Remains of the day

Die, die we all pass away
But don't wear a frown cuz it's really okay
And you might try 'n' hide
And you might try 'n' pray
But we all end up the remains of the day

Not only humanity but also time passed so far and as fast as a blink the course is over. Its hard to believe that nearly 4 months are gone  and that the end is near. Gosh that sounds dramatic but its not the end of the world but the end of a time of working together. I don’t want to write end of the project because we really want to continue and this would sound so negociating. Anyway our time together as the glorious five is nearly over and this means its time for a little resume. The project – it started as a normal course but become more a personal and group project so Ill stick to this term – was an entertaining but also sometimes exhausting time. I think I also write enough about the project itself in this blog so Ill focus on the circumstences of the course and about the blocking stones on our path. This will be a reflection of how I felt as a student in this course and what is my impression about it, what could be improved and what were my personal highlights.

Its hard to say what were my expectations now then everything is over. I had, to be honest, very little clue about what would be going on in this course. Even after the introduction on the first meeting I was not sure at all and this feeling lasted for a long period. The course was open structured to give lot of freedom to the students and I really struggled with this at the beginning for two reasons. First I was not really used to this “freedom” to do whatever I want and second to fulfill the expectations of the professor. I spent too much time guessing what this expectations could be and I think the others did the same which lead to some of the troubles we had inside the group. When everybody guesses about expectations you are not really free to use the freedom that is given to you. I think sometimes a hint in one or other direction would have been something that really have prevented some of the argues we had inside the group. It has always been hard for me to formulize expectations and concrete goals for me and its even harder to follow a path to goal without feedback also in a critical way. I think this can guide you in some way better than accepting everything. 

The course is about the “production” of social media and so we tried to use as many media and tools as possible (in a meaningful way ;)) to get used to them and see how the production of content works with them. I first really liked our “learning”platform wikiversity. It has a nice structure which is so similar to Wikipedia that you have no troubles to find content and know how to sort and organize the content. It was also not too difficult to use after you figured out some codings to create headings, links, etc. I really liked how my text good this nice Wikipedia structure and looked far more “professional”. Now there is the part where the BUT pops up and in my case its not just a small but like…”but its not good to include pictures or something like that”, it’s a huge BUT like “But the system kicked me out, banned me and erased my content”. This was so damn frustrating for me, you cant really imagine. You work on content for over a month and suddenly everything is gone. I was a bit disappointed because I did not feel supported at all in the beginning but at least I learned to stay calm and continue contacting people from the helpdesk. After a disturbing weekend the problem was solved and although some content was gone forever I could continue working but my trust in this page was gone. This made me think about the construction of the page. I think the platform itself is nice for creating content at a very high level based on scientific sources but I think its not the best tool as learning platform. Content by the students itself might get claimed as spam and that is everything else but not motivating. I guess our professor mentioned it in one of our first meetings that he had chosen this platform to show us something new beside the common moodlething. This is an excellent thought especially concerning the theme of the course but the selection was maybe not the best choice because it is no protected space where the students can come up with own ideas and try out different things. It is a stable system that doesnt allow any mistakes and is also public for everybody. This shall not sound like blaming a person or a system. Things like this can happen but what I really learned is to have a look at a social media, its system and its rules before I add content and another thing we should always keep in mind. Make backups. Lots of people are praising the cloud but just make sure you have your content also saved somewhere at your own computer.

 
What did I learn beside making backups? Working in a team was nothing new to me because you start with groupworks already in primary school but this groupwork was a bit extraordinary. We had to come up with complete own ideas and the whole responsible was on our shoulders. We had no leader figure but tried to give every member enough room for own ideas. We tried to include the strengths of the individual so that the whole group can benefit. I think the whole process was not only working on a common goal but also a learning progress. What is my opinion to this topic? What do I want as outcome of this teamwork? What can I do to realize it? We had the moments where we stuck but when the stones continued rolling and goal was insight we were more than glad that we made it. 

