Capstone Reflection: A Look Back at my E-Portfolio

Through developing my e-portfolio, I have gained a bigger picture of the web and especially different ways to display my work on the web. Through the my samples of new media page I found a way to showcase my projects and list the different web and public relations skills I have (in a quantitative manner). In making this portfolio, I've become much more conscious of this "unknown audience" and make sure that whatever I put on this portfolio can be seen by anyone on the internet. I also experimented with pdf versus Word document in attaching writing samples on another page of my portfolio.
In terms of web design, I have learned some of the ins and outs in how to design different web pages either through the regular format or editing html code on the page. With the contact me form, I had to manipulate the width and height of the embedded form to fit in the allotted space.

When working on my portfolio, I really had to take a trial and error approach in experimenting with formatting and layout of the overall site. This website was a definite trial of patience as I found dozens of things I didn't want on my site before I figured out how to make the site how I imagined. On the home page I chose to display a sidebar with easy navigation and pages that mirror resume sections. This however, took a lot of work because there wasn't an easy route to link all of the pages together in one simple list.

The general theme in my portfolio is the main setup of a resume with every page representing one section of my work experience, samples of my work, skills and contact information. In addition to an easily-accessible resume online for future employers to explore, I wanted to create an index of my online presence, especially through my social networking sites.

In developing this portfolio, I really wanted to create a snapshot of my skills and experience, but create a personal feel for my resume with a photo, interests/hobbies and career goals so my resume is readily available for future employers to explore and see the finished product of my e-portfolio that hopefully displays my creativity and my specific career goals. In having an e-portfolio, I will be able to have an active resume that I can update easily and show future employers. In having a site to show my projects and writing samples I hope I can set myself apart from other applicants because of my web skills and communication.

In building this portfolio, I have found a new way to market my skills and experience to future employers and show different ways of working with technology and the web. With the flexibility, I can update the site to show my web skills and different class projects that will help me in searching for a job. Public relations is based on writing skills, but also relies on computer skills as well and this portfolio can tie the two together to show my experience and skills.

Time's Person of the Year: You

After reading the Time Magazine's article about the new Web 2.0 I have a few reflections. The article talks about the development of the new web and the dissemination of information across this infinite medium.

"And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software."

The new web has been a unique medium to express our creativity, our ideas, our thoughts and share them with everyone and anyone. With this new web we can also spread information quickly- almost as it is happening. News around the world, the earthquake in Haiti, the 9/11 attacks, are being reported not only by the media, but by the people as they are happening. We are not just the consumer of media anymore, but the producers and distributors of the media. As I did some research on fandom, or fan communities, I found a lot of information that showed how fans express their participation in fan communities online and how it is much more possible to be an extreme fan in today's society because of the flexibility and ease of spreading information through the internet to others.

"But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion."

We're still exploring how the internet is impacting our communication with others. Is it helping communication by making quicker connections through email, Skype or blogs? Or does the computer and internet distract us from real life happening around us? It's still a social experiment, how do we use our capability to communicate with millions? There's no road map to the internet, so how do we explore the endless possibilities and share them with others?

Just as blogs are an interesting development that have us writing to the world wide web- not with a specific reader in mind. The web has us posting, publishing and spreading information but do we know who is using this information? It's great to explore this new development and spread information to the world wide web but we should also keep in mind our audience and how this information can help those that find it.

To read this whole article, it is available at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

Fandom Movie!

The FATP and storyboard for the movie project can be found here.

All other links related to the slideshow (the previous project) can be found below:
Original slideshow
Flowchart proposal
Slideshow script

Below is my Fandom Slideshow transformed into a movie on Youtube!

This movie project was really neat in the sense that I got to pull together a lot of skills learned from working with Audacity (the slidecast/podcast project) as well as skills learned from working with screencasting and uploading video to Youtube within an earlier project (Gimp tutorial). I did storyboard before the assignment, but couldn’t upload the picture. I figured that out and it is posted in a previous post (linked at the top of this post.) I ended up with a produced movie that followed the original plan pretty close. It was hard to conceptualize the idea of a movie (it was a lot of components to include in seven minutes) but I think the planning process helped as usual- especially because once I started the project, there were so many steps to complete it.

