Evaluation

Criterion A

Investigation was my favorite part of this project, as is often the case. I started off by interviewing many other teenagers to get a basic feel of how different people live adolescence. This reporter work was pretty interesting, but I’m afraid I did not get as much out of it as I could have. I tried to interview many different teenagers, but mostly ended up with girls my own age because I wasn’t comfortable asking vague acquaintances for their full feelings on life. I completed my survey over Facebook, so it was easier to keep a written record of their answers.

I think that the fact this interview wasn’t private made the people a little self-conscious about honestly answering what they thought of peer pressure, living abroad and what’s stressing about that, etc. It probably would have been easier for them to talk if I had made the interview anonymous, but I didn’t think of that at the time.

After completing these interviews, I actually listened to real podcasts to get a feel of what these sounded like. I had heard about podcasts before but had always thought they were just an online version of the radio, which I am not very fond of. I looked through iTunes and actually found a lot of interesting emissions on topics that interested me: photography, science, technology…I think I spent a little too much time on this part, though, than I really needed. After watching two or three podcasts, you already know pretty well what they are like – you don’t need to go through another four like I did. I probably should have spent more of this time researching teenage stereotypes or something like that.

Criterion B

Before starting design, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do for my podcast. Since I’ve lived abroad my whole life and I had asked my interviewees lots of questions about how that felt, I thought it would be interesting to do a podcast episode on that. Before I completely decided on that, I still asked other people for their opinions on the topics I had brainstormed.

None of the people I asked were interested in a podcast on the differences between living abroad and living in a mainland country. They all thought it was a little overdone – and well, I realized it was. The specific culture we live in is something we always talk about and it can be a bit of a boring topic. On the other hand, everyone thought that a podcast on teenage stereotypes would be interesting. I actually quite liked that idea myself, and I think teenagers can relate more easily to this day-to-day issue than another long presentation on living abroad.

Once I knew which topic I would do my podcast on, I started brainstorming designs I could work on. As soon as I wrote each of my designs, I thought it was the best one I could think of and didn’t think it was necessary to make another one, then I made another design and thought that one was great too. Finally, I decided on the simplest format – a script and interviews of various people representing each stereotype. That worked out well, but I think I should have made my script shorter as my podcast ended up being way too long. People tend to have a limited attention span, but I felt like I would forget so many things if it wasn’t at least seven minutes long. I should have asked for more opinions on the script at this point in time. The people I asked may have been too nice since they are good friends of mine, and it’s also hard to judge how long a page of writing will be once it is recorded.

Criterion C

My plan was pretty similar to the ones I usually do, and I think overall I followed it pretty well. The problem was that once again I planned too many things to do in each class. I know it’s better to push yourself rather than be completely unambitious in your plans, but it ended up being rather stressful as I hadn’t planned all the little gaps between what I planned to do – getting the microphones and setting them up takes time, even if “Interview three people” sounds like very little on the actual plan. I think my plans are more adapted to my speed of work every time, though, so this isn’t really much to worry about. Now that I know how these little details take up time, I won’t make the same mistake same time.

Criterion D

Since I had created my plan and my design, I actually started working on my project. The first step was to get people to interview, and Elise, Jiri and Kyu were happy to help. That was a good surprise because I was afraid not to get a single boy to interview, and I thought I really needed a little of their perspective since I had already interviewed so many girls for investigation. Their interviews were the first thing I did and they went well, but they were a little distracted by each other’s presence. It might have been easier just like in investigation to make this anonymous by not revealing their names in the podcast, or simply to interview them separately.

Once I was home, I recorded my own parts which took me less time than planned and turned out pretty well, as far as stuttering or bad pronunciation go. However, my sound quality was really bad. I can’t hear myself all that clearly at times, and there’s a lot of background noise. I should have bought an external microphone for this part of the project or come back to use the school’s microphones, because I think that really messes up the quality of my podcast.

After that, I assembled all of the recorded parts and created my final podcast, adding images. I really wasn’t happy with the images. Whereas my podcast sounded somewhat interesting, the pictures just made it look so amateur and not serious. I think it would’ve been better to use just one image for the whole thing, even if it seems like that’s less variety.

Finally, I think my podcast would’ve been better if I had actually uploaded it on Youtube as putting it on Blogger wasn’t the best quality I could have gotten. My sound was already not too great and this most definitely did not help with it.

