Reflections and Lessons Learned

The whole process has been interesting, from starting with an idea, finding a co-op partner, the action research, through the completion of this class. (which will not be the end of the project).

Some of the early issues I had were getting people on board with the concept I wanted to look at, I had several conversation where the project took twists I did not want to do.  The KINBER group was very helpful but their focus was not yet on the content but the hardware, time to work with them will be in the years to come.  MAGPI who I am very grateful for their support gave me mixed signals from time to time.  I am happy to say they now seem to understand what I was looking at and agree that there are opportunities for growth in collaboration toward better new digital media literacies.  I had a number of unexpected interaction that helped me with the bigger picture. One a presentation to Lyrasis, which is a consortium of libraries, I had the realization that the acceptance at the directors level was not what I expected.  Where I thought I would get great survey results I got five out of twenty to complete my survey.  I also sat in on a librarian’s meeting about KINBER and the resistance to change was very strong.  The conversation was locked on how things were done in the past.  When I brought up the idea of looking toward future of video and new digital media literacies collaborations, the tone changed but only to quiet the most vocal against collaboration (even through the libraries have long standing collaborative relationships).  Final try to get the survey out was far more difficult that I expected.  A special thanks to NMC’s (New Media Consortium) list serve whom approximately 40 users responded.  Because this is a group of power media educators, I was surprised at how many were on the low end of the questions about the effective use of new digital media literacies in the classroom.  I did find the open comment area very useful.  Unfortunately, the MAGPI uses got the survey too late to be effective for this project.

The presentation

Again special thanks  to MAGPI for helping me complete my project.  They help an open forum meeting which is very expensive and time consuming.  They were great for providing me air time for free.  As with any presentation there were minor technical glitches but overall it went well. (copy of the event is provided under the presentation link).  Best of all the presentation generated a good post event conversation and set up the potential for collaborations with Mount Washington’s Observatory, where they have 80 years of raw weather data available.

Final Thoughts

Collaboration is key, both for my project, and for new digital media literacies.  A special thanks to my classmates and Dr. Rose diBenedetto whose insight made this project a valuable experience.