To make my video I took my same PowerPoint used for my SlideShare and screen captured all the slides- about halfway through, I didn’t have to go through the process of screen capturing, I could just save the whole PowerPoint as a .jpeg and all the slides would individually be saved as pictures. I was working with Windows Movie Maker- a program that I thought was awesome! It was simple to use, just click and drag images, audio and video into a “story timeline” and it was easy to see exactly where each of these images, videos and audio would overlap. After saving my PowerPoint as a .jpeg, I imported all the images into Windows Movie Maker and selected transitions from one picture to the next. This process was fairly easy as well because you can see what each transition will look like if you click the demo box once and watch the display window on the right-hand side of the screen.

After importing and arranging all the images how I wanted them, I imported my audio clip. (I decided to import the mp3 version of the audio to work with so it was one track of all my audio previously recorded for the slidecast project.) I synced all my slides with my audio track that was imported and now I had to add video.

This is where the project got a little tricky. I wanted to add a screencast of different websites that show “extreme fandom” to further explain one of my research questions and study. I had worked with screentoaster.com before in recording the screencast and uploading directly to Youtube. This time I needed to download the screencast to add to my Windows Movie Maker file to complete the project before uploading to Youtube. With my personal computer lacking an upzipping software (I’m still figuring out the new freeware I found) I couldn’t open the file downloaded from Screentoaster, it was too big. After multiple fails on Screentoaster, I decided to find another freeware that would allow me to download easier so I could get the file from the web to my personal computer file to import into Windows Movie Maker. I found another freeware for screencasting called screencast-o-matic that was very simple and allowed me to download the file into the folder I needed for Windows Movie Maker.

Now, the problem was, I had one continuous file of audio that did not match the screencast + slides turned pictures (since I wanted to put the video clip right in the middle of the presentation). I had to go back to Audacity and work again with my audio to leave a silent gap in the middle of the track for the screencast to fit in, so there wasn’t overlapping audio tracks going on at the same time.

After that Audacity editing, I could import the new audacity file, add transitions in between the pictures and video and make sure the whole file flowed nicely. I then uploaded the presentation to Youtube and it is now hosted there for the world to see! It was a challenging project, but I loved pulling in the skills from previous projects such as editing audio clips in Audacity, uploading to Youtube, screencasting and the basics of different files and what they can do (such as .jpeg, .mp3 and .aiv for video that was recognized by Windows Movie Maker.)

Fandom Movie Beginnings

Below is the storyboard for the movie project.



FATP:
Form: Slideshow with audio and visual components plus video (screencasting) combined in Windows Movie Maker including transitions between the pictures and video.

Audience: Communication Studies majors, minors, potential employers, classmates

Topic: “Fandom: A look at fan participation in the current media.” I really want to see if I can take my senior comp presentation and add to my slideshow with video componencts and enhance the overall presentation. I gave the original presentation in 5-7 minutes to the Communication faculty and want to see if I can make the presentation better and accessible to other students that are looking for information about fandom and how it pertains to our communication today.

Purpose: I want to show my comp project through Youtube and see how I can combine all the components of video, audio and visual through Windows Movie Maker while showing the idea of fandom in the media today and expanding on the idea of my comp.

Podcast/Slidecast

I just finished with my podcast presentation on SlideShare. It can be found below and here at SlideShare.

Fandom: A Look at Fan Participation in the Current Media 2

View more presentations from reiste01.

The flowchart and FATP for this project can be found in this blog post.

My script is available in this blog post.

A little reflection on this project now.
I loved doing this project, especially playing off of the SlideShow already created in the previous assignment. I used my comprehensive information because I was already familiar with the material and had some interesting graphs and visual information to help present my data to the viewers.

