December 1: Journal Entry #11 Second SDA Reflection

On November the 28th I created, and published my second SDA. I structured this SDA as a podcast, and I answered my essential question of "why is the CIA operating in Africa?" First and foremost I feel positive and proud of the product I created for this SDA. In this podcast episode I was able to accurately and thoroughly display my learning, which was ultimately my goal for this episode, and reaching this goal made me feel really proud of the product I created. In the future I hope to continue pursuing this goal indefinitely in order to continue to create a finished product that I am proud of.

In regards to me conveying the significance of my answer I think I was able to do so. In my podcast episode I stressed the importance of specific events several times in order to show how these events led to future events. I also tried my best to show how these events affected the world not only in a direct, but also in a indirect manor, which I think shows critical thinking through SPECS.

In this SDA I dedicated a significant amount of time to writing my script, and recording the podcast episode itself. The time I dedicated to this SDA was far larger than my previous SDA, and I think it displayed itself through the quality of the SDA. This SDA was far better than my previous SDA, and I credit that to the amount of time I spent on this SDA. I think I also had both superior time and attention management skills in regards to this SDA. During the chunks of time I allocated to working on my SDA I found myself being more engaged and working more efficiently. I am not quite sure why these behaviors transpired, but if I had to guess I think it was because of the format of the SDA.

When taking a look at the five "C's" I think I was able to hit four out of five of them quite accurately. The ones that I think I hit accurately were the creativity, critical thinking, communication, and especially the curiosity aspect of the five "C's," but the "C" that I think I missed was the collaboration "C." I think that I missed this "C" because of the nature of what I am inquiring about. My research topic is, for lack of a better term, esoteric, and this makes it quite hard to collaborate with others because they most likely don't know enough about my topic to be able to adequately help me. I think that this will be a problem going forward, and I hope to find a solution to this, but I am not entirely sure how, but I know where I will start. First off I will start branching out to my fellow EMCers to see if any of our topics could potentially mesh, if that leads me down a dead end then i'll set up a meeting with my coordinator to see if they could provide me with any advice.

I think that the most important thing that I learned whilst doing this SDA, besides answering my essential question, was that the formatting of my SDA's will really impact the quality of my final product. I've learned that certain formats such as infographics don't work too well with my topic, but formats such as podcasts work terrifically. Knowing this I will start using formats such as podcasts at a higher frequency, and will probably stay away from formats such as infographics.

Most of the vital sources I used to craft this SDA were lengthy papers and articles by historians who specialize in the cold war, and one thesis written by a university student who was researching a topic very similar to mine. I used these sources specifically because they were both reliable and trustworthy.

Something that I am proud of concerning my SDA was how I went extremely in depth into my essential question. I am proud of this for two reasons, the first one being that it was a massive improvement when compared to my first SDA. As previously mentioned my first SDA was sub par by my standards. I could have done a better job, but I hadn't. In my reflection for that SDA I stated that I would improve in the future, and I think I have improved. My second reason for feeling proud about this SDA was simply that I think that I created a very well polished and valuable product which serves its purpose.

In regards to something that I could improve on I think that there is some room left for improvement in my choice of background audio going forward. In this podcast the music was quite redundant, and the sound effects were non-existent. I think this occurred because I was somewhat unfamiliar with creating podcasts, but also the interface I used for creating this podcast limited me to select audios. Going forward I'm going to choose a different interface to use in order to have more choices regarding the audio of my podcast, more specifically I think I will be using Soundtrap in the future as a opposed to Wevideo.

In the coming months I think I will be able to use the information I gained during my research into my essential question, along with my research into my SDA in order to analyze certain operations and events that occured in Africa in order to understand how they occured, but more importantly why they occured. One example that came to mind was the Angolan civil war. With the knowledge that I have gained through creating this SDA I will be able to analyze why the US supported certain factions in the war, and why the USSR supported the opposing factions.

In regards to HOTQs helping me to craft my essential question, along with my sub-questions I think it was a massive help. In a course which has practically no boundaries it's nice to have something to refer to every so often so I know i'm on the right track, and that was precisely what HOTQs was. HOTQs helped me to form questions that were both meaningful, and important, along with confirming my potential questions as either not good enough, or on the dot. In short, HOTQs helped me out a lot.