In the end it is great so see that have not just finished a course but produced a concrete idea that that hopefully will grow and become real. For this reason its even topping my expectations because I would never believed something like that in the beginning. I think one of the essential points which make this project possible was the size of the group. Five is a perfect number. Enough brains for collecting ideas but not too many cooks that spoil the broth. Overall I can look back on a sometimes quite rocky road but it was really worth going and I hard ever had such nice accompany which wants to continue walking together after the goal for finishing the course has been reached.

In this way
So long and thanks for all the fish

P.S. pardonne my youtube overkill here but I really like that I can include the music/lyrics that came into my mind while writing this feedback for the course. In traditional feedbacks you dont have the chance to include such things but a blog is more open and so I thought I just give it a try ;) So if you dont like the text you can at least enjoy the music.
Especially the music from the hitchhikers guide through galaxy because today is Towel Day ;)

'In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king'

When you are working on a project you must be aware of so many things. You consider this and that, take care of different point of views. No matter how aware you want to be at some point you get blind for your own project. Its essential to take this a fact, a process that you can hardly stop but find a solution for in through getting feedback from outside. In our case we had the advantage to have an audience that gave us interesting points to think about. All were skilled and had a different background and also working and project experience in the cultural sector.

We all appreciated their critique and suggestions a lot and so I decided to write a bit about it.

Why should people use our app and how we can introduce it on the market? 

There are already tons of apps available so what a new app needs to be suggestful is a "twist" something that distinguishs it from all the other apps. We thought that for our project the "social aspect" would already be enough twist but maybe there has to be more extra features to make it attractive. I liked the idea of a competition and contest to make people not fighting against each other but having a little challenge that they can solve also with each other and share their results with their friends. Its also a nice idea to inlcude such competitions in real events. In this way the app is no longer just a technical gimmick but also becomes more real for the people because its part of a real social event. When we want to make people start using our app and adding their content we have to take care on some basic informations - content that is already there. i liked Nanas suggestion for getting people on board as content producer. This is my frist blog I write myself and I am not so used to the blogger-scene. But I know that there are several people around blogging about their life and their surrounding out of an very different personal angle or with an quite artistic touch. In this case it would be awesome if such people share their impressions with others and as Nana explained further: They are used to express themselves in the internet and you dont have to push them to post something. The same system of including local people as contributors could work with local institutions, communites etc.

Back to Business

When we talk about business I always feel a bit unformtable maybe because business and management is always so connected to suit up people and I dont know most of the time how to dress myself. But its sure part of a project and all administration stuff which makes a project become a project out of a simple idea is necessary and I'm used to it. Im less used to think about concrete plans to create a real business strategy out of a project in this way. We developped a product in theory and now the next step is to think about the necessary steps to make it become real. 

Money, Money...must be funny in a rich mans world. We had focussed on founding possibilities before but never really considered to contact a company to support us. I like the idea of the guy in the audience to have a look for people with an already done technical solution which can easily be transformed to fulfill the needs of our tracker. To raise attention social networks seem obligatory in our days. Most of the companies have a site on facebook before they set up an own website.

What was one of the key sentences from the feedback that really kept in mind was "You came up with the idea and when the plan is made everything else is just programming" Sounds true but I think as humanist you often forget about the value of your work. Your environment is rating the theory far below the practical outcome and you start to feel less important then the technical crew. In this way its good to get feedback that confirms you in what you are doing and that your research is the essential thing in the project. 

Jaako mentioned student collaboration-networks in the end and that they have a system at the University of Tampere where they bring students together from different fields of study to help each other in realising projects. Great idea. I don't think that we have something similiar in Graz but I think never the less its able - maybe through social media - to get in touch with other people to make our project become real.

My Pori is...

Its kind of a strange feeling when you are travelling to a city you don't really know but when you told people about it their reaction was quite negative. Even if you want or not this conversations stay in your mind and influence your way of seeing a city. I  had also analyzed the "Mu Pori u kaunis" page which was a project to erase the bad impression people have about the city.You start to walk around and pick out the ugly places.

There were many buildings which doesnt look "breathtaking" at all. But when we passed the church this impression changed a bit. Also the building of the university looked really nice to me. I think its a brilliant idea to recycle an old building in this way.