Overall

As a whole, I think my podcast turned out alright but there are so many areas I could’ve improved in so many small ways, as I realize while I write this evaluation. First of all, I knew from the start that my sound quality was not too great from my fictional podcast, and I would’ve had time to buy an external microphone. The problem was that I kept forgetting about it until it was too late. I like my script and I think my podcast topic is really interesting to many teenagers, even if there were lots of things I could have improved. In my case, I think the content of my podcast was good but the actual format not so great. I could’ve improved it by using less pictures, better sound and a better uploading website, as I said just before.

To make sure that my judgment was completely fair, I asked other people for their opinion on my podcast following the test I had set myself at the beginning of the unit.

• Ask a number of people what they'd expect to see on a podcast about teenage stereotypes, and compare it with what is actually on my podcast
• Have 3 people listen to my podcast and rate it from 1 to 5 based on interest of the theme, interest of the script, sound quality, pronunciation and overall.

For the first test, I asked Elise, Suugii, Binderyia, Bilegt, Kyu and Brooke what they'd expect to see on a podcast about teenage stereotypes. Here were their answers, and whether or not these things actually are on my podcast:

Elise

1. Specific stereotypes - Yes
2. Interviews - Yes
3. Pictures - Yes
4. Background information - Yes
5. Solutions - Half

Suugii

1. Not too formal, funny - Half
2. Entertaining information - Half
3. Slang words - Yes
4. Interviews - Yes
5. How to deal with stereotypes - Half

Binderiya

1. Pictures - Yes
2. Stories of teenagers - Yes
3. Background music - No
4. Adults discussing teenager stereotypes - No
5. How teenagers want to grow up - No

Bilegt

1. Not too formal - Yes
2. Stereotype yourself - No
3. In your own high school - Yes
4. In your country - No
5. In other schools - No

Kyu

1. Interviews - yes
2. Personal anecdotes - no
3. Background of interviewees - yes
4. Social relationships due to stereotypes - yes

Brooke

1. Interviews - yes
2. Opinions - yes
3. Statistics - no
4. Background information - yes
5. Pictures - yes

Overall, I think my podcast mostly matched expectations as it had interviews, background information and pictures (what most people seemed to be looking for.) However, people also had many other interesting suggestions I forgot to include in my podcast. I particularly liked the ideas of statistics (I could've realized a poll of some sort in my class), background music, comparisons between stereotypes in our school and other schools, and more "solutions" to stereotypes. I think most teenagers don't need that much background information on stereotypes - they know what they are. Perhaps having more solutions to the problem rather than exposing it could have improved my podcast.


For the second part of my test, I asked Sonya, Elise and Ha Young to listen to my podcast and give each criteria a rating out of 5.

Sonya
Interest of the theme: 4
Interest of the script: 5
Sound quality: 3
Pronunciation: 5
Overall: 4

Elise
Interest of the theme: 4
Interest of the script: 4
Sound quality: 3
Pronunciation: 5
Overall: 4

Ha Young
Interest of the theme: 5
Interest of the script: 5
Sound quality: 3
Pronunciation: 5
Overall: 4.5

From this final test, it seems like most people did agree with me on the general idea that the content was better than the format itself, as they all gave a rather low grade for the sound quality. I would even have given something lower for sound, but I suppose I may actually be a little biased as I keep thinking my sound is terrible whenever I listen to my podcast and I can’t focus on anything else.

It was great to see that other people enjoyed my podcast, and in many ways seemed to like it more than I liked it myself. My friends who listened to it said it made them think about stereotypes themselves, which is what I really wanted to achieve with this podcast. We teenagers often think we understand ourselves but I’m not sure how much that is really true. It’s impossible to make a podcast covering all aspects of adolescence, but by making and listening to podcasts each talking about one of these multiple sides to our teenage years, I think we can understand ourselves better. It helps to be able to make sense of this giant mess our thoughts are in this time of life, and it helps even more to see that we’re not the only ones feeling that way, as I realized when listening to the others’ podcasts. Everyone is confused about who they are; everyone has these same problems with stereotypes and other aspects of being a teenager. I’m glad I understand my own better, as well as the trouble other teenagers go through.

