Category Archives: Unit 3

Strategies and Timelines—-Preparing for Summer

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  • Draft plan/design of your project management strategy
  • Draft timeline with your goals/milestones mapped out over the Summer Independent Study Period

https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/project-management-methodology

After reading the link provided in class, I decided to develop my own project management strategy based on a combination of agile and scrum methodologies. I personally find it a bit hard to link methodologies and theories to what I’m actually doing currently in my project, so understanding all the methodologies in the list during class wasn’t directly helpful to me, but I could pick out details from the 2 methodologies I picked and slowly build a draft.

From tutorials I slowly learned to build a small cycle for the progress of my project, because my project currently have 3 different overlapping topics that doesn’t link to each other. (Fiction, Psychology, (Education) Systems)

The cycle is as follows:

1. Dig deeper into each area(research-wise)

2. Identify the link between the 3 areas. Sketch out the link between 2 and 2 and 2.

3. Revisit the old interventions, and create new ones that explore either one or two of the topics all at once.

4. Repeat all of the above. And again, and again, etc.

Because both agile and scrum methodologies welcome changing requirements even in the later stages of the projects, and introduces “sprints”, a short period of one or two weeks that plans and finishes a task very quickly. As we are having a tutorial every other week, I plan to go through the cycle in a duration of 2 weeks.

Here’s an example of a 2-week sprint:

1st Week:

(1)Find out everything about dystopian fiction. The definition, the different forms of dystopia, the famous and loved works of dystopia that already exists and the impact it created to the environment. If I were to create my own dystopia, what would it be like?

(2) Do research on what impacts students’ psychological state of mind. (The environment, their relationships, the technology of our times, etc…) Create a list of things that causes psychological impact on individuals.

(3) Sketch out the link between dystopian fiction and psychology on students.

2nd Week:

(1) Create the plan of an intervention based on the previous research and link on the first week.

(2) Carry out the intervention on stakeholders.

(3) Recap. Gather the data collected through the intervention. Record and measure the change that occurred because of the intervention.

According to the calendar above, I’ll have the time to do 5-6 sprints(which means 5-6 interventions) from June to August, leaving a 1-week period to recap all the interventions and the direction of the entire project.

The strategy and timeline in this entry is a first draft and will morph and change according to the impact of every intervention within the schedule.

Time Management Recapping

Recapping the seminar on time management, we were taught to view time in a sort of first-person narrative. So when I created a draft plan for the summer period, I viewed time from a Gods’ Eye view. While that is absolutely necessary, it isn’t an accurate perspective to actually experience and feel the entire process during the summer, so imagining a first-person narrative is helpful in this area.

If I’m on time with the schedule during the summer, then I would feel like I’m walking towards the milestones and goals that are marked throughout the timeline. If I can’t keep up, then I’ll feel like the goals are pummelling towards me and that would cause stress. The first person narrative is definitely a very new perspective for me to inspect time.

Autoethnography and Time Management…and others

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Those are two key topics that were discussed in seminars in the past two weeks. As we are preparing for 3 months of independent study, it feels like we’re packing different techniques(food, water, clothing, weapons etc) into our brains like heroes in storybooks preparing for a very long journey ahead.

autoethnography

My initial understanding of autoethnography was to tap into our own experience when doing a project. The actual definition is as follows:

Autoethnography is an approach that seeks to describe and systematically analyze(graphy) personal experience(auto) to understand cultural experience(ethno).

This somehow reminds me of a novel I read when I was 16… It’s called “Spirit Walker” (from the series “Chronicles of Ancient Darkness”) by Michelle Paver. The story is based on mythology and history in the New Stone Age. In this book, every human has three souls inside them: the name soul(on the heels), the clan soul(on the heart,representing who you belong with, your environment and surroundings), and the world soul(on the forehead). If anybody loses one of those souls in this world, they will forget what it’s like to be human and morph into demons and ghosts.

So, autoethnography, to me, is using our name soul to understand our clan soul.

(I’m just putting this here because I genuinely think like this, I’ve been told that I leap onto a different topic reeeaaally fast)

I have used autoethnography in my own project(unconsciously if I might add, because I wasn’t aware at the time that what I was doing was a method called autoethnography) when I went back to my high school in Beijing during spring break. Physically being back there did wonders in reawakening my old memories of the place. I drew from my own experience and insider knowledge on the topic, and am now at a loss of what to do next, and which area to research next. I’m probably at what I would personally like to call a stalemate.

time management

We used the Eisenhower Matrix in class to map out what would eventually be our schedule for independent study. As you can see below, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do:(

I do tend to get to this point in previous projects where my topic is too scattered for me to continue. So the next step is to gather all the info and research and other titbits I had collected(rather kleptomaniac behavior actually) and to reframe my research question into a cohesive sentence.

Right now it has stretched to 3 different topics, not unlike 3 jigsaw puzzles where I’m trying to force them together. In my own head they piece together quite well in fact…

Fiction, Psychology, (Education) Systems

How can dystopian fiction be used to disrupt the psychological impact of result-based systems on younger individuals?

The Eisenhower Matrix told me I need a more concrete plan. FAST.

The education planner test we did on the right told me I was a Tactile Learner, which means I learn best by taking action. Which I guess was right because the intervention on May 13th had a huge boost on my project as well as my personal feelings about the project. Action and physical movement does push my project forward a lot.

This is the layout of my mind map right now(I linked my Box of Uncertainties to my project recently):

I sense an adventure in the independent study period. While my thoughts and the scattered pieces of research I found are chaotic to the extent that I couldn’t succinctly describe it, they are there, and they come like the tide. I’ll just have to figure out how to take advantage of it.

We are also required to:

  • Draft plan/design of your project management