NATIONALISM – To Unite and Divide


Nationalism is a concept defined as, “the love for ones nation to the detriment of others”. Although the first part of this isn’t inherently bad the second part is. Nationalism has prompted many events, especially conflicts because of its protective and often violent nature. When one group of nationalists collides with another group of nationalists that have different views they will often prompt conflicts which lead to the injury of bystanders and innocent people. This is why in my view nationalism, although not always bad is still bad.

Within this four week project I made five videos about nationalism, two of which had my dad getting interviewed and reacting. To our questions and videos. This blog post will be a chronological reflection of all of my videos except for the ones featuring my dad.

The prologue

These videos were created to explain the events which they were about and tie in nationalism along the way. All of the videos led up to the Cumulative Video which used them as examples to answer the driving question of, “How can an understanding of nationalism help us understand today?” to which my answer is, “Throughout history, many major events have happened with nationalistic causes. We can study these events and see their causes and consequences. We can then make educated guesses about the future based on the past. Using our understanding of nationalism we can see why countries do things that we wouldn’t understand were it not for our understanding of nationalism”.

With that out of the way, it’s time to get to my first video. My first video was an animatic about the foundation of Germany and how it was influenced by nationalism. If you don’t know, an animatic is more or less a moving storyboard. Something halfway in between a storyboard and an animation.

I myself have yet to learn how to draw good pictures of people as you may see in my animatic. It was for this reason, and time constraints that I decided that rather than wasting my time drawing stuff, I’d grab some pictures off the internet and use those. Although I most likely shouldn’t have I did because when I created the video I was at a crunch for time and drawing the other images and doing the animations took ages. In retrospect I should’ve put more time into it and done a few things differently but the past is the past and by learning from my many mistakes I made something that wasn’t necessarily better but rather different.

That different thing was my tutorial on British North America in which I used a Risk game to make a tutorial on how to make a nation. The tutorial was based on the history of how Canada was created.

I decided I would completely redo my approach to my video and instead of doing something that was rather boring, I’d put some techno in the background and had fast angles while I explained what was going on in the background. I also completely disregarded the rules of Risk so that it looked more like a population map of Canada in the late 1800’s.

In the end, my teacher didn’t like it, and with good reason. The techno that I had once found cool and entertaining was more distracting and my fast angles made it hard to see what was going on. So, it was time for a redesign.

For this video I went with a style that you see in many video-essays like the ones by Kraut, one of my favourite people on YouTube. For this I have to go into a bit of detail. By this video we had a way of doing things. We would plan out the schedule, make a screenplay, storyboard, draft, film and edit it. The thing is that we did everything up to the draft by Wedsnaday and then had time to do the draft of the film on Wedsnaday but on Wedsnaday I always had a full afternoon so I didn’t have any time to do the draft. This on its own was not too bad as I could just do the whole video on Thursday night but on that week we had to start the next video on Thursday. This meant that I could either do my video on the Indian Act or I could start on the next one. When at school I decided I would first do some stuff for the next video and then give myself two hours to do the video on the Indian Act. What I actually did was research  for an hour, get sidetracked, and watch a five hour series of three videos explaining the history of Turkey from the Hittites to Erdogan which I do recommend, it’s a great series. This is why one and a half pages of the screenplay of my next video were about Turkey.

The last, Cumulative Video

For this video I tried to copy the style of video that Kraut displayed but there were a few things I did wrong. I spoke faster than a rapper on cocaine so it was quite hard to understand. Someone also said that my audio was distracting although in my opinion it was good. The thing that I know I didn’t do well on were the transitions from topic to topic. Although they were pretty smooth, they didn’t flow and my video seemed more like a few things stitched together which it was. I also should’ve put more time into my conclusion.

What I want to do to improve my video skills is make a high quality video about whatever I’m doing over the spring so that I can show it and show how much I’ve really learned over this project. Trust me, I’ve learned a lot but it would take ages to go over all of what I’ve learned in this one post so I will make it concise by putting what I’ve learned with every curricular competency.

Designing Texts 

I used the design process as efficiently and fully as I saw fit. I refined what I created and made my texts meaningful and engaging. I also considered the message and audience so that my creation would portray the message to the audience as well as possible.

Using Resources / Use Evidence from Various Sources

I found and used an array of reliable information from various sources and compared them to find out their relevance, reliability and accuracy. I read up on my topic before I started writing about it.

Identify Continuity and Change

In my opinion continuity and change, especially for nationalism is one of the most important things about history. Connecting the past to the present and finding out the cause and consequence of things regarding nationalism is quintessential for not letting our mistakes in the past happen again in the future. For most of history there was never one reason for any big change, but a few. There is also never one consequence of the action or change but many which have many implications on many people. That is why I think continuity and change is one of the most important things about history.

Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to construct knowledge?

I like to consider myself a very empowered learner. Not only by the need to create a product that I see as good but by my thirst for knowledge and because history is interesting. I use my resources to their fullest extent and always push for quality and efficiency when I am making my videos. When given the task I will try my best to create something good, or even great within the deadline.

Outro

thanks for reading my blog post, the link to all my videos is here, feel free to check out my Youtube channel and subscribe so you can see all of the videos I make for school and when I want.

Email or iMessage me if you want, my email is jakubh@seycove.ca

Bye

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2 Responses

  1. Sepaus says:

    Hi Jakub

    I really enjoyed reading your blog post on Nationalism as it is also something I am interested in. I thought your blog post was super informative and interesting.

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