Reflections on Group Presentations

During my tenure here at HWS, the majority of my classes have started out pretty slow, with the first major project not coming until a few weeks into the school year. I must say however that I enjoyed having this project right of the bat and having to immerse myself in the class immediately. With the grade scale being how it is, this project gave us students the chance to judge the quality of work our peers are willing to put into the class. The project also help us delve right into the subject at hand, Digital Networks, by allowing to judge when the Internet started and create a timeline from there. Enough for generalizations for now, as I would like to take a closer look at the individual presentations.

Group # 1 was my group and we looked at the modern day Internet as we know it, with a particular in depth focus on social networking sites. We saw social networking as a fixture in the future of the Internet and were interested to look at its evolution and how this evolution has affected the development of the Internet over the last 20 years. Looking back on our project now, I do feel like we did a good job with presenting good information, but feel our PowerPoint may have been able to be somewhat clearer. Obviously the lighting in the room did hinder that somewhat, and that is certainly something I will keep in mind when creating PowerPoint presentations in the future.

Group # 2 created a really interesting YouTube video that cited the 19th century as when the Internet began  develop with the advancement of communication means. While the style of the presentation was extremely unique, I felt some of the video clips were unclear and had little relation to the actual content of what the narrator was discussing. Rather than focusing on the development of the Internet, the group often sidetracked and focused on the development of the computer. Overall, it was still a great presentation that I did enjoy.

Group # 3 took another different approach and focused on the Internet as a means of transferring information between individuals. They program they used to display their timeline was really cool and was for sure a indicator of how far the Internet has really come. When it came down to the information that they presented I felt they really weren't discussing the history of the Internet. Rather the presentation became an in-depth look at the history of file-sharing. None the less, it was still a great presentation.

Group # 4 took the most in-depth look at the history of the Internet, presenting a simply laid out timeline on PowerPoint. They took an extremely broad approach and traced the founding of the Internet back the 1822 with the founding of the computer. They then looked at the progression of the computer and then the progression of the Internet up until today. The only criticisms I did have were the PowerPoint was unclear (much like my own groups) and they didn't cover very much recent history of the Internet. It still was a great presentation that I was able to learn from.

As a whole, I felt the class did a great job with their presentations. While we all took an extremely different approach to the presentations, I feel we all did complete the assignment that we were given. That is why I feel that the grading system that we have been given may not be completely fair. I will leave that discussions for another posting though....