If you might remember in my post about California, I talked about how the point of the trip was to learn about disruption but I didn’t go into too much detail about it. If you want to know more about what we actually did on our trip, then check out this post!
If you want to see why we went to California and the learning we did, then this is the post for you…
So a couple months ago, we were still wrapping up our Sins of the City Unit in class. At the same time, we were starting to get prepped for our big unit that was coming up as we knew it was going to be connected to our trip to California. It wasn’t even Christmas Break yet when we were given This Book to read.
We were also given a selection of other books to choose from as our choice book. I, along with many other people, ended up choosing This One.
Although these two books may not seem very similar as one is about terrorist attacks and rebelling against the government via the internet and the other one is about the life story of Elon Musk, they both have a similar theme; Disruption.
At first glance, I thought, “Yeah, a book about rebelling against the government seems pretty disruptive, but what does a book about Elon Musk have to do with disruption? What did he do wrong?” I think the most important thing to focus on is “…what did he do wrong?” My original associations with the word Disruption was words like chaos, destruction, etc. The thing is, that’s not at all the case.
Although a disruption can apply to something like a little kid running around a library with an air horn, a disruption can be so much more. Imagine tossing a rock into a body of water and watching the ripples coming from the splash. In the case of this unit, the rock is represented by businesses, people, products, etc. The water takes the place of the incumbent or the world which is being affected by the rock. Finally, the ripples are represented by the affects that the “rock” has on the water and how it changes the world. That whole process is disruption.
That’s how we were encouraged to look at disruption, not as a negative but as a change. So coming back to something like the Elon Musk book for example, he didn’t disrupt the world because he did something bad necessarily, he disrupted the world because he caused change. He caused change with Space X, Tesla, and many other innovations.
There was one more connection between our choice books and Little Brother though. That connection was technology. That was obviously on purpose as we were going to visit Silicon Valley on our trip to California. We had also done a LOT of learning about the history of Silicon Valley, certain people and companies that rose to the top there, and how disruption and technology mix together to change the world.
Eventually, after all that learning, we left…
And then we returned…
For our Humanities class, two of the biggest projects we had been building up to were:
1: Disruption Video
2: In Class Synthesis Essay
So let’s get started, shall we?
Starting off with the video, we were given the option to pair up with a partner of our choice and we would have a location of our choice for what we would be basing our video on. The catch for our partners was that it had to be someone we don’t normally work with and they had to be somewhat opposite to us. I partnered up with Kate as we argued that although our personalities aren’t too different, our skill sets definitely are we would be able to play off of our strengths and weaknesses. Now that we had our partners, it was time to figure out what the location/focus for our video would be. The video had to show how a certain location disrupts the world and I wanted to make sure that I picked wisely. Kate and I ended up picking High Tech High as we felt like there was a lot of different directions we could’ve gone.
To make sure we were prepared before leaving to California, we also had to create a SoCal Thesis for our video that described how our chosen location disrupts the world.
When we came back from our trip, Kate and I felt happy with what we learned and experienced at High Tech High and we definitely felt like we had the material to create a strong video for our project. I immediately got started on writing a script as I felt very comfortable with the thesis I wrote and the things we learned at High Tech High. It was also helpful that my thesis was lengthy as it made it easier for me to sequence my script according to certain portions of the thesis.
I was ready to start recording but unfortunately, Kate had left during our California trip to go on a sports competition and was away for a while, so we weren’t able to work or communicate with each other during that time. She thankfully did come back in time for us to be able to record our audio during class. All though our voice recordings could have been a little better, they still turned out pretty well, so I was able to quickly put it together and edit it in Ferrite which as you might know by now, I’ve become a huge fan of.
I was then able to put everything together (visuals, audio, etc) into IMovie Except for the cool intro which I may have spent a little too much time making, there’s not too much to say about the editing aspect for this project…
Either way, I’m very happy with how this video turned out as it’s one of the longest videos I’ve ever made and shows how I can work in a time crunch. It also included the most “self made” visuals I’ve ever put into a video which was cool because both of those factors took a lot of work. I think our points were strong and the video was a good portrayal of the things we learned about disruption and High Tech High. Check it out!
Moving on to our Synthesis Essay…
Since last year, we’ve been learning about essays. We’ve been learning how to structure them, how to transition sentences, stuff like that. I’ve personally never had problems writing essays as I do feel really comfortable with my ability to write. My problem however, roots from being a little bit of a perfectionist. What I mean by that is I tend to struggle with trying to make every line perfect, and as soon as I make a mistake, I’ll stop everything I’m doing to fix it. That usually stops my momentum which makes the writing process much longer than it has to be.
Anyways, this year, we would be writing an essay, IN CLASS, answering this question; How has Technology Disrupted the World Throughout History? As this was a synthesis essay, we would need to have at least three sources in our essay. One of our sources had to be from the book we read, Little Brother. We had two classes to start and finish our essays but the catch was that we couldn’t have anything with us except a sheet that had our sources on it. That meant we couldn’t have our outline or thesis with us, which made me feel pretty nervous as I have usually referred to my outlines in the past to help me out with the in class essays.
By the time we came back from our trip, the in class essay was only two weeks away, so we had that time to create our theses, our outlines (for practice,) and use several practice methods to help prep us for the essay. When the time came for the in class essay, I felt pretty ready. Everyone had different strategies for how they were going to complete their essay. Because of my lack of an outline, I knew I would have to switch things up. For me, as long as I know what I’m writing about, I can write, I made sure that I knew the general ideas of my argument and thesis by heart so that no matter what, I could write quickly and effectively. To get past my perfectionistic tendencies, I forced myself to just keep writing when I made a mistake. My goal was to finish writing my essay on the first day so I could fix my mistakes on the second day.
This went perfect for me as I was finished my whole essay during the first day. I left a ton of mistakes but that was all part of the plan. On the second day, I had a whole hour to read my essay over and fix all the little mistakes while still having an essay to hand in by the end of the class. I was able to make all my edits and put all my sources within the timeframe we were given.
I’m really, really happy with how My Essay turned out as not only did it prove to me that I don’t need to be so picky and spend so much time on the details but I also know that when the time comes to write an important in class essay, I can definitely knock it out of the park..
Either way, that has been our unit on disruption. This was by far, one of the coolest units we’ve done in PLP so far, in my opinion at least. I loved learning about what it takes to change the world and what kind of person it takes to become successful. In the end, I came out with two end products that I’m really proud of and I’m glad we got to base them off of such an interesting unit.
This concludes our disruption unit, thanks for tuning in!
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