Role-A it evolved/changed throughout the project, your position and function within the group structure, the issues you faced and your part in formulating solutions.
Basically, in terms of the research project during the past semester, I mainly took responsibility of the academic definition part of our theme. Specifically, at the beginning, my initial role was take responsibility of the outline of our research, mainly including the web page design, what should be included be there, how many components are should be divided. However, things turns to be more clear about what is the most meaningful purpose of this research. Because of our special topic, digital literacy in China, it has a focus on a detailed place, a unique situation, and a future career environment that relates our group members. Thus, we realized that it is necessary to really know and gain something after this research, it should be include the contemporary situation in the main land of China, moreover, the skills and ability are required for this filed. Therefore, I was focusing on exploring the definition and basic information of digital media literacy, as we know, the most of the people are not really understand what it is, why is important to discuss and know, how it is used in civic life. My section and role is to solve these questions supported by academic knowledge that searched and combined from experts. It is not surprise that the process was not too smooth, because the language and culture gap, I prepare to expand this issues based on the background of China, but most of the information are aiming at Western World. Obviously, I was facing the problem that there was lack of helpful resources. However, we discussed this problem and figured out one way to catch up this resources shortage. It was I changed the input language when I searched, as a consequence of this measure, I found what I needed, although the process was more complicated than before, but it really works at the end.
Progress- In your research capability, in observing your learning behaviors, in identifying your strengths and weakness.
To be frank, the most significant strengths are cooperate and communicate skills, because all of us came from the same background and we are close friends after university time, so it helps us have a good collaborate process. We encouraged each other more that judgment. In fact, probably, judgments and strict requires are always stimulate improvement and development, but in this case, encourage and positive attitude are the most helpful way to keep us moving on. I kept serious and elegant attitude when I treated study tasks. Obviously, language is the most outstanding weakness for me, but I think I made progressed by each time’s practice, from presentation, from a lot of reading, writing, and listening in classes. At least, I am proud of myself when I stood in front of more 50 people to present what I gained from the process, I am not a shy and nervous overseers girl anymore. I did not waste time and expensive tuition fee foe those years, and now I am going to graduate from there, I can clearly see all positive changes and aspects happened for myself. (By the way, thanks your patience and extra care for us.)
Problems-nominate a few key problems of difficulties that you faced and discuss how you resolved these.
It is true that there are a series of problems occurred of our project. I prefer to list two points them with a solution as following:
1.How to let the content of the topic is more all-round?
The research process is totally different with the brainstorm time we did at the start. The real research process cannot be expanding with a very wide and a big picture anymore, we have to concentrate on some vital aspects that are all also connect to each other. We hope our research can include many things, but it has limits with the time and words, we have to organize and mange it really careful. We dropped and avoid some aspects as the result of it, actually, it was a good decision, in comparison set up many branches only will give rise to a mess, pick up some key lines, and pay attention to them is better.
2. How to let an academic be interesting?
This problem is the most trouble for me. To be honest, I really like some group’s work, they have really clever and attractive ideas, I also want to make our topic likes that style. I do not want explain this points with the culture gap, indeed, it is a comprehensive issues. Our projects looks too board, although we tried our best to come up with interesting examples and cases, but it seems did not work well. Nevertheless, I still recommend that think about more about audience’s appetite. Like we used the mobile votes example of “super girls”, I guess there are not too many people know this event, so we talked about this with the “The voice” example together, because of the popularity of the later show. Personally concluding that maybe we can “borrow” some charming from others.
In addition, during the whole project process, I used 2 main aspects strategies; one is from research strategies, one for personal learning strategy. In terms of the former aspect, because I have read the reading materials about research tips and theories about how to do a academic research, therefore, I followed a check list which I learned from the reading. This list is constructed by 5 questions, such as have you read enough literature relevant to your topic to know that your research project is wroth your time and effort? Have you looked at your research problem from all sides to minimize unwanted surprises? Thus, this checklist can drive the research project and focus on the topic to avoid us expand the project too wide so that everything will be in a mess. I used it as a map to achieve each destination step by step; that can control everything. Another strategy is from personal studying experience. Actually, I have a habit to divide things into several sections, like this time, I divided my part with 3 aspects, statistics, general information collection, case study. When I started to research I just arrange one-aspect things for one day, then, I can drop and ignore extra information quickly, the process became more effective. Both of the two points were work well. There was also has some strategies did not work well, like we did not organized a good plan to do each field’s experts interview as we planed at the begin.
To myself, I believe the value is the ability of thinking. In other words, thinking independently. It was the fist time, we faced and realized an issue from the topic, we did brains tome first, figured out key connections, pick up the direction, and go with the line by ourselves. Whether the direction is perfect or bad, all should be taken responsibility by us. Because it was not essay without a clear questions, which need answered by us based on relevant ways. To sum up, I think research project is an special chance of independent study before we are going to graduate.
