The Past Remains in the Present #3

Our groups topic was Labor v. Big Business, and we had a group of four people. They really helped me understand the power aspect of the theme. The people and the places were pretty straightforward and I understood those well, but I didn't quite understand the power part. My group members helped me understand the significance and emphasis on Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan. They explained what Vertical and Horizontal Consolidation were and their role in big business. I also had a better understanding of the difference between inventors and investors. Both are very important, but I learned through my group that the investors were the ones that created these huge businesses. Also my group helped expand my knowledge on the difference and similarities between Trusts and Cartels. We all worked together to come to a common understanding of each word and their significance. Overall working in a group was not only enlightening but also quite entertaining. It is a lot more fun to be able collaborate and share ideas with your peers rather than just keeping it to yourself in your own mind.

The video essay was something I've never really experienced before. It was interesting to do any I think my group did a good job on it. The whole thing was quite a learning process, we learned that we could only have a maximum of 10 pictures, and a maximum of a 60 second presentation. This created a few problems for our group that we had to work together to solve. The reason it was a problem was because our group had already started to find a ton of pictures and we had already wrote the script. As a result we had to cut down the pictures and shorten the scripts which was a little difficult. Also we learned that our pictures had to be wide screen, so then we had to go and edit all our pictures so they would fit properly in the application. Overall I thought that the idea was great, if we knew about the limitation before hand we could have planned accordingly. But overall I thought that it was a good experience and that it taught us as a group that we have to be able to be flexible and make changes. Next time I personally would like to make sure I get a role in the presentation part of the project. This time I spent a lot of time getting pictures, cropping them, and making the Survey Monkey. As a result I didn't get to really work on the background presentation, or on the script for the video essay. Overall it was nice working in a group and the video essay was a great idea.