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This was an interesting and challenging group assignment and it certainly made me think (theoretically and creatively) in ways I hadn’t before. I think that initially the tasks ambiguity and unrestricted nature confused a lot of students (myself included) and after forming our group this factor lead to a somewhat delayed ‘production period’. However, I think that I worked as an effective team member alongside Cheyenne and Jeremy and that our continuously improving work ethic and communication resulted in a solid final submission that I’m proud to have been a part of.
I took us a while to decide how we wanted to present our research, and what form our ‘media artefact’ would take, and throughout the process we altered our plans quite significantly. While this experimentation with different ideas initially resulted in us being behind schedule, I feel that it allowed us to really develop our final product and I think that the experience helped me develop further creative flexibilities and the ability to recognise when an idea isn’t working.
There are a lot of things that I feel worked really well in our submitted work. I think the website looks clean and professional and the podcasts and supplementary materials work well together to address our topic (mediums). At first I was unsure as to how the audio podcasts would turn out but after listening to the final products I’m proud of what we managed to create. In regards to the topic of mediums I thought our ‘multi-media’ approach to creating the website was one of our major strengths as the various content reflects the diverse area of media that was our topic.
However, if we were to complete the task again, there are a few things that I feel we could improve upon and change. First of all, while I think our podcasts were great – I think that we could have delved even deeper into the topic of mediums. Retrospectively, a further discussion of academic researches and theories could have greatly enhanced the depth and professionalism of our episodes. While we did use the supplementary information sections to achieve this depth, more verbal discussion in each episode might have been more effective.
Additionally, earlier in the ‘creation process’ I had considered creating short video-essay style presentations to upload to the website as supplementary material. Upon deciding to focus more heavily on our podcast segments, I decided it would be best to abandon these short videos – while this allowed for more time to work on the 2 episodes, I feel that by adding some video elements to the website I could have enhanced the multi-media experience even more.
Through the completion of this project I learnt a lot about my own collaborative strengths and weaknesses AND the technical processes involved in producing a podcast. The task also gave me a better idea of how I will have to go about completing future projects of similar nature. The experience of completing a group assessment task at university level was a useful one and has provided me with further knowledge of how to conduct myself within a more professional working environment as a future media practitioner.
In regards to communication, I think that we developed and utilised a range of effective strategies which allowed us to maintain fairly strong contact (especially in the second half of the completion period). We utilised Skype to hold more regular meetings and I think that this is certainly a communication technique that I will use in future projects (for uni and professional life).
I think one of my group’s key strengths was its ability to divide work fairly and effectively, and our decisions regarding who would focus on what. Generally speaking, we separated the workload with our individual skills and strengths in mind and this allowed us to complete tasks more efficiently and with greater quality. I believe that when working in teams, this is a crucial step to take and I will strive to replicate this in all future projects.
I felt that during the first half of the completion period, my group lacked the level of organisation that was perhaps required, however I think after we had realised what we needed to improve upon our work and collaborative relationship significantly improved. This taught me the importance of establishing a working schedule and regular meetings ASAP – when working independently I generally find it manageable to catch up on work that I have left undone. In a collaborative context, this is certainly harder to do as each member has jobs which the others trust to be completed on time. Overall this group experience provided a lot of interesting learning experiences and I will certainly use the knowledge and lessons detailed above in my future projects as a media practitioner.