Our final presentation went very well. We managed to further integrate our academic resources into the presentation to provide context to what we were saying about Obama’s use of online social media. Finding academic resources that directly referenced Obama were difficult to find because his election to president was so recent, to combat this issue we decided to look beyond this to the wider issue of “Is the New Media Changing Politics?”. To do this we gathered thoughts from a few selected scholars to show the differing perspectives on the topic. The other main challenge we had with the final presentation was learning how to use the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) software as none of us had used the program before. It was difficult to use initially because the only way we had to learn from was a few online video tutorials. After a few hours of trial-and-error we eventually got the hang of how the software worked learning it advantages over other presentation software and of course its limitations. I personally found it very rewarding to learn a new way to present information, rather than using the standard Microsoft PowerPoint format.
The presentations from other students in the class were also of a very high standard. I particularly liked the Film Voir presentation – The video presentation was funny but informative, the whole marketing campaign was well thought out (handing out cards with their website etc.), and creating a web of online networked linkages. The boys who did the presentation on Xbox were great too, and I liked their use of TinyChat as a presentation method, however it would have been better if we had a few microphones set so that we could ask questions. The presentation on YouTube and viral online video (Part 1 / Part 2) was really enjoyable with the video presentation filmed/edited in a very skilled fashion.
