In the past 9 weeks we have been working through ethnography research towards expressing and discussing weekly ideas while engaging with other class members and relating these to my own experience and recount of the weekly content. This was a great experience for me, I truly learnt a lot more by going away and relating to the weekly work in my own way to help me understand and documenting that on my blog as well as reading how other people made sense of the weekly work through doing this, I engaged directly with different platforms of media that I will discuss below.
During the first assesment task my feedback stated, ‘This was great. You have taken your discussion and research with your subjects and extrapolated it into a more meaningful discussion about how their interaction with television provided insight into the manner in which they lived as children/young adults. This is an excellent use of the ethnographic research and will provide a strong foundation for your future projects.’ This was awesome for me to hear as it meant I was going in the right direction, so I looked at where I could improve and it seemed to be in the ideas i was discussing rather than my overall blog. Personally I also believe that I should tie in a lot more of my ideas with the class lectures in order to better my understanding.
Over the last couple of weeks you will notice that I asserted myself a lot more into the weekly blogs, by researching and structuring my discussion around the weekly lectures. I also added videos into my weekly posts to give the audience a overall understanding of what I was talking about without even reading my posts. I found this to be very beneficial and have been receiving a lot of ‘viewers/hits’ on my blog posts each week after implementing videos. Similar to how memes are used to condense messages states Limor Shifman, I believe these videos work in a similar way in drawing viewers in as supported by Suse Barnes. By taking a lot more of a personal approach I believe I have hit the nail on the head by providing an auto-ethnography research thread that supports all the weekly content learnt each week in both the lectures and tutorials, this is evident in my week 9 blog. Within the week 7 blog post I spoke about using all three of my classes to combine research and ideas, I used Vlogs posted to Youtube, twitter which I embedded into my posts, reddit which was embedded and my other blog posts to truly engage and explain the way in which my final research project will come together as well as engaging with a huge selection of different audiences. I even played around with snapchat one week, to engage with an audience who have all used snapchat.
In using this many platforms and embedding them all in one place, I believe I am reaching out to readers in different classes which can help expand my knowledge as well as get feedback from different subject perspectives too. For example I am using the DIGC330 blog page which is a digital asian research class, my DIGC202 reddit thread as well as my twitter account and my blog. By embedding all of these platforms that I am using for this project and subject in one place, I can provide lots of background knowledge as well as engage with a wide range of audiences on all different platforms to help form ideas surrounded my weekly content, opinions and sources. I have also read many different blog posts from BCM students and engaged with there weekly blog posts in order to understand their explanations of the weekly content. Here are two examples:
Both of these posts were extremely engaging and I looked at ways Sonny engaged with his readers by providing a video of his ‘attention’ experience, this provided a really personal research account, one I hope to capture as well in the future. Chelsea’s blog was also extremely engaging with a diverse use of quotes and references to other sources which I hope I can improve on. By engaging with both students as well as many others, I have gained experience in reaching out to students who approach each weeks content differently to how I have approached it, helping me learn, think critically about the weeks content in different ways and also exploring many different sources that I may otherwise not of found.
The Everything Blogging book written by Aliza Rishdahl, explored what makes a blog, even down to the research, ‘When it comes to accessing…opinions and advice…current events…somebodies life, blogs can do the trick.’ This means that blogs are often the go to, in order to get research and personal opinions etc. This is supported by Aymee C. Buckhannon who states ‘the functionality WordPress offers is a lot more extensive for both viewers and publishers.’ Due to using WordPress, I have found limitations but also a lot of cool features which have personalised my blog in a way to draw readers in. This is an example of something on my blog. I am extremely interested in Photography and have done a few events and this feature gives my blog a personal feel, as readers get an understanding of my ‘voice,’ as spoken about by Marie Kaplan. It also related to the way I am writing about the class content each week. By referring to memories, my own horror stories and my everyday internet regulations in a very personal way, I am able to reach out to other readers who may of also had similar experiences or laugh and engage with them anyway. This creates a mutual understanding between readers, written content and writer supporting the auto-ethnography research through my own daily experiences and collaborative understanding of the weekly content by referring to lecture notes, tutorial discussions and students blogs who have used a broad range of quotes and experiences to help them understand the weekly content discussed also.
jadelaurenhall 