Era in Review
The goals for this assignment were to produce a video that synthesizes the period of years covered by the members of the student’s group. I used the analytical thinking skills I developed this semester to contribute to my group’s effort in providing a holistic account of the American experience in our time frame. My group accomplished the synthesis part by our topic being national security and everybody contributing information about it into our project. Then we put together a video containing the information found in PowerPoint slides and pictures from our specified years. We were successful and the video was excellent.
The era in review video was a hassle in the beginning but it ended up being pretty good. My group’s years are so spread out that it was hard to find a topic that tied everyone together but we came up with one and we rocked it. Our film topic ended up being national security, which played a major part in pretty much every year since its start up and that’s why we chose it.
When we first got our group together we had no idea of what our synthesis would be. When we first talked about it in class we thought, hey we could do wars because the United States is always involved in some sort of conflict but that topic failed. We met a couple more times where only a few members showed up to discuss possible topics and we got nowhere. Then the next time we met somebody mentioned national security and we went with that, which was really good. Then we told everybody to go get information about national security in their specific year. We broke off and went to the computers in the library and we got good information and made up subtopics under national security. Then we went into the digital commons room in the library and we worked on the first couple slides of the video. It was really cramped to have everybody in there but the video was getting done. Later, the more technical/Macintosh savvy people finished up the video and it ended up looking great.