I started out searching Creative Commons online for relevant music and photos that would match up to my presentation and enhance the slideshow for the viewer, instead of having it cut and dry information and nothing more. I found two songs and worked to edit them using Audacity. I had a lot of trouble at first, but once I learned the icons in Audacity and how to move around the audio clips, I could work a little more with these audio clips and fade in/fade out, move them around and add the audio that I recorded into Audacity to mesh all of this together and link it to my slideshow on SlideShare.

After finally figuring out the Audacity audio and meshing the tracks together I spent some time decking out a battle with my computer on how to convert an Audacity file to an mp3 so it could be uploaded to SlideShare. I needed to download a Lame encoder, but I could not do this without a file that reads .ddl files and I could get this file without an unzipping file (WinZip) on my computer. I finally found a way around this drama with a simple freeware called Switch Sound File Converter (a Microsoft program) and converted the Audacity file into an mp3.

Then, I couldn't find where to upload onto SlideShare so I uploaded my mp3 to the internet archives and then transfered the file to SlideShare. From here, syncing the audio with the visual slideshow was fairly easy, I just had to go through a lot of trial and error to make the slideshow and experimenting with the different programs helped me learn some new skills.

I think I still have a lot to learn about Audacity and want to play around with it some more for future projects- there is definitely more to use than just fade in/out and I want to experiment some more to see what I can do with this program.

Now I have my finished project that looks a lot like my beginning FATP and flowchart and presents my comp in a new and exciting way for many to see on the web! Creative Commons was fun to work with and I could not have put together this presentation without the help of artists for photos and fun music to match my theme of Fandom.
The script I developed when recording the audio track for my presentation helped a lot but next time I really want to play around with Audacity in changing my voice so it sounds a lot better.

Overall, it was a fun, but difficult, project and I learned a lot of new things about Audacity, SlideShare and different freeware projects that I will use in the future.

The World is Flat 3.0

Thomas Friedman talked about some interesting points in his lecture about his 2004 book "The World is Flat 3.0" In his lecture he addressed points about the era of globalization and the three different revolutions within this development. He addressed the way the stock market has played a role in the founding and development and move to internet connections around the world. Finally, Friedman stressed the idea of the internet being a connection for individuals around the world to collaborate together and work together to produce results.

I thought it was interesting that the basis for his book, Friedman first wanted to interview foreigners at call centers around the world (who imitate Americans) to get a sense of what people feel about Americans. With this sense of a global view, it is a great approach to take when examining the role of internet globalization and its role on communication around the world.

The World is Flat is a concept that tells how the "playing field" is being leveled and flattened. Even though America is already so technologically proficient- Friedman stressed that America is not ready for this and needs to update to be ready for this revolution. He talks about the eras of globalization:
1.0 being the PC and the era in which individualization could happen- and the altering of a person's own content in a digital form
2.0 recognizes the launch of Netscape and the dawn of the internet browser and dot.com era
3.0 brings about the work flow revolution and the computer and software becoming interoperable

All of these I think are interesting to show the progression of how the internet took flight, especially in the US. With the launch of Netscape, investors purchased stock in the company overnight and in essence, all invested in this technological development for our future.

The last thing that I took from this lecture was one of Friedman's rule of a flat world:
"Soon, economic competition will not be between companies, but between you and your own imagination."
With the growing potential of the internet and this world-wide collaboration we are becoming more adept at expressing ourselves and becoming producers of the media instead of simply consumers of global company's products.

The Beginning of a Podcast

I decided to review a Harry Potter podcast to get an idea about how podcasts are made and presented through iTunes. The podcast's name is: Pottercast #217: The Leaky Cauldron. The podcast can be found here.

The layout of the podcast for this fan fiction production was very similar to a radio program. There was a music intro and occasionally in the background. There were excerpts of speaking from the characters in the Harry Potter movies. The hosts for the show were introduced and they outlined what they would talk about during that episode of the podcast. The episode carried on like a conversation between the three hosts and they displayed something similar to radio personalities with different knowledge on the topics they were talking about (mostly news about HP movies, books, the wizarding world of Harry Potter, etc.)

While informative, the hosts shared their opinions and critiques of the films and fan fiction that resulted from the productions. This was a really long podcast (about 45 minutes) so mine will be a lot shorter, but I think I want to follow this setup with the music and quote excerpts if possible.