The presentation about the university was not so interesting. I would have preferred to have a walk around and get an idea of how they integrated the university into the cottonmill. I got the impression that the university is a very international thing with cooperations worldwide but on the other hand it doesnt seem so friendly for international students cause they offer hardly any courses in english.
I was really glad about our "babysitter/guide/great accompany" Nana which showed us where to have nice lunch and guided us later on through the city.
The presentation was something some of the others really worried about. They drove me a bit mad with their behaviour of selfblaming etc....no matter I think everybody did a good job. I was glad that we had an audience. Its always a bit lame to present your project to the same single person again and again. What was even better was the fact that we had a skilled audience. Their questions and comments really brought us forward to think in other directions as well. We had considered some points they mentioned before but it was good to have qualified answers from people who work in the same field of study or in the culture sector.

Ill go into detail in another post I think otherwise this post would get incredibly long. After the presentation we (incl Nana) went to the city and had a look at the church. Awesome. Okay its really easy to make me happy...just send me with my fisheye into a church and place some nice lightressources there. But the church in Pori was really nice. I also liked that we were allowed to go to the first floor and to stand closely to the organ. Magnificent instrument. I also really liked the statues infront of the church.

Unfortunately the weather became quite windy and rainy and so we went ahead to a nice café. We met a friend of Nana who was one of the heads behind "Mu Pori u kaunis". A bit of a courious situation because we had talked about this project before and I even did an analyze about it. But then I decided to share my thoughts with this guy and that was really good. I got a deeper inside view and also the guy(too bad I forgot his name...Im really sorry) seems to profit from my thoughts about the project.

So in this case the trip to Pori was really fruitful to me. We got helpful feedback for our own project to work on with it and also were able to give another project some feedback and to help them thinking in new directions.

Blood, Sweat and Tea

Im always underestimating the workload when it comes to videocut. Today Nina and I started early and I really mean early. 8 a.m. on a saturday morning. Just a tea and quick breakfast before I head over to Ninas place. I brought my laptop with me and so we had the chance to work together simultaneously on two computers. Nina had the idea of working together, which was a brilliant one. 

I had prepared and organized the graphics the other had made into a good order so that I would easily find them today. Nina worked on our blog while I spend hours on cursing the software and switchings scences all around. From time to time  I asked her for advice. She gave me good feedback and so we really made it together today. Its really helpful to have a second opinion when you stuck in some point and don't know how to continue. Sometimes the new ideas really bother you cause you already spend so much time on the previous version but in the end the result is worth it.

I think thats the advantage of working together in one place. Immediate feedback is a good thing. It might take more time till you end up with a solution that both of you like but I think its less time then on working alone and the present it to someone else. You work hard on a version you like and think that its good enought but you dont get some essential points and forgot about some other things and have to redo it anyway. 

Somewhere around lunchtime we were done. We left the computer at Ninas place because it would take quite some time for the export of the video data into a format that can be viewed in normal programms. The endfile had about 880 MB in AVI. For the youtubeversion I transformed it into MPG4 which has only 110 MB. The upload was quick and I could share the link with the others.

Nina and I also reflected the whole videoprogress a bit. It was hard for us to combine text and video sequences with the graphs. Everybody was waiting for the other parts ...nobody wanted to say...we have to do things like this and take over control. You can see this in a good or bad way. Its good to seperate the work. Its more comfortable for everyone and everybody can do what s/he's best in. It has also disadvantages when the workflow stucks because the smaller groups or single person don't know how to go on because they have to wait till someone else has done his/her part of work. I think the only solution is communication. We met quite often to figure out the weakpoints and also encourage each other by highlightening the results so far. I could go on for a while but it was a exhausting morning and after my thrid cup of tea today I ll have a short nap...But I wont leave you with lot of blabla about videocutting alone..

please prepare the drums for a great drumroll and prepare your fingers for a click on the "LIKE"button.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy6KC9hhX5U

----seems that there is an error right now...will add the video later

Scissors Sister

.

