An Average Post About Nationalism

Hello and welcome to my latest and greatest blog post! This post is about a project that we did in humanities/maker and it was called “A Case for a Nation”. This project was focused on nationalism and it’s effects on people, places, or the world in general.

To kick off this post, lets talk driving questions. The driving question this time was “How can an understanding of nationalism help us understand today?”. This question was pretty broad and has a lot of ways to answer it, and I can finally answer it! But that has to wait until later. Can’t give away the whole post so easily!

The first example of learning I want to show would be something that I have only recently done. This would be our milestone 9 (yes there were 10 milestones in this project!). This was an explainer video to compile all of our learning on nationalism so far. I think that this was a very important milestone for on of the competencies for this project, Designing Texts. This competency was based on our video skills and our planning skills. I think that this video was the best example of this competency that I have shown for this project. I also think that this milestone showed a lot about another competency, Using Resources/Use Evidence from various sources. This competency was mainly based on our sources and the information we squeezed out of them. This milestone showed this competency the most because it was a cumulation of all of our videos that came before it. You can find all of the sources within the description of the video! Coincidentally, this milestone also is the biggest and most obvious example of another competency, Identify Continuity and Change. The objective of this competency in this project is to assess your ability to how lives, conditions, and most importantly, nationalism have changed over time. I think that this milestone is the best example of this because I compared the nationalism from 1860-70 to nationalism now, and identified the things that changed between them. The last important thing that I think I got form this video were the video skills from completing 6 videos! I learned a lot about the process of film making and editing during the duration of this project, and although I may not think it to be very useful at the moment, it is an important skill to have for the future.

If you want to watch my video, I have attached it below.

Check out the planning process here!

The next example of learning I would like to share is my second video, this being an animatic showing the nationalism that was present during the unification of Germany during the 1860s this video was the starting line of sorts for this project. This was where it felt like it really started and where the learning would start to happen. This video was, in my opinion, the hardest of them all. Despite that, I think that this was the best example of our last competency, Empowered learner. This competency is about growing your thoughts and views through the construction of knowledge. I think that this milestone is the best example of that not only because of the research that went into the milestone but because we made all of the visuals ourselves. I think that this aspect of the milestone is important because your thinking process and opinions reflect off of the images you create and use. Now that I’ve recognized the good I did in this milestone, I think its time to think about what I could do better if I were to make another animatic. To be honest, I rushed with this milestone and could have done a lot better, firstly, I definitely could’ve added a voiceover to make the story flow better and the scenes would be appropriate length. another thing I would fix would be the captions. the captions that I used were not very effective. This is because they were hard to follow and and the story didn’t make enough sense. Overall, if I were to this again I would need to think about the audience and their perspective more.

Here’s the animatic if you want to watch it

Check out the planning process here!

Now I would like to share another piece of my learning. This is another video, but yet again, in a different format. This time, I teach you how to bake a Canadian confederation cake. Yum! I think that this milestone was another great example of Designing Texts and Empowered Learner. This is because of the creativity and scripting process. I think that there was a lot of directions you could’ve taken this video with such a broad objective. I think that I showed these two competencies in this video by expressing my views on Canadian confederation through an entertaining baking tutorial. There were a few mistakes here and there though and I think the main one would be my word choice for “beat indigenous villages”. This was a mistake as I did not think it through too much as I thought it would be alright because I used eggs as the metaphor. This was a large oversight on my part and although it was a mistake I can learn from it as to not make the same or similar mistakes again.

Here’s the tutorial is you want to watch it

You can check out the planning process here!
This project was a long one, but almost all of it was important learning. I learned a lot of video skills from this project and I hope that I can showcase them in yet another project looking forward.

Until next time.