I think at this point, this week’s interactive projects are just reinforcing everything that I have learned from everyone else’s projects. With this being said something I did see this week that I thought was a very good idea was someone found a website that gave off the save sort of “vibe” that her and her group were going for in their project. I thought that this was a really good idea because this allowed for you to see how something could end up visually, especially if it is an aesthetic that may be harder to pinpoint or perfect. Hopefully I will be able to do this with my project as well. I think that I could also look at this in the sense of I’m not really sure that our group fully knows what the aesthetic of our website is going to come out to be yet, and I think that this can help us get a feel for different looks.

This week I have been in contact with Senator Morfeld in order to schedule a time with him in the next few weeks so that we can interview him about our topic. At this point I honestly am slightly worried about classes being moved to online and how this will effect our project, but I am sure we will be able to come up with solutions to any problems we may face.

This week was my turn to present for the interactive analysis projects, and I chose to do the Ocean School. Although the topics are different, I think the main goal of both the Ocean school, and our group’s project, are very similar. We both want to raise awareness on an issue that isn’t always obvious to many people and educate them about it. The biggest takeaway from the Ocean School website, as I mentioned in my presentation, is that the content they created was meaningful and made the experience feel more personal and real. Moving forward, it’s important that the videos and pictures we use to tell our subjects’ stories build empathy for our target audience. As far as the progress of our actual project, I think the biggest thing we’re worried about is getting all the interviews done, especially now that classes will be online, and it’ll be hard to check out equipment. Our project is largely based on the availability of our subjects, and with this recent pandemic, it’s hard to say how we will go about gathering pictures and videos. It’s important to keep the health of not only ourselves, but our subjects into consideration as we move forward, so this will probably be the biggest challenge we have to tackle.

I presented my interactive project analysis this week and I learned that the more ways you can present your point and your findings, the more interesting and immersing it will be to your audience. The amount of different types of media included in the piece that I presented would really make our site standout, and I would like to implement as many different types as possible. Multiple types of media is present in all of the projects I have seen so far, so I feel like it is a trend that all groups should try to follow.

This week we scheduled our first interview and recorded the video for it, it went well and we are starting to edit it in a way that will fit our storyboard and desired outcome. The editing will be the most challenging part because we will have to sort through the entire thing and really hone in on what it is that we will use. The good thing about having this first interview done is we will finally have a vision of where we want our project to go and will be able to tailor all of the other things that we do in the future to that vision. I had no challenges this week, I think our group is in a very good position.

This week I saw a lot of interactive websites that I was very impressed by. In particular, I liked the one about Antarctica melting and the one about the boat story. The Antarctica melting story had some very gripping visual graphics that I enjoyed. While it excelled in showing how the ice is melting and where it is likely to go, I didn’t find the media (photos and videos) as compelling. I think they could have done a better job at telling the story through those mediums. The boat story was very compelling because it was unlike any of the other interactive websites that I’ve seen this story. Using graphics and sounds to tell the story definitely gave me a better idea about what reading the book would actually be like.

This week our group settled on a design for our website and delegated more tasks for us all to complete. We are beginning to get interviews set up and completed with people. Once we start getting video footage, it will become easier for us to start actually putting things on the website. We also hope to start compiling our research in more digestible ways such as graphics and maps. Overall, we are beginning to make progress on gathering information and media to implement into our websites.

At this point in the semester I think that what is going well is that we have a good foundation planned out for the project, and have assigned specific tasks to each individual person that allows for a good flow of work throughout the group, and allows us to get things done in a timely manner. At this point we have also gotten a pretty decent amount of people willing to participate in our project, and we have decided to have all of their interviews done before spring break, which makes it possible for us to go back and get any more photos or b-roll without it being last minute. I think the biggest challenge that we are going to face is finding enough people with differing stories, or even opinions, in order to make the website as informative and interesting as possible. I am slightly worried that at the end we are going to be left with a lot of information about basically the same exact thing. This leads me into what I think our group could work on, which I would say is finding additional people that may not even be Dreamers who may have valuable input to our topic.

We got a lot of things accomplished this week, one of which being deciding everyone’s specific roles. My role will be, at this point, typing out the dialogue from the interviews as well as writing a synopsis for each individual interview that will be shown on the website when you scroll over each individuals picture. In addition to this, we have decided to contact different DACA resources in the Lincoln community to possibly get some more information or a different perspective on the topic. This week I have been tasked with contacting Nebraska State Senator Adam Morfeld, as well as starting to draft the questions for the interviews.

