We have all enjoyed our project, but it's not over yet. Our group (excluding me unfortunately because I'm moving to North Carolina) will be doing a fireside sometime in January or February about the on we have been researching and wanting to present.
This has been a very positive experience for all of us. We each had a common interest in the family and digital culture, and were able to do our own research in the niche we were interested in. I think I speak for all of us when I say that the most important contribution we have made has been to ourselves. We have come to a greater appreciation of how digital media can have a positive effect on the family.
It took a while to get the project started because we each had different ideas and we weren't sure what direction we wanted go. Some of the ideas we thought about included starting a blog, a YouTube playlist/videos, creating a brochure of sorts, doing a fireside, doing webinars, among others. Because it took a while to decide we felt like we were behind all the other groups, but when we decided upon doing a fireside we got excited.
Finding a venue to do a fireside proved to be a greater challenge than we anticipated. One thing none of us realized was that the leadership we talked to wanted to know more than simply what our topic was; they wanted to know specifics. If we were to do it again we would have done our research much earlier, and focused on that as soon as we started looking for a venue. That way we would have the information to give leadership when we were asked what we wanted to present.
We also decided to do webinars as practice runs for the fireside. We tried a couple different programs, and liked GoToMeeting best. The first two webinars we did among ourselves to try and become familiar with the program. The third webinar we had family and friends watching as we presented our program. While we felt like it was successful, we had some unanticipated technical problems.
When it became apparent that we wouldn't be able to schedule a fireside we decided to do a YouTube playlist, which means we went full circle because a YouTube playlist was floated around at the beginning of the semester. We even found a Google+ comment that mentioned doing a YouTube playlist recently that was from a couple months ago. We all got a chuckle out of that.
One of the major pitfalls of our project that we wished we had realized early on is how long it takes to organize a fireside. The chances that we would have been able to do one would have greatly gone up had we decided we wanted to do one at the beginning of our project, instead of a couple weeks in.
We also wish we would have done a group blog. Because we talked about doing a blog, but decided against it, we didn't think to do a group blog to post our research to. We feel like it would have been much better to have everything in a centralized location instead of each of us using our personal blogs for our research. It also could have helped us be more motivated because we could have seen what everyone else was doing.
While we didn't make our goal to do a fireside, it was still a valuable experience. We learned a lot from our individual research, as well as from each other. We also became friends. We have been able to use our resources to help each other out, not only with our project but with other aspects of our lives. We hope that the YouTube playlist we created will benefit others.
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