Category Archives: assessment tasks

Blog analysis tips – week 11

Based on the workshop with groups today. Here is some additional clarity for the group analysis blog entries and essay.

Your essay addresses the question/s:

This essay will focus on the question What can we do with online video? The following secondary questions can be used to support this inquiry:  What you have learnt about authoring, publishing and distributing online video. What issues did you encounter? Was it what you expected? What did you like about it? What did you dislike?

Your analysis entries are a transition towards the essay. Consider this blogging as a type of informal (brain dump) for the group – where you get your thinking articulated as a starting point towards the more formal essay. Even though the word count is 250-500 you can write beyond this just to get your ideas out. Your assessor is not looking at the quality of the writing in your blog entries, they are more interested in seeing you start to articulate what happened with your research.

In your evidence section contextualise the specific online video practice you chose to do the case study on (link to your case study) then describe the decisions you made as a group with your video production (the making of a comparable video).

Your assessors want to know about the processes you went through to collaboratively produce your video. Talk about the pre-production, production, post-production processes. What issues emerged in the making process? What changes did you have to make?

Remember the video making is part of your groups’ research into understanding what you can do with online video. Your evidence will describe the journey you took to make the video (over the time it took to complete the work, 1-4 weeks – now from week 9-12 for some groups).

From your research (your case study and video production), you will decide as a group on a focus for your critique. In the evaluation section your assessor wants to see what you have learnt in regards to how your video production has extended your understanding of the practice you examined in the case study. How has the making process informed your understanding of what you can do with online video in this particular context?

Your assessors are interested in what you have discovered through your research and what you learnt about authoring, publishing and distributing online video (and more broadly networked media).

For example, how does a particular service like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube effect the way video is produced? What are the constraints? What are the affordances?

Task 2 update

This blog entry is for all the workshops (but with a specific focus on the Tuesday workshops who have missed out due to the ANZAC holiday).

Working backwards from the upcoming group essay. I have provided notes on this in the week 8 tutorial available here on the blog.

Looking ahead and back as a recap:

Week 7 – Online video blog entry based on video lecture and readings (it should be done and added to your group assessment doc by the end of week 8).

With Medium most group members have signed up to this blogging service and created a publication that you all can edit into. As a collaboration you can decide how you collectively write up blog entries. My suggestion is to work on sections individually in medium then get one group member to collate the shared effort into one post and add the link to that post to your group assessment g-doc.

Week 8 Case study – Groups are to chose an example of online video practice to examine as their case study. In The Friday workshop many groups found that one video was usually in most cases part of larger body of practice produced by an individual or group. This meant their case study and close reading in the first instance would start from looking at one specific work and extend to the larger body of practice, and then to the service it is published on. Groups focused on videos on Instagram, facebook and YouTube with the option also to look at other services.

We workshopped their choices against the case study questions to test how they worked in relation to this analysis and looked at using this example of online video practice to make video content in weeks 9 and 10.

Remembering that the focus is on the form of the video and its relation to the affordances of the services it is published in – rather than the quality of what is made in relation to the topic or content. In other words your group is making content to get an extended understanding on authoring, publishing and distributing online video. The making of content extends the case study analysis from just looking at a practice without getting your hands dirty. Therefore, as a starting point to select the online video practice you will examine – look for examples of practice that you think make good use of the affordances of the service they are published on.

Week 9 -10 Video making. In week 9 your group will present their case study to others in the workshop. Refer to the notes on this presentation. The other half of the workshop will focus on determining with your teacher how much video content will need to be made. The agreed quantity will be documented in your group assessment g-doc. The quantity of video content to be made will varying depending on the context of the online video practice you analysed in your case study. (See the week 8 workshop notes for more on this…)

Week 11-12 – Will focus on three analysis blog entries that reflect on the case study and the making of content as a transition to the essay which will be drafted and workshopped in week 12. The task 2 group essay will follow the same format at the individual task 1 essay.

Documentation framework

Produce a blog entry of 250-500 words that addresses the following questions:

What? Describe the types of online media practices you engaged with and produced today. This many include (what you listened to, watched and created online). Write this description as if you are explaining to someone step by step what you did. Explain what you did like for instance if you added a video to YouTube. What was the content of the video? This part sets up the context for the next two questions.

How? This part focuses on the authoring, publishing and distributing part of your activity. For instance, if you are adding a photo to Instagram – What did you take the photo with (what type of camera)?, How did you author the content then publish it to that service? How did you distribute the content you added? Did you link it to other social media services like Facebook, or a blog, for example.

Why? This part concentrates on the question ‘What do I do with online media?’ For example, why did you post a photo to Facebook? Was it because you wanted to show family and friends what you were doing that day at that particular time? Another example – Why did you watch a particular video on YouTube? Was it for entertainment purposes or to learn something?