I had breakfast while I started the computers and switched them off somewhere in the early evening. I knew that cutting would be time consuming but it even took more time than expected. Before I started with the actual work in Premiere I had to finish some graphs in Photoshop. I found out that we had no startscreen so far so I created one. I hope the others will like it but I had a very short conversation with LeighAnn and she didn't complain so I think it will be okay.

It was good that I had two screens so could I work simultaneous. I had a look at the text on my computer and arranged the scences with text and music on Ninas. I like to watch tv shows next to working cause the bring a nice chilled athmosphere. I decided for the Big Bang Theory. I already know most of the episodes and so I dont have to take care on the pictures. Actually watching/listening to other filmstuff is a bit irritating when you have to focus on cutting. I had to switch off the sound when I made the excat cuttings. At some points where we had a looooong sequence but only short text a became a bit desperate. The girls did an amazing job with the text but it was so hard work to do. It felt a bit like the want me to do some mirecals and it always leaves this bad taste in your mouth when you have to remove nearly whole scences cause of time limitations. Anyway. The first rawcut of the whole video is done. The quality of the sound is not perfect but I'll ask Thomas to take care about it. There are also 2 or 3 graphs missing but most of the work is done.

After the work I had to do...I made another short videocut for a project long time ago.

Sure it has nothing to do with our project but it really showed me how bad my skills were a year ago behind the camera and also in telling the actors what to do. It feels good in some way to see that I improved at least a bit and its also fun to see that you get more clue in a new programme and the outcome becomes better and better.

So loooong day...now all the scissors are stump and my eyes look like squares. Good night Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.

Vappu Shooting

It was not planned to make a 2nd shooting but we thought that an extra scene would make the story more complete.We figgured this out while we did the first raw-cut and synchronized it with the spoken text. Nina, LeighAnn and Nathalie worked really hard on getting the lyrics right. 

They have to have the right length and must be easy to understand but have niveau at the same time. It took us a while because we were not sure if we should make the text or the cut first. I gave the girls my rawcut to work on and while the others will be in Russia Ill continue with the cuttingprocess.

In the missing scene we did today we shoot a VappuCelebration. It tooks place at the stone you can see in another scene in the video. A couple is sitting there in their student overall and with their a-level-hat and celebrating Vappu. Vappu is a holiday that the fins celebrate on the 30th of april and 1st of may. I liked the double meaning the girls had in mind. You have the memory factory on the one side but also the heritage factor on the other. Those who know Vappu can figgure out the traditions and clothes performed and shown in the scene.

The scene shall be some sort of memory that give a personal touch to a normal tourist sight. I think I'll use a soft overlay to highlight the memoryprocess...maybe also another colorkey would underline this effect nicely as well. Not sure how I can do this. Maybe I can ask Clemens or Shirin how to do.

I usually hate to be infront of the camera but it this case it was alright. I played one of the Vappu celebrating students. I wore the overall of LeighAnns husband Will. Was a kind of nice feeling. LeighAnn also organized lots of material for the scene like a bottle of champagne, glasses and some "fake-booze". Nina replaced myself behind the camera and directed this scene. 

 

I think its maybe good to change the roles sometimes to get a feeling for the different aspects of producing media. Don't be confused cause you see Nina on the photos. She showed me how the scene shall look like. 

 I think I ll really miss the others while they are in Russia but it will be also nice to have a bit of time for university and finish some projects. I also like to finish some other videos I made a loooong time ago and were unable to cut them since then. :)

Graphic Day

 I spent the whole friday night and saturday morning with installing the cutting software to Ninas laptop and cutting the introduction scene for monday. I like the result. Its much better than the first version and now the sound fits very nicely to the video sequences. I uploaded it to youtube but on private-mode to be able to show it to the others and also concerning the contest it is good to have it on a sharing platform.

Thomas and Nathi came around 2 p.m. to my flat. I first wanted to start later to be able to do other things but Thomas argued that we have so many things to do and we would really need this time. He was more than right. Nathi started with a Prezi to conclude all our ideas for the project in a short form that is good for presentations.Thomas and I focussed on the graphics. 

The funny aspect was that we were working on four laptops. One room. Three People. Four Laptops. Meters and meters of kables. Thomas and I worked on the same computer most of the time. I usually prefer to work on my own but on this day we were a great team.

