CODES Research Teams Portfolio
Introduction
Overall I’ve really enjoyed the CODES Research teams this semester, and I’ve been very thankful to have made it into the NGRREC group. It has given me the opportunity to meet fantastic people like those at NGRREC and the members of our cohort. I feel like throughout the semester I have made a lot of improvements. I feel like I’ve become more comfortable with researching in a group but also with speaking. Not only speaking publicly but also just communicating my ideas to teachers and peers. I feel like this was especially true with our final presentation for the Digital Humanities Presentations. Even though I was extremely anxious before them I was able to calm myself down and remember what I had rehearsed when presenting.
Goal 1 (20%)
Written Communication
I will use appropriate relevant and compelling language to clearly communicate with my research team, the people at NGRREC, and their social media audience.
NGRREC Social Media Report
One of my greatest challenges this semester has been a task assigned to me by my communications internship at NGRREC. I was assigned the task of creating a social media report that could be presented to the higher-ups in the organization to analyze our social media accounts and stress the importance of said accounts in the current world. This report shows a clear understanding of the use of professional communication. It also shows an effective use of diagrams and charts to convey the numbers to the reader.
What Was Learned?
- How to use professional language in a business-like setting
- How to combine the information from my cohort with the information presented from my internship
NGRREC Final Presentation Poster
As a part of the conclusion to my fall internship at NGRREC, I had to create a poster of my work throughout the year and present it during a poster session. This was my first time ever creating an official research poster and presented me with new challenges. It limited the amount of space that I had to present my research and challenged me to pick only graphics and paragraphs that were essential to the description of my research.
What Was Learned?
- How to pick important graphics for your research
- How to pick important sections and steps of written research
- How to communicate efficiently on a poster
- How to organize work in a visually appealing way
- How to clearly direct your audience’s eye
Goal 2 (40%)
Collaboration
I will speak up in class and provide input when appropriate. I will also encourage classmates to collaborate by helping engage them. When working in groups I will be an effective team member who can help our group move forward.
Final Presentation
For the final presentation, we were challenged with the task of combining all of our research into a single presentable slideshow to share during the digital humanities exposition. I feel like during this project I took on a leadership position within the class when it came to designing and organizing the slides. It challenged me to work with a large group and to make sure that all members of the group’s opinions and feelings were taken into consideration with group decisions even when I personally disagreed.
What was Learned?
- How to collaborate with a large group for a project
- How to value team members opinions even when they differ from my own
- How to effectively communicate my own opinions
Goal 3 (10%)
Critical Thinking
I will take the assumptions of myself and others and knowledge I gain through separate sources to create logical solutions to the problems I am faced with.
Final Presentation
The final presentation was truly a test of our ability to work as a team. Before that point, we hadn’t been asked to combine our knowledge into a single presentation and it was easy to have preconceived notions about what each group member should do. However, once the project began it became clear that each student had their own strengths and weaknesses when it came to form a presentation. Because of this, it challenged us as a team to recognize our own strengths and weaknesses and assign ourselves to tasks that fit our own strengths.
What was learned?
- How to recognize one’s own bias/set standards
- How to be empathetic to others
Goal 4 (20%)
Informative Literacy / Research
I will effectively determine logical and effective research questions. I will use effective methods to answer said questions and identify multiple possible solutions for each question.
Final Project
When it came to deciding on topics for the final project I knew that there was one thing I had to focus on, social media. It’s something I have worked with and questioned since 8th grade. During my 8th and 9th grade years, I was the media coordinator for the Flaming Monkeys FRC robotics team, then my 10th and 11th-grade years I was on the IMSA Titan Robotics media subteam, and finally my senior year of high school I was the unofficial marketing director for the IMSA Drama club. This has led to a lot of time being spent scouring places like Twitter and seeing a lot of the same stuff repeated. As time progressed I started recognizing trends in my feed. For example, I started seeing more and more news articles populating it, even on blank accounts that don’t follow or interact with any news articles. That led me to wonder, well typically stuff like that starts to happen because there is more and more of the average user clicking on that type of content right? So does this mean that there has been a spike in Twitter users clicking on news articles? How many users use Twitter for news? Where are people getting their news? How does this relate to NGRREC? How does this relate to real-life events near me? These all caused me to come to my final question of “How is news of the Mississippi river spreading?”
What was learned?
- How to take a multitude of different questions and combine them into one concise question
- How to relate outside passions with schoolwork
- How to use Tweet Binder, GDELT, and Google Trends
Goal 5 (10%)
Skills for Lifelong Learning
I will look both inside and outside the classroom to deepen my knowledge on the things that interest me.
Final Project
For the final project, we were challenged to create a website to house the research we have done throughout the year. For this, each student got to focus on one main research question. The main research question I focused on was one I first began to think about during my internship at NGRREC. Having used social media so much and seen the general types of posts contained under conservation tags I wondered how much
What Was Learned?
- How to create a simple HTML website
- How to communicate one’s research