My final podcast

As some of my classmates had said that the quality of videos uploaded on Blogger wasn't too good, I tried to upload it on Youtube but it repeatedly gave me an error. So here it is right above - hopefully it will work this time. Since I wasn't too happy with the pictures, I was planning on removing them to create an audio podcast but then remembered one of the design specifications we had been given was to include at least one image.

It took me over ten technology classes to simply make one podcast episode, and it wasn’t even all that long. I can’t imagine the amount of work that needs to be put in by those running Muggle Cast, for example (a nearly 2 hours long podcast published every week.) As with many things, listening to a podcast is a lot less time consuming than recording one! Overall, there are many things that could be improved in my podcast but I believe it turned out pretty fine. I'm glad to be finally done...

In case the video above is really of a terrible quality, I also uploaded the original file here.

Process - recording the podcast

Over the next class, I got two microphones from the school in order to record my interviews. Since the class was noisy, I borrowed Elise’s computer and we set it up in the corridor. The problem was that the school’s microphones refused to work, as we didn’t know how to set them up. We ended up using the built-in computer on the laptop - obviously this diminished the sound quality. I had asked some of the people who got really good sound quality on their fictional podcasts how they had done the recording, and they had used their computers or even their phone, so I thought it would be fine.

The recording of the podcasts actually went well. The sound was not as bad as I expected, and I think my interviewees felt freer talking outside the classroom. However, their mutual presence was still a bit distracting, and sometimes I had to push them to develop their answers to the questions. Here is what I asked each interviewee:

• Have you ever been stereotyped? If so, as what?
• What did you experience because of these stereotypes?
• Do you think the stereotype does apply to you?
• Do you stereotype other teenagers? Do these impressions usually turn out to be right or wrong?

I was happy with the unscripted interviews because all three of my classmates gave very different, interesting answers. They were also quite honest in admitting they did stereotype other teenagers, and actually thought that often stereotypes turned out to be partly true. The only problem with the interviews was that recording them took much longer than planned. I didn’t have time to record my own parts or Sonya’s part, as I had planned.

I finished recording at home, but I think my own built-in microphone is of a lesser quality than Elise’s. My voice was a little hard to hear every now and then. I asked my sister to record the part I had planned for Sonya, and I hope her young voice is not too noticeable in the podcast.
Once I had all of the parts, I assembled my podcast into a small movie using pictures I had found on the internet for stereotypes. Some of the images were very striking. I particularly liked a series of photographs that went “I die my hair crazy colors so I must be an attention seeker,” “I’m Asian so I must like math,” “I am a person so I must be stereotyped. Overall, though, I felt as though the images added something very amateur, not serious, to my stereotype, and made listening to it less interesting.

"Recording sign on black background." Kompressor Studios. 2007. 26 Jan 2010

Process - writing the script

Once I had decided on how I would make my podcast, the next thing I needed to do was write the script for my podcast. I had already made a vague layout of the way I wanted the podcast to go, while I was designing it:

• 2 or 3 seconds video shots of various teens saying "Hello. I'm a jock. I'm a nerd. etc. etc. etc." (Scripted)
• Switchover to myself on video, explaining how many teenagers are categorized into groups, a fact that is accepted as "common knowledge" by most teens (Scripted).
• Quick interview of people defining themselves as belonging to a certain stereotype and how their daily life is affected by this characterization (Unscripted).
• Switchover to myself, explaining how many teenagers don't fit inside any of these groups which are often more of a fashion statement than a way of living (Scripted).
• Short scripted interview of someone who believes they don't belong to any stereotype, and who thinks many other people don't either (Scripted).
• Credits for all the people who were interviewed.

Writing the script was then rather easy, especially since I had a lot of ideas on the subject of teenage stereotypes. I used Word and simply wrote all of the scripted parts you can see above. I had planned to do this during one class period, but it took me a little longer so overall I used about two technology classes.

My next task was to find people to interview for the unscripted interviews, and one person to read out the scripted interview. I wanted to focus on how my age group experiences stereotypes, so I asked those of my classmates who I thought were most likely to be stereotyped. Not everyone accepted, but Elise, Jiri and Kyu agreed to being interviewed about their respective stereotyping experiences. I was happy about that, because as we are a majority of girls in the class I was afraid I wouldn’t get any opinions from boys, but that turned out fine. Sonya agreed to record the unscripted part for me.

"Pile of Paper." Quo Vadis Blog. Feb 2009. 26 Jan 2010