For the last few weeks I have worked with people from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii and Kansai University in Kansai, Japan to create a video about social media in Hawaii and Japan. This is the second time I have completed this project as well as the second video I have produced with Dr. Bert. I went into this project thinking that it would be the same thing as last time but there were new advantages and challenges that came up.
Language Barrier
When I began meeting with the students from Kansai University, I found that just like last time, they could speak English much better than I could speak Japanese. This time I tried to speak Japanese a little more but it ended up slowing down our communication and I reverted back to English. One of my partners, Sohei, is very proficient at English so he helped to translate what we were saying to the other Japanese students.
Attendance
When this project began, our group decided to meet once a week on Tuesdays in Hawaii/Wednesdays in Japan. We decided to use this time to review what we had accomplished so far and plan our next steps as a group. A problem that I didn't expect was that people were not attending these group meetings. There were times when Sohei and I would be the only two people conversing over Google Hangout. We both decided to find out what was going on with the rest of our group members and why they were not attending the meetings. Sohei took care of things in Japan and I emailed my group members. It turned out that Shilpa had a class that was going on at the same time as our agreed upon meetings so I told Sohei, Yuri, and Hitomi about that and we moved the meeting dates to every week on Mondays in Hawaii/Tuesdays in Japan. Shilpa's absence was understandable and it appears there was a miscommunication when we originally agreed upon meeting every week on Tuesdays in Hawaii/Wednesday in Japan. On the other hand, Christy did not have a reason for missing so many meetings so I had to email Dr. Bert and let him know that she was not doing her part in this group project. Thankfully, Dr. Bert was able to solve the problem and get Christy to show up for the final meeting. I was glad that we were able to accommodate Shilpa because I know she was very busy with her many classes. Furthermore, Christy should have behaved more professionally and explained to us why she did not show up for our meetings. Thankfully, Dr. Bert was able to work something out. These events taught me that it is important to keep the lines of communication open between all group members and the instructor so that problems can be avoided or quickly solved.
Expectations
In order to successfully create our video, we went through a lot of planning. We started off by brainstorming an subject and then I created a storyboard for our group. Our group edited the storyboard and then divided up the scenes that needed to be filmed. When I uploaded my first video, it was a strict how to video about texting in Hawaii. However, when Sohei uploaded his first video, I found it much more entertaining and funny. His video inspired me to redo my video and upload a new clip. Eventually, everyone was able to upload their clips to our shared folder in Google Drive. I volunteered to edit the entire video together. When I got all of the clips, I found that most of them had a lot of personality. Most of the clips were both educational and entertaining. However, I was surprised to see that some of the clips were not video clips but picture shows and another clip was a video but it was confusing. The video clip below sums up how I was feeling while I was editing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4rsAGjDZKY&feature=youtu.be
I edited all of the clips together to form a fairly coherent story line and submitted the video to the class. If had a chance to do this project again, I would plan ahead and make time to ensure that everyone knew that all of the clips should be video clips. Furthermore, I would make sure that all of the video clips featured an engaging and educational subject(s) without being confusing to the audience.
This project was quite an educational one and I learned a lot more than I thought I would. As one of the group leaders I gained more experience about how to deal with language barriers, attendance issues, and clearly expressing our group's expectations.
No comments:
Post a Comment