This was very interesting because usually feeling like you’ve “nailed” a skill take a long time and lots of practice, however with the podcasts I felt like a pro only the second time around.

I believe that this says a lot about my generations interaction with technology and media systems. I think because I am so comfortable and well versed with media and technology overall and because I have some background in technology media production I can easily master tasks that require such skills.

Additionally, I really enjoyed speaking about The Skimm as it is a media outlet that has sparked my interest for a few years and something that I have always wanted to look at more carefully and from different angles.

I believe that my group has been successfully progressing through our project and towards our projected goal regarding university endowment and mobility. The biggest challenge so far has been in the comparison between private and public schools and the differences in endowment between those different institutions. It is not level grounds for comparison as public funding may be allocated differently than private funding and may seem much larger although the public and private institutions may be regarded on the same level of “eliteness”. However, I think by studying endowments as part of our data analysis project we are shining a light on a typically not regarded statistic especially in choosing a college. Yes, people choose based on “eliteness” but how many people really pay attention to the school’s endowment? It can really make a big difference in resources and it is important to look into where that money is going and if it will truly help better your education and opportunities as well as increase mobility for students leaving such institution. Does the amount of money that goes into a university effect the amount of money a student makes coming out of that university?

After finally getting in touch with my paired student, our communication project turned into me sending him a list of questions to answer so that I could finish my project, and a response from him expressing to me that this project was busy work and not something he had time to put effort into.

After the struggle to even have content to put together my end of the project with, I too felt like I was wasting my time simply reiterating and writing a piece on my listening project partner with whom I never really got to communication with in a productive manner.

I found that writing my technology literacy narrative of the present in comparison to writing about the past presented me with a bit more of a challenge. While the prompts for writing were very clear, I found myself challenged to define my present relationship with media. Whereas, in the past i had a much more tangible interaction with my digital world that I felt was easier to narrate. That being said, I believe I got a lot out of the writing process for my present narrative. In today’s day and age where I am so consumed by not only my digital world but the media filled world around me it is so important to step back and reflect. This narrative gave me a change to take myself out of the ever consuming digital world and think about my place within it.

We thought it was very important to clearly get across to the listeners how The Odyssey connects to new media writing in a sense that is easy to grasp. As the term “new media writing” has a very flexible definition and application, it can become very unclear in relation to different media forms that the class has addressed in podcasts. We really tried to directly connect a clear and applicable definition of new media writing to our podcast on The Odyssey.

Personally, my goals for the production and the execution of the podcast were far surpassed as I believed it was going to be extremely more difficult to execute this project. However, I believe that because we worked very diligently to plan, our recording went very smoothly and therefore editing went smoothly as well. That being said, as this was my first podcast I think that my goals were not as high as they could have been. Now having completed one podcast from start to finish I am able to see how much room for improvement there is and can set higher standards and goals for future productions.

In my opinion, this assignment really tackled the collaboration learning outcome. From an obvious stance, the podcast defines the collaboration learning outcome as it is a “project” in which students are “working together”. With a podcast, even more than collaborative writing, it became very clear how important clear and direct partner communication is. More specifically, in the recording process when you have two people speaking it becomes even more important to learn how to work together and find a flow that will be productive and successful.

Although the podcast production utilized many of my skills that I have tapped into before, creating a podcast was a complete “first” for me. I found that really interesting and exciting, because after being in school for almost eighteen years I don’t often get to experience completely new learning experiences. I believe that seeing this project start to finish, and diving head first into something completely new really helped me to progress as a learned and reminded me that there is still very much room to progress a student and learner.

One goal I believe that I can accomplish in my next podcast, now that I have some experience, is to make it more conversational. I believe that as we become more comfortable with podcast production, it will become easier to set up the recording execution in a more conversational manner as opposed to one person speaking, stopping the recording, and then moving on. This would lead to more unscripted discussion which may spark even more interesting ideas.

I believe that the podcast was a great learning experience that was both enjoyable and completely different than anything I do on a normal day.

This data image I generated on Tableau really sparked my interest into looking at the Equality Opportunity Project data through the lens of schools that have the highest percentage of parents in the top one percent. I believe that as a starting point, these statistics can allow us to dive in to the data and the reasons that caused this data to come out the way it is here. I think that if we looked more closely at this data there would be consistent factors, such as where the students are coming from, that may create these differences. I also think it could be interesting to look at where these top 1% kids go after school regarding both profession and geographic living areas.

Upon completion of my narrative, it was extremely evident to me how much influence my geographical and social upbringing had on me as a person and a technology/media consumer. Once I had pieced together relevant and temporarily lost pieces of my media filled childhood, it was clearer than ever how much privilege comes with the forms of consumption I experienced and grew up with.

The trend of “New Media Writing” which I have newly been exposed to, is still very alien to me. For this reason,  I did not feel comfortable for this kind of narrative looking to new strategies of writing. Therefore, I believe that my composition was very minimally effected by the information I have learned from my recent readings.

After looking at the podcast logo gallery for some inspiration, I created my take on our podcast logo using photoshop. I believe that this simply gets across the title of the podcast using a simple aesthetic.

I chose the water color image because I believe that simplicity is a key element of design and I especially like simplistic water color prints. I am also a simplistic person, therefore I believe that the simple yet colorful and calming brushstroke pattern below represents me well. I used photoshop to enhance the water color image that I had found and made it more unique by adjusting the colors and duplicating the layers to create a more unique design which was not hard as I have a background with photoshop.