We started with working on the background. Thomas first idea was quite similar to the final one we have now but instead of leaves we included footprints. We tried for a while how we should arange them. When we talk about tracks it would be good to show a path and so we ended up in showing a row of footprints from the left bottom to the right top corner. We placed the smartphone a bit to the left.

In the next step we focussed on the screen of the smartphone. We wanted to create a unique style that is visible on all graphics we will show in the video.

We want to look professional and so we want to have one certain design for all our graphics. We used the font that I had chosen for the track button and the logo before. It fits nicely for buttons and headtitles. For other texts we used a more simple writing without curls to make the design not to overload. 

We also created a menueline and highlighted the category where the user is right now. Thomas and I wanted to wait till the others set up a order for showing the different graphs before we go on with the graphics. It would be nice when the menue-buttons get pushed in the right order from the left to the right.  I think we did an awesome job. Also the others seemed quite happy with it.

I also made a very raw cut of the other scences so that we have at least a brief idea of the story. I have to transform this data to make it available for the others too.

...early birds catch the worms...

Getting up far to early to fix some problems with the technique. I could not solve them but at least I found a good way to transform AVI into MP4 from 1,1 GB to 80 MB :)

There is still the cutting mistake inside but I had no time to do it again because the rendering needs so much time with the old programme on my computer. Anyway I was quite satisfied with the music and cutting. 

We presented our concept, graphics and video to our professor. Its always hard to say whats his opinion about our work. He seems to be happy with everything. Maybe our work is really good but it feels a bit strange to get little critical feedback or feedback at all. 

We arranged a deadline for our individual work and also fixed a day when we'll travel to Pori. Maybe we'll be able to present our video to a small audience there. I think this would be great to get some feedback. 

After we left the history departement we went to the school of economics and had some coffee/tea there. I also tried some sour milk thing which was slimy  but not so bad at all. I had had no time for breakfast in the morning because I tried to fix the issues with the software. 

We discussed further steps. There is a contest in the CHIEF-forum which fits like the fist on the eye to our tracker and we want to participate with it. We told again about the division of labour. Some of the things have to be done till monday to present our project to Kimi Kärki as well others should be done soon but there is no concrete deadline. 

Ill try to continue with the cutting. First I have to check if I can install the CS5 Mastersuite on Ninas Laptop. I hope it will work. I also will try to transform some snapshots out of the video sequences to a cool comic storyboard and will have a look at our blog too. Thomas and I also arranged a meeting for tomorrow to do a Prezi for monday and continue working on the graphics.

stay tuned :)

Action...CUT!!!

The title of this blogpost is inspired by an "outtake" of our videoproject. I just gave Thomas the signal to start acting and only a few seconds later he stopped the shooting through yelling CUT!!!

Today we invited LeighAnn to Nathis kitchen. We had lunch together and then started working. We discussed which scenes we liked most and will use in the final video. We also had lots of fun watching the outtakes. Everybody made making-of-pictures which are also quite nice. 

We had some difficulties with recording the narrative. LeighAnn brought a headset and we took care that had a silent room for the record. The software first didnt accepted the microphone but after some changes in the settings Thomas made it and we could record the sentences for the intro of our video. LeighAnn spoke them. She has the best english for sure and its also good to have one with english as first language in your team which can do the corrections. 

When I think of all the troubles we had in the beginning of our project, the more do I enjoy our work now. It is very creative and we now work great as team. 

After LeighAnn had to go to pick up her kids from the daycare we continued for a while looking for some music that could fit to our video and we also had a look on the graphics we want to use. 

Tomorrow we'll have a presentation and we also fixed the things we wanted to include in our projectpresentation to our professor. Nina and Nathi wrote all things down in a googledocs and I did a first cut of the video with some music. Thomas really helped me with the music selection. 

While writing this post Adobe Premiere is still running and I hope this time there won't be any mistakes in the video. It takes a lot of time to render the frames. I really need a new computer. Its so crappy. You have such a nice camera and has to work with so awful software which is far to old for your technical equippement and no longer state-of-the-art.

