Finally Final

With the peer review process, I would say that I learned a few key tidbits that I wanted to change.  Unfortunately until I reviewed them again for this blog post, I overlooked the one comment on word choice, which means the wrong word is in our final.  However, the good feedback came in the form of the tempo and manual manueverability of the slides.  The suggestion to slow the pace really helped once we added new slides with a lot more information to read.  The other really valuable suggestion was the addition of an information about Genesis slide.  It seems we had overlooked that which is something that was our original intent to inform.  As far as the rest of the projects go, I think we are all very similar.  Some seem to have a little more interactivity than ours, but we kind of had an advertisement in mind for ours.  All in all though I feel solid about the work and grateful for the suggestions to help us polish the slides.

A Reflected Final Project

I'm not too sure how the final project is shaping up for us.  I think it mostly meets my expectations.  I have done PowerPoints in the past, and they are almost always a bare bones experience since I am technologically challenged most days.  So in that respect Allyson did a good job making it do things other than "next slide"  which is my forte.  As far as the content goes, I think it works for our purpose.  I was hoping we'd get an "Aha!  This is awesome!" reaction from our audience in regards to submitting, but I don't know if that will happen or not.  I think if it just gets people thinking about Genesis once then we did our job to help promote it.

A Voice Emerging

Well, I guess for me a digital voice or personality is not something I had spent a lot of time on in the past.  I know that my academic voice is distinct, and I would never be able to pass off other work as my own.  However, my E-voice still feels a little bland to me.  I consider myself a clever person, but I have troubles bringing that into my E-voice.  Even my SL avatar was a straight to the point experience where a lot of me could not come through.  I have been trying with the blogs to dial down the formality, but it doesn't work as well.  I'm not really sure how to fix this other than keep blogging and keep trying.  The blogging has been my favorite section of the use of voice, and I think the one thing I would be most likely to continue with.

My Group Voice

I actually think that my voice is well represented in our project.  I was able to craft and submit my own original work as part of my student involvement section.  Then I was able to use a lot of whatever tiny little nugget of creativity I have in me as I editied and compiled both the draft and the final portion of our presentation.  I think that for the most part our group was all able to insert a bit of their personality into the project.  Each of us either created original thoughts to contibute or helped design the slides to their own liking. 

Interactive Gameplay

I am well versed with games that change based on the decisions you use.  I can think of Mass Effect, Oblivion, and the Final Fantasy series to name a few of the better ones.  These have so many different choices, like the type of character you use, what sorts of skills you develop, and my favorite choice, if you're good or evil.  I tend to almost always gravitate to good for some reason, must be the Army streak in me.  The best of all of those is Mass Effect though.  They were able to create a unique situation where you can develop your character and take him with you through all three games they released over the years.  This has been revolutionary for the industry, and I'm sure will start to be the standard soon.  Even the MLB game that Playstation has is adopting this for their franchise player mode, where you will be able to use him on both the Playstation and their portable gaming system.

Secretly Shopped

Recently we found out the company we work for was starting to employ secret shoppers to grade our performances.  How did we find out you ask?  I got shopped that's how. Of course it was during our busiest time, the lobster fest we had for Lent, and I assume I was fairly busy.  I know that I was because I did not do our patented steak tray presentation, or offer to joint the platinum club.  However, despite my fails on that part, I was graded highly for my service and pleasant demeanor.  I was actually worried about missing those two points, but I was given some high praise by the management team during our server meeting on Saturday, so I will take that as a win!

Communicating Groupily

Group communication has been rough for us, as I was afraid it would be.  For our group, we are all commuter students who are busy outside of class as well.  The original idea I had was to go ahead and have a face to face meeting.  What we discovered was that we were all way too busy for that.  This also impeded the idea of having a live chat.  So like many 21st century scholars we resorted to Facebook.  This worked as our best tool since they all go to our phones and usually it's set up as a homepage for a lot of people.  It worked much better than the sporadic communication we had with Oncourse.  We were even able to share the PowerPoint on Facebook, when Oncourse had trouble uploading it.