OHP- Reflection

Francesco Argentina

Casie Cobos

English Language Arts

10/28/17

OHP- Reflection

Now that I have completed my oral history project, I discovered that there were things that went well and things that didn't go as well that I can improve the next time I participate in a similar project. To start, I will discuss the things that I feel went well. I think that the questions that my group came up with were very good questions, they were engaging and thorough which resulted in a lot of good content coming from the interviewee. Also we asked good follow up questions at the appropriate times and executed little details well, that generally helped the interview run smoothly. As well I think my group worked very well as a team, we were organized with the formatting and tech set up, we managed our time well, and we distributed the work evenly among each member. Overall I would call this project a success for our first time.

Although I would deem the project a success that doesn't mean that there isn't room for improvement. There were certainly a few things I wish I had known when we started the project. The first is that keeping a conversation going is no easy task, this is something we learned along the way during and after we had our interview. Even though our questions were engaging and the information we got back was valuable, we had nowhere near enough questions. Our interview ended at around 25 minutes when we thought we would easily exceed at least 35 minutes, however we now know that it's better to overshoot with the amount of questions you have and maybe not get to all of them, than to undershoot and not have enough to say. Also I think our class section could have done much better on our final movie that we made. I believe this is partially due to a lack of time, however that still is not a valid excuse. Our biggest problem was not having enough editors working on the project, as we underestimated the amount of work it was for them in comparison to the other groups. Although we made our mistakes, I am glad we got the opportunity to explore a completely new type of work that before this, was absolutely foreign. I had a great time participating in this and hope to work with oral history some more in the future.