Hope that the others will like the preview of the introduction scene :)

Videoshooting

I got up very early. I had bad headaches the day before and wanted to fix some things I couldn't finish on monday. I had prepared the equippement the day before. Recharged the batteries and remove all pictures from the memory cards. I m not used to film with my "baby" but I hoped that it would work. I decide to bring along my 18-55, 28-75, 8 and 50mm lenses and also my tripod. 

When I got up it was extremly foggy and I was really afraid that we had to cancel our shooting but then the sun came out and we had best conditions. 

We met at the cathedral with LeighAnn and Nina who had breakfast before together. Together we started to look for an open entrance door to shoot the first scene but all doors seemed to be closed. I had the idea to go to the history departement because there the doors would be open for sure. I was right and Thomas did a nice job infront of the camera. We went back to the cathedral and continued with the next scenes. We didn't do this on purpose but for some reasons we filmed all scenes in the order of their appearance in the movie. 

I think all actors and especially Nathi did a great job. Nathi often looks so insecure especially when she has to talk english but I was overwhelmed by her behaviour in front of the camera. She made it really professional.

I was sometimes really stressed and hope that I didn't act to unfriendly to the others. They really expected from me that I have a plan for all scenes and completly know what to do.  I just entered another place and had not even an overview and so I was unable to tell them where to place the camera. Anyway I think we made it in some way.

 

We finished the shooting with a lunch at Arken and decided to meet again on thursday to discuss the cutting. Nathi, Nina, Thomas and I also had a little sighting of the raw material.We classfied some of the videos and told each other which one we liked best and what are nice "making-of/out-take"scenes.

I also tried to prepare the cutting-programme at my computer but for some reasons it crashed down 3 times. Maybe it has to do with the main storage. Ill try to fix it so that we can work on properly on thursday.

Tell me why...I don't like mondays

Monday is not my favourite day of the week but I'm usually not one of those people who complain about it all the time. Today we had a very early meeting at 9 o'clock to browse through the storyboard and fix details for the videoshooting. 

We met in the cafeteria of the school of economics. We started to "walk through" our storyboard and also discussed the graphs we want to include in our video. I was the responsible one for the storyboard but it was so hard do decided what we want to do in a certain way. I had done the first pages but the middlepart was empty cause I needed feedback of the group. The final scene was also a bit unclear and we decided to it the next day spontaneously.

We made the "casting" and decided that Nathi would be the mainactress playing the tourist using our tracker. Thomas would be the local one and Nina and LeighAnn would be the other tourists. I dont like to be in front of the camera. I think I always look so ugly and fat and behave like a troll so its fine for me to be behind the lense. 

We were a bit worried about the weather because we had snow and fog on sun- and monday and thought that we maybe had to cancel the shooting because of bad conditions. We decided to stay in contact and to shoot at least the first scene for the video to be able to show something to our professor on friday.

5 1/2th Meeting - VideoProduction

It has become something like a tradition to have a meeting at 11 a.m at CafeArt. As I mentioned before its a nice place. They offer nice drinks, cakes and sandwiches. The prices are affordable and they dont force you to consume. We usually all have a drink and some of us sometimes have a little second breakfast. Whats not so charming are the old ladies or as I would call them "the grumpy grannies". This is a group of old ladies and the tend to rend the same room after our session.
They are unpolite and interrupt us before our time is over. Anyway its a good location for working. 

We talked about our video and how the concrete plans look like. We want to make a promotion video instead of a tutorial one. Finally we figurred out how to communicate. There are still some differences but we learned to talk about them and so they are no longer blocking but boosting our working flow. Its challenging no question to include different ideas but so it becomes a real groupwork in my eyes.








We figurred out that we want to include the aspects for tourists and locals in our tracker. We also thought about a name for our tracker "FOLLOW ME" is just a working title but I like it. 

We had to leave the room because of the grumpy grannies I mentioned before and we had lunch together at Arken Cafeteria. First we wanted to arrange another meeting for thursday but then we decided to stay a bit longer. We had coffee and tea and started with planning of the script for our video. It went pretty good. We fixed the storyline and now we have to write the off-text and draw the storyboard and decide where and how we want to film.

