In Their Own Words Reflective Post

We just finished our latest project, which was the second episode of our podcasts. If you want to read more about the topic my podcast or previous episodes, you can read about them here. This episode was about WW2, with the driving question of “How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WW2?”. There were also four competencies for this project, which I will go over as we move forward.

The first part of this project mainly involved learning about the causes and consequences of the war, and choosing what we would do our episode on. The first milestone was purely this, where we had to write research and write a paragraph on one of the main causes of the war, nationalism. In my paragraph, I wrote about how everyone is a bit nationalistic, and that is fine as long as you don’t take it to an extreme. If you feel like it, you can read it down below.

However, the main reason I chose to include this milestone in this post was because I think it is a good example of our Responding To Text competency.

I believe this because for we had to create a text that would show a connection to us and the world, which I believe I accomplished with my paragraph. Writing this paragraph also helped me understand why nationalism was one of the key causes of the war because of the extremes people went to.

By the time we did our next milestone, which was purely research, we had decided what we would do our episode on. My podcast is about Warhammer, which isn’t a very broad topic. However, Warhammer is a type of tabletop game called a wargame, and in my research I found that wargaming was actually used a lot historically, especially in WW2. After I had decided, I moved right on to milestone 2.

As I said before, Milestone 2 was purely a research milestone, so I went to see what I could find. I found out about historical military wargames, the start of Warhammer, but most importantly how the US Navy used wargaming extensively during WW2. We also had to find an interview for our podcasts, and I ended up looking through the archives of the National Museum of the Pacific War. However, I didn’t find anything related to my topic just yet.

This milestone covered another important competency, Using Evidence and Resources.

We had to find a variety of reliable sources, and use their information to help build the story of our episodes, which I would say is a good example of this competency in action.

The next major milestone was our episode script. This was pretty much going to be our finalized story, so we had to make sure it covered everything we wanted to talk about. I decided to start out with my introduction to wargaming with some earlier historical examples, and then move on to the main topic, wargaming in WW2, and concluding with wargames like Warhammer today. We were supposed to include our interview in our script, but I still hadn’t gotten one yet, so I left a blank slot to put it in once I found one. Something new we also learned was putting in text citations into our script, which we had practiced a bit in Milestone 1.

I also think the script was a good example of the Analyze Cause and Consequence competency, because we had to write our episodes which focused on some of the causes and consequences of WW2.

The final milestone I’m going to talk about today was our completed podcast episodes. While I was editing my recording together I finally got a reply for an interview. I had emailed the US Naval War College and they had replied, and directed me to Dr. Hal Friedman, who I promptly conducted an interview with. Now I had everything I needed to finish my episode, but as always GarageBand had some problems. I had a few issues with audio cutting off but those were just me accidentally cutting the clip, so it wasn’t too hard to solve. The main problem I had was that the interview audio was a bit too quiet, even when I increased the volume in GarageBand. After some trial and error I came up with long process that solved the problem. I had to take the original audio clip, put it in iMovie as a video and increase the audio, and then remove the audio from the video with a shortcut and increase the volume again in GarageBand. Then rinse and repeat until you have sound that you can hear. Other than those problems the editing process wasn’t too bad, as I had learned quite a few tips from my previous episode.

This milestone is also what I think is a good example of the Global Collaborator competency, at least in my case, because I did my interview a bit late.

I used technology to connect with someone in another country, interviewed them, and used the information I got to enhance and support the ideas I presented in my podcast episode.

That’s all the competencies covered, so now I’ll move on to the driving question, “How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WW2?”. My answer to the driving question is that I think stories like these help us to better understand the causes and consequences of the war by looking at new aspects, or perspectives, that usually don’t think about too often.

So, in conclusion, I learned about wargaming, WW2, and podcasting in general. You can listen to my finished episode here, and there will be more coming, so stay tuned.

One comment

  1. emaxwell

    You use good evidence of your journey here Anthony to tell us about the story of creating this episode! Great interview you conducted, and awesome job on not giving up when the timing did not work out ideally! Overall, I really enjoyed listening to your episode!

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