Ethnography

Quotes and Messages

For the ethnography project, my group chose to do quotes and messages.  To me, quotes are important words to live by.  The picture above is my favorite quote.  It reminds me everyday that I can do anything  possible as long as I have a good mind set.  As we worked on our project we found that we don't all have to same meanings for the same quote.  

When we were first assigned this project my group was actually really confused about what to write about.  We didn't understand what we were being asked to do.  We played around with a bunch of different ideas but we couldn't quite put our finger on what we wanted to do.  We brainstormed a bunch of different ideas and we first thought about doing a prezi, then a slide show, and then we finally decided that a powerpoint would be our best option.  Once we had the idea of going around taking pictures of quotes and messages we took off running.  Each one of us took pictures and wrote down what it meant to us.  In the end, we put all of the pictures and meaning together in a powerpoint and presented the final product to the class.  

Since we didn't really know what we were supposed to be doing in the beginning of this project we had to come up with a bunch of different ideas and change them around as we needed.  It was really nice that Lacy would come up to each group and talk about what we had and what we needed to add or change. Once we got the analysis part of the project done, we didn't have much more revising that we needed to do.   

I was in a group with Olivia Armstrong, Nikki Pacitti, and Nolan Ollis and we worked really well together.  We all pulled our own weight and we all did what we were supposed to do.  Each one of us collected pictures and shared them as a group through email.  We met at the library to discuss the meanings of the quotes and messages and we also put the powerpoint together. I liked doing this project in a group because it allowed us to put all of our ideas together and it was cool to see how we each thought of different meanings for the quotes.

I thought that doing this ethnography project in an "untraditional" was was really cool!  I had a friend that had to do this project but she had to write it in an essay format and she was not excited or interested in the project at all.  For me, I'm not big into writing papers so I was excited to be able to work with a group and use technology.  Doing it this way made it much more enjoyable and I was really excited about working in a group setting.  When we presented the projects in class it was cool to see how each group did something different.  Not one group had the same presentation.  If we did it in essay form then all of the projects would have been very similar.

Overall, I thought that this project was very interesting because each group had a very unique topic and each group put forth a lot of effort to make their project the best possible.  I also thought that it was really cool that the group topics were kind of different and nonconventional.  I would never have thought that food or clothes had an underlife, but the way the groups thought things out gave me a complete different understanding.  This project definitely made me think outside the box and think in untraditional ways.  I truly enjoyed working on this ethnography.