Well the time has come and it’s finally over. This class has been such a challenge but ended with such a rewarding product. My American Studies adviser nominated me and registered me for this class with little description about what it was and what I would be doing. The fear of having to video conferencing strangers for a class worried me the whole summer and it was defiantly nerve wracking at first but I got used to it. Probably my biggest struggle with this class was working out how to use the video conferencing and feel confident asking questions on there. It didn’t help that my Chromebook has a weak internet connection no matter what I tried to do to fix it so I constantly felt self conscious about speaking because I thought the internet connection would be too weak to work. In the beginning of the class I felt a little strange about the whole set up and I felt strange about being in a class but not really ‘being there’. I can’t count the number of times that I had to explain to my friends and family what a coplac class was.
Another struggle for this project was the fact that I was younger than the other students so I felt self conscious that I didn’t have as much college level independent research experience as everyone else. But working in the archives was a great experience. I loved looking at the school newspapers because I’ve always been interested in culture and the school news paper showed the culture and the personal perspective about not only the Pumpkin Festival but also my school in the past.
Constructing the actual website wasn’t that much of a struggle for me. The website revolved around the narrative that the newspapers told so it wasn’t that hard building it. Adding the media was hard at first but once I figured out how to do it in a faster way it came together well. The presentation of the website wasn’t too hard because we had spent so much time explaining the site and the conflict to the other people in the class so it felt like we were just doing that for a wider audience. Overall the product was defiantly worth all the hard work.
Congratulations to everyone on some great work! Stay in touch