I put together a script for the podcast and it is included below:

Intro Music

Hello and welcome to my presentation about fandom- a look at fan participation in the current media. My name is Rachel and I am a senior Communication major in South Bend, IN. Today is April 7^th and I am here to tell you about my fandom study. For this study, I look closer at the fandoms associated with Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Twilight and this presentation incorporates research from my senior comprehensive research project and various skills from my Web Communications class.

This slide presentation is supported by Creative Commons and some rights are protected.

For this project, I developed several hypotheses and research questions that are explored in this study. My research questions explore how fans show their participation, looks to define the point at which someone becomes an extreme fan, a deeper exploration of the idea of an “extreme fan” and helps look at trends between age, gender and education and how each of these relate to fandom.

I distributed a survey for this study called “Fandom in Today’s Media” available online at surveymonkey.com. This survey was distributed using the snowball method through Facebook and email. 253 participants took the survey and the mean age was 21.98 years and the participants were 18-64 years old. I divided the participants into adolescent (18-24 years) and mature (25-64 years). I divided the participants so I could see differences in media expression and the different attitudes and practices of fandom.

Research Question #1 explores how fans show their participation in a fandom. We can see through these graphs that both adolescent and mature participants have strong expressions through books, television and films- this could be because of convenience or popularity sake. In both areas, there is a strong presence in the technological media through fan fiction, applications and blogging.

The data supports hypothesis #1- that fans will express themselves through many mediums. There were many other unique ways of expression from the open-ended question- fans replied that they expressed their fandom through undergrad classes, music (such as Wizard Rock affiliated with Harry Potter), museum exhibits, video games and art.

Research question 2 explores the point at which a fan becomes an extreme fan. This is done through looking at when the participant believes they THEMSELVES become extreme fans versus when they believe OTHERS become extreme fans. These graphs show surprising data because most participants show the extreme fan at low levels of participant when society has painted a picture of an extreme fan being the attendee at midnight movie premieres, writers of fan fiction and obsessive individuals.

We can look toward a study completed in 2006 by Gantz, Wang, Paul and Potter to ask: if the word “fan” originally derived from fanatic or fanaticus- already describing an extreme role?

In contrast to these graphs, the self-perception of oneself as a fan may be leading to the distortion of when we believe WE become extreme fans.

This hypothesis isn’t supported- perhaps because many of us do not want to be classified as extreme fans because “extreme fans” were described in a survey open-ended question as “obsessive, passionate and stalkers.” This contradicts what the participants define as extreme- are those that love the movies and books- obsessive and stalkers as well?

Research Question #3 asked what type of relationships a fan would seek out.

This question is answered by showing that fans feel more comfortable around fans of the same thing but do not necessarily seek out those fans when developing interpersonal relationships.

Therefore, fans will incorporate their fandom into their everyday life through interactions with others- hypothesis #3 is supported.

The final research question addresses the relationship between fandom and age, gender and education:
Age doesn’t have an impact on relating to fandom although the mature participants have more extreme feelings toward their fandom than the adolescents.

Gender trends show that female relate more to their fandom than males.

There is an increasing correlation between education and fandom although transition years such as from high school to college and college to post-grad show lags in the curve of fandom. These three areas of age, gender and education would be a great area for expansion to fandom studies.

From these results about education, the final hypothesis cannot be determined from this study.

Major challenges to this study were from the broad participant pool especially in terms of age and gender. Different means of sampling could help improve this study in the future. Also, fandom is such as broad area to explore and hard to define. There are many contributing factors to a fan’s feeling and one’s feelings are hard to isolate from social factors and opinions of others.

(Music begins softly behind text) Hopefully this has given you a bit of knowledge about the study of fandom and I want to thank you for tuning in. This presentation would not have been possible without the help of creative commons artists for the photos and Fairytale (a Creative Commons music source) for the great music. For more information you can visit my website at www.rachelwebcomm.blogspot.com.

Thank you and good night!

*Outro Music concludes