I want to work on the storyboard. Its fun to scribble a bit around :3

SkypeSession

We had a Skypemeeting today. I had no real high expectations concerning that meeting. I was wrong it was quite good. I was a bit a bit confused and behaved like a fool in my eyes. I was unable to answer the first questions of the professor. But since I have great coursemates they gave me another chance.

The professor asked what we have done, what we have learned so far and what are our aims for the porjetct and the difficulties we had.

I did..

• benchmarking about cultural heritage sites on Facebook
• reading Chapter 9 of the Social Media book - presented it to the others and wrote a summary
• research paper about tourism photography - presented and summed up
• analyze the "Mu Pori o kaunis" page and write a summary about it
• create a Prezi about our current Step in the working process

 I learned to look for different social media tools who fullfill my needs. There are so many available and its worth trying out new ones. We thought about using tumblr for our project but in some way wordpress seemed to be the better option. It has a better structure and is in my eyes easier to handle and guarantees an better overview to the visitor of the page.
I also gained some experience through the groupwork. It was really hard to handle all this perspectives in the beginning but after lot of talkings we made it or at least we are on a good way. It was never so hard for me to be part of a groupproject and the others had the same feeling. Maybe it had to do with the unknown freedom we had. Usually someone - the teacher/professor - tells you what he/she is expecting from you and what shall be the outcome. I guess we whined a bit about being lost with so little information but right today I got the feeling that we made it on our own. That is a quite good one and I were a bit proud of us as group. I think that we are a great team not only cause we solved our troubles ourselves but also cause we are so different and can gain from this different perspectives about the same theme.

We are no nearly done with the theoretical background and can look forward to the "fun things" like making the video. I got some experience in video-making so  I hope that we can benefit from that knowledge.

Back to work

I had a horrible weekend. It's not really relaxing when you have no clue if you have to rewrite all the texts from the past 1 1/2 months or if things are saved somewhere and can be restored. I finally found out what was the mistake. I contacted the admin of the wikiversity pae who had deleted my content. We figurred out that this was a mistake and they re-activated my account. All the texts from my last evening - quite a lot - is gone but its better to rewrite one session than to redo all stuff. Sigh....

Crash

I was just finishing my summary of the chapter I had to present to the other. Text about pori and my research paper was done and uploaded to wikiversity. Just clicked the "save" button after two hours of writing and was so glad that another point on my to-do-list would finally be done. But it came different. There was an error on the page. I was kicked out of the system and the article dissapeared. I tried to login again but failed. Also that damn password recovery was a mess and nothing worked. But the worst thing is that not only my lasted text but all of my writings got deleted...I hope this can be fixed otherwise this is quite a disaster for me. I tried to contact the helpdesk of the page - no luck at all. I also contacted the professor but no solution in sight right now. Lets hope the best but its really disturbing my concentration for other things I have to do....

Third Meeting

Today we had our third meeting again @CafeArt. It is a nice place and the seperate rooms offer a great working athmosphere. We had to look for a research paper that fits to our group project. We thought about splitting the group into two parts - photography and tracker and combine these topics in the end. I looked for articles about photography - especially digital photography and the visual representation in social media. I found a rearch paper about travel photography which fitted nicely in my eyes because we want to create a tracker for tourists and so it might be interesting how tourists deal with photography. 

After our presentations we discussed what is the concrete goal of our groupproject and how do we want to work on. It seems a bit complicated to have a equal ground for conversation. I dont know why there are quite a lot misunderstandings. We mean the same but explain ourselves so differently that we dont understand each other. This makes it a bit more challenging but we talked a lot about that issue and I think that we are now moving in the right direction as Beth Ditto would say. 

In the evening we met again to fix our goals in a paper. This paper was focussed on the organizational stuff of our project. This ended up quite exhausting because we share the same ideas for sure but its really hard to write out something that is clear for you and the teammates but you must be able to explain your thoughts to a stranger.

