the image properly if you do!). Just make certain that any images your include in your reflective essay are clearly identified with good captions.

Use links not URLs throughout your reflective essay and throughout your site.

In the process of reorganizing your site into a portfolio, you might consider changing themes for your course site. Your goal is to make certain that the entire site looks good, and shows that you’ve given thought to how the pieces all fit together. Think of the entire course site as an argument that you have met the learning outcomes for the class and that you know how to write, design, build, and publish an effective and thoughtful academic web site.

Podcast Reflection

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Once you have completed your podcast episode, you should write a reflection post, published to your own site. Embed the Soundcloud episode in your post (if I haven’t published the episode yet when you publish your post, just edit the post later to add the link once I have).

Your refection should be 250 – 500 words and should be in the form of an essay with complete paragraphs, not as a list of bullet point answers.

Reflection Questions

Include a brief description of your process for developing the podcast. How did you and your assistant producer divide up the tasks involved and how did you structure your collaboration? In what ways does your episode respond to the other episodes in the series — in other words, compare your episode to the ones before it, explaining how you gained inspiration from, adapted, or resisted something that your peers did in their episodes.

Please describe your primary goals with the episode that you produced and explain the strategies that you used to achieve them. You’re producing these episodes under a number of time and technological constraints, so it’s likely that there will be some goals that you just cannot accomplish within those constraints — address what challenges arose for you and the choices you made to meet them and/or describe what you would have done differently had you more time/resources available for your episode (in other words, what are some aspirational goals that were perhaps unrealistic given the constraints of the assignment but that you would have liked to have tried to accomplish if circumstances were different?).

How do you see your work on the podcast episode helping you to achieve the learning outcomes for this course? Link to the specific learning outcome posts that applied to your work on this assignment, and explain how you met that outcome with your work on this assignment.

Make sure you address the sets of questions above and then also consider some of the questions below and address them in your reflection (you definitely won’t be able to answer all of these, so go through the list and pick some that seem to be most of interest for you and write about them):

  • Were the strategies, skills and procedures I used effective for this assignment?
  • Do I see any patterns in how I approached my work on this episode? How was producing a podcast similar to or different from writing more traditional essays?
  • What have I learned about my strengths and my areas in need of improvement?
  • How am I progressing as a learner?
  • What suggestions do I have for my peers as they go about working on their episodes to come?
  • How can I apply the skills I used in crafting this podcast episode to future writing projects? Where can I use these skills again?
  • What are you most proud of about the episode that you created?
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