134 Group 4

Through the presentations this week, I saw some good examples of what not to do. The website about nicotine and opioids was a good example of what can happen if you try to put too much information on one screen. With the complications with the coronavirus, I am worried we will need to rely on a lot of text to supplement information into our project. This will be tricky to organize in a way this is not overwhelming. We will have to look for some websites that exemplify a lot of text being displayed in a pleasing way. We have a few interviews and a lot of B roll, but I am disappointed that we do not have a ton of actual content or stories about ageism. I understand not every elderly person has experienced ageism, so it is hard enough to gather actual stories, but now since we are limited in the number of people we can talk to, I am worried about what our content and website will look like. This week we concluded our OLLI class observation. The last class was on Friday. We got a few more interviews, but sadly, our audio did not come through very well. I am slightly concerned about what to do next for our project and website considering the circumstances.

This week, I saw a lot of data visualization in the projects. I saw it in moving maps, graphs, and other things. This is something I would like to incorporate into our project, but I don’t think we have a lot of data to work with at the moment. Right now, we have a very good amount of media, but I think we could work on incorporating data, maps and graphs into our project. In on of the websites shown today, I thought it was cool how when you clicked on a certain photo, it brought you to a story and video. This is definitely an aspect we could incorporate into our website because we have interviews, so we could give a brief story that goes with the interview, then have the user be able to click on and watch it. One more thing I learned from the day is that it is very important for a website to be cohesive in every aspect. It makes all of the media flow and work together well. This week, we will continue to progressively work on our project. As of right now, we have all of the media we plan on getting. We are slowly working on editing and putting it all together. I think the next step for us will be to plan our website out and how we want to lay it out.

This week during presentations I learned it is critical to be able to have a topic you are passionate about. I wish I would have had more information on my topic and I think it would have been better if I could have related it to class. I think also having more confidence in my presentation would have made it better but I think the confidence would have come with a better-prepared project. I have noticed that people are very fast at pointing things out that they don’t like about the website. I didn’t find anything wrong with the projects really but it seems to me that everyone’s “what can be better” part of the presentation was pretty much the same. I think this could be avoided by trying to find out more about information about the website.

This week we returned to the OLLI for a 3rd time to gather more pictures and video. I think people are a lot more comfortable with us now and more people have offered to be interviewed. In the beginning, it was a struggle to try and find people to interview since we were strangers and typically elderly people don’t like their photo being taken. This week I was the person conducting the interview and asking the questions. I still wouldn’t change anything about our group and I think we are moving along just fine.

I think that our project is going well in a bunch of ways. We are getting some good content from videos and data. Making good connections with the students in OLLI and working together really well as a group. We are figuring out our strengths and letting each other handle some different responsibilities. I think our team needs to work the most on having the idea and picturing what the project will look like at the end. I think we really need to focus and see how we can bring all our content and data together. I think the biggest challenge thus far is capturing the content. We have some good b-roll and some good interview footage but some of it has been a good challenge. This week I helped with the interviews. We set up cameras at the recreation center and interviewed a couple more of the OLLI students. We encountered an issue using the microphones but solved it with a second interview that went much better. We didn’t really encounter too many challenges this week and things for the most part went pretty smoothly. We are getting closer to being able to see the finish but we need to create a vision.

I think some things that are going well with our project is that we are getting an early start to collecting our media. We have already attended two OLLI classes, gathered photos and videos, and conducted two interviews. I think this is a great position for our group to be in at this point in the semester, and we can focus on the content for our website. Everyone is contributing their time and efforts to the project. I think we need to focus on editing our interviews and B-roll together, gathering content for our website, and creating our website. This will be the most time extensive part, so I am glad we are starting early. At this point, we need to get some more interviews and stories that involve ageism. We only have one solid story that includes examples of ageism. Having some more examples would be beneficial. This week we all met to conduct research for our website, and we also went to an OLLI class last Friday. This Friday we will no longer need to gather B-roll, so we will mainly be conducting more interviews at the end of the class. This is the last class so we will have to gather all of our information.