Chapter Presentatiion

We met at Cafe Art again. It is a really nice place. You can easily book a room for your own without any charges. They have nice drinks and cakes and always a good and tasty salmon bread for Thomas :)

After having a little breakfast we started. LeighAnn made a little Prezi Presentation. It was really cute and reminded me a bit on creepy victorian pictures in Tim Burton style. I fitted nicely to the ghost metaphor the author of her text was using. 

I was next and told the others a bit of my chapter. It was about photography and the use of photography concerning cultural heritage. In my eyes it was a really generall introduction to the theme but it was okay.

Nati and Nina had similar topics about participation of the visitors in museums. They highlighted the importance of involve the visitors to make the exhibition attractive to them. Concerning social media they told us that its not only important to be representative in social media but also use them in exhibitions in some way. I liked a term for "digital born" people...I guess I can't really remember it but I liked it maybe because Im one of this digital people who raised up with computers and internet.

Thomas theme was about norwegian boots of the vikings and their reconstruction and how this process can be tracked for future generations and also for social media. But we all agreed that this is a quite difficult project and the way of documentation really relies on what is the result. A short video for a youtubecommunity which must be interesting or a long, very detailed video to document the craft for future generations. 

Later on we talked about our groupproject. The next meeting is sheduled for tuesday and we said that we want to focus on the city Turku and a cultural tracker. I ll check out the "my pori is so beautiful" page on Facebook to see how it works and what we could use for our project.

Chapter Reading

It took me longer than expected to read my chapter. Maybe about 3 to 4 hours. My chapter was about photography - what else :)
I prepared some of the important parts for the others.

What happend so far...

What happened so far…
So we have to hand in a report till today about our activities for the course so let's summarize a bit what I did in the last time:

After the first meeting I thought about the benchmarking and found that is difficult to narrow the wide field of the use of photography with cultural heritage content on the social network facebook. I looked for some "institutions" or "official" pages on the social network facebook and how the represent cultural heritage with photos and other visual material. 

Right after the first lesson Nina created a group on facebook and we joined it to organize further meetings for this course.  Another task was to create a learning diary. I decided for a blog because its quite easy to create one if you have a google account and we had one for a course in Graz before and it worked quite well. 

This is the link: http://productionofsocialmedialearningdiary.blogspot.fi/

We had a groupmeeting on the 20th of february. Everybody presented her/his thoughts and research about the benchmarking. After we talked about that theme we switched to the courses we had in the first semester. Leigh Ann told us about the cultural heritage course in Turku and we told her about the IT-related courses in Graz. It was good to get an impression what the euromachsstudents did in their first term. We also uploaded the keyinformations to the wikiversity.

It was a bit challenging to put the informations into the wikiversity but it was helpful to go to the "edit-mode" of the mainpage and see how the different styles work. Like the other I created an own page: http://fi.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cultural_Heritage_in_Facebook_-_Pages_and_Private_Impressions 

Leigh Ann was so friendly to organize the book about Social Media for us. Kimi gave us the introduction but we also distributed the other chapters so that every one of us would have one with a theme that would fit him/her personal interest I got one about photography. I already read the introduction but just had started with my chapter and am not completely done yet. We will meet up next week and present the chapters to each other.

Concerning further projects for the course we had a little discussion yesterday. For the groupwork we want to work together as a whole team if that is possible. There were some suggestions in the wikiversity and we thought that it might be possible to combine these topics. On the one hand there is this Facebook Page of Pori with a lot of photos and on the other there was the idea of a cultural tracker. We ended up that a combination of these themes could be possible. Creating a cultural tracker for the city pori including the visual material from their facebookpage. We also thought of going to Pori and create a short video where the trackerdata, the facebookphotos and the real impression could get combined.

For the individual project I have a only a very vague idea. Right now theres a new trend coming on social media called "Harlem Shake" and i thought it might be nice to see how trends set up on social media and how they transform the original content into a new hybrid form in the internet. I think that this Harlem Shake might be a good example for some reasons: There is a strict pattern for how it works and have to look like. People all over the world are fascinated and create their own version with friends. I'd also want to have a look on the original dance and how the city Harlem and their inhabitants react to this trend.

We will be away for some days but when we ll have our meeting for presenting the chapters to each other we will also talk about how we want to go on with our groupwork.