Being at the mid-way point is a weird feeling, just because our team doesn’t have very much tangible items completed. That being said, I don’t think we’re necessarily behind. Our project is just a process of setting up a decent amount of interviews and contacting a variety of people. I think my team just needs to remain confident and know that it’s all coming together. Our next step is securing interviews, which is happening soon. Then we will write copy and edit video.

Our biggest challenge so far has been getting in contact with influential figures, specifically local politicians, and getting their input. We also just started that so it may just need a bit more time.

For contribution this week, I volunteered to reach out to a Nebraska Apple and Define America to see how they could help with the project as a resource. I will be sending out those emails over the weekend. If I could do anything differently, I would have sent them out this morning but I got busy with work and forgot. Shouldn’t set us back too much though!

So far I think our team has been doing a pretty great job of working together. Everyone seems willing to help where they can and we’re starting to meet more outside of class so that helps a lot too. As far as challenges go, I think the main one is just getting all the content that we need so that it can be edited, as well as starting on our website. For this week my main goal has been to get all the interviews scheduled within the next three weeks, so that we can get photographs and video out of the way and move on to actually creating a narrative and building our website based off of this content. Although we already have an idea and plan on how we want to set up our website, I think it’ll be a lot easier to visualize which direction we would like to go in once we have all the content we need. The biggest challenge I’ve encountered with scheduling interviews has been trying to work with multiple people’s schedules. It’s important that we work with their schedules because they are doing us a huge favor, but a lot of them are college students and very involved on campus, so it makes it hard to find times that work for both them and us. Although I think this project is a great idea and I’m very passionate about it, I do think that if I were to do something like this again I would probably choose to do something that relies less on other people and their time, and more based on our group. However, as I mentioned before, although it has been a little stressful, I think the final project will be worth the stress because we’re creating something that will have a long lasting impact that goes beyond this course.

My group is doing a great job of dividing and assigning tasks. We have utilized our team schedule very well and I think we are all very comfortable with our progress at this time. We are working through our schedules and the schedules of our interviewees, and once we have those interviews out of the I think we will be in a really good spot. The one thing I think our group needs to work on is finalizing an angle to our story. We can tell this story in so many ways and it might be in our best interest to wait until we get our interviews, because those will tell us which way we need to tell our story.

This week I did my portion of the group research, my portion was on the requirements needed to receive DACA. I also worked on finalizing a basic layout and design for our website. I am satisfied with the delegation of tasks, we are all doing our part and it is very helpful that we have clearly identified all of our strengths so that we can cater some of the work to the people that would enjoy them and know them the best. I didn’t have any challenges this week, everything went smooth!

Right now, I think our group is doing well at having a clear goal for our project. We have narrowed down our topic to only include dreamers in the Lincoln area which has helped us focus in on what we need to get done. What I think we need to work on most with our project is starting to delegate tasks. A lot of what we need to do relies on getting interviews and photos of our subjects. After we get these, it will be much easier to give out tasks to other people such as writing stories, creating graphics, and starting to build our website. At this point, the biggest challenges that we are facing is beginning to set up interviews with people. It can be hard as we are all very busy and doing this is reliant on our subject’s schedules as well as ours. On top of this, setting a solidified schedule is proving to be difficult. We are beginning to meet outside of class once a week which I think will help us in this aspect.

This week, we continued to set up interviews with our subjects and gather research. We each took on a different topic and came up with 1-1.5 pages of research. I researched the history behind immigration in the United States. I found that much of the history revolves around Asian immigration to the United States. Other than that, I took and edited our first headshots for the website. I think we are getting a good start on picking subjects and getting content of them for the final website.

Not having presented yet, I still feel as though I learned a lot from everyone’s presentations so far. Seeing other people show their examples of interesting web page navigation and use of media gave me a better idea of what kind of website I want to pick. A few examples presented made me want to find an organization that created a cool website for the benefit of others education about an important subject matter. I like the idea of this because it’s very hard to make an actual impact on a community or social cause through just a website, but it isn’t quite as difficult to spread information in an interactive way.

I would like to try to avoid some of the layouts that seemed to “busy”. There were a couple examples that were for sure engaging, but almost distractedly so. If my team decides to follow that kind of trend, I think we could execute it with out that sort of message interference. We’ve done a adequate job so far in thinking through what we want our project to look like, or at least what direction we’re headed towards. Last week we discussed the types of people and what experiences we want to capture in our project. So far we have at least three people as solid options and a few more as additional insight. I’m in the process of setting up an interview with a friend of mine that knows both personally and professionally, about the DACA experience so I’m excited for that. The main challenge I see as an hurdle to jump is putting the ideas into practice but again, I think we’re on track.