Overall, I think our project is moving along nicely. We have gone to two OLLI classes so far and gotten a lot of media. Something we need to work on getting tomorrow is more interviews because we need more content that may show possible bias. With the interviews so far, the interviewees have not given us many examples of bias in their lives. Another thing we need to work on soon is thinking about what we want our website to look like and how we want it to be laid out. We are doing well with getting content, but it may not all be useful content. This week, we met on Tuesday to work on our preliminary content submission. It was a little confusing at first because we were not sure if it had to be in the form of a research paper. For the most part, we looked at a bunch of trustworthy websites that had useful information about our topic, and took facts from those. Tomorrow, we will be going to the final OLLI fitness class. I am hoping that by the end of that, we will have at least 2 more interviews and more photos and videos. Hopefully we can get deeper into the questions with the interviewees.

I think we are moving along at a good pace and I think what we are to end having a really good project. I don’t think I would change anything about our group. I think our communication has been really effective. I also think the photo and video we have gathered has turned out really good so far and I think is something we are proud of.  I think the interviews we conducted were really good and the feedback we got back from the individuals was really good. We fault that the interviews questions we developed were opened ended and allowed them to talk about things for a while. One of the biggest challenges we have had to face is being able to film the members of OLLI. There have been some who made it clear they didn’t want to photograph or have videos taken of them.  I was in charge of setting up the video cameras and recording the interviews along with Ben. Another challenge we came across was finding people who wanted to be interviewed. We only had two people volunteer but we are hoping that more people change their mind this week. I don’t think I would change anything. We have been really successful in what we have been trying to accomplish as a group!

This week we went back to the East campus rec. After last week we were able to plan out how we want to do this project and mapped out the direction to go in. We talked to a couple subjects last week and they agreed to do interviews today. We went in this morning and got straight to work. We set up two cameras on tripods, set up some chairs, and had a mic ready for our interviewees. During their workout activities we got some additional photos and video to help tell our story. We then had our interviews, which went great. They were both approximately ten minutes long and we got some great footage. When I got home after work this evening, I ingested all the footage we have and starting editing. It’s going to be a long process editing it all but I’m very excited about it! Next week the activity will be different so we will be able to get some unique footage, which is always appreciated. We will also work on new interview questioned to get a little deeper into our topic next week. Overall, I thing my team is doing great and is definitely on the right track.

What I’ve seen and recognized the most in these presentations is the order in which people are presenting the data. Most people do the presentation, tell us about the information, and then show what media is going to be used. The ones today were definitely more focused on the websites. I would say that is the main consistent factor in these presentations. I believe it’s because they had seen previous ones and know what will be graded and what won’t be graded. The presentations I saw were good this time around and I especially liked the football and basketball salary website. His presentation was simple, to the point and easily thought out. The only problems I am noticing are that people are losing the attention and focus of the classroom. Maybe it’s the time of the day or its the subjects that are being presented but something is happening. This week I helped the group figure out what equipment we will be using on Friday for the interviews and I checked out some of the equipment myself. We rented two cameras, 2 tripods, a light and 2 microphones. I will be capturing video content and running the cameras to make sure that everything looks crispy.

This week, I presented my interactive analysis project. While looking through and analyzing this website, I learned a lot of information, but more importantly I learned that to have our semester project be successful, we truly need to think out all of our media and make it engaging. The thing I liked most about the website I did mine over was the map that remained in place with data points shifting over it as the text moved along the side. My project could have been a little more engaging with photos, so I’m hoping that we get a lot of good content to include in ours. Also, watching the other presentations gave me a lot of ideas of aspects we could try to include in ours. For example, I liked the floating photos/moving photos in the last presentation and the interactive photo slideshow that Katie showed on hers. I am not sure what kind of data we will be getting yet, but hopefully we can include some data visualization in ours as well. Tomorrow morning, we will be going to another OLLI class to take photos and begin interviews. We will be going to one more after tomorrow’s class so we can get as much content as possible.