In the first half of this course, I’ve been working to improve my self-regulated learning by improving my practice of help-seeking behaviors. My original plan, as stated in my first blog post, was to reach out reach out to my mother for assistance, as I thought her general knowledge of communications skills would be very useful as a resource for helping me to understand and complete the objectives in the course. Unfortunately, the concepts we were working with (single-source authoring and the use of Madcap Flare) were outside of her area of expertise.
I did, however, have another resource to reach out to for help in this area–the team members I was working on this project with. While none of us had a complete picture of how to implement these concepts or use the software, each of us had specific knowledge within these concepts and skills outside of them that were well-suited to the challenges we were collectively facing. I found myself relying on their expertise, and our group ended up splitting the project into various individual tasks that we were best suited to. In this way, we were able to help each other achieve the goals we were working towards; we instituted far more regular meetings than were required so that we could frequently pool our knowledge and materials together to best reach our goals.
In the final half of this course, I’d like to continue working on my help-seeking behaviors; though for this half of the course, I think I have several much more applicable resources for at least some of the coming challenges. I’ve noticed that many of the coming techniques that we’ll be focused on (such as storyboarding, scripting, and post-production video editing) overlap with the skills some of my friends have–namely, I have a friend in film school who’s very familiar with storyboarding and scripting, as well as a friend who works as a professional editor.
I plan to consult these friends several times as I go through these concepts. I want to contact each at least once before I have put much work into my deliverables, to check my knowledge against theirs and see if they can fill any gaps in my knowledge or offer advice. Additionally, I’d like to contact each at least once after I have finished my deliverables to ask them to review what I have done, and see if it reaches the standards for what they would consider acceptable work in their respective fields. My hope is that by utilizing these resources to both supplement my knowledge and check my work, I can ensure that I can provide the highest-quality deliverables possible as someone just starting out with these concepts.
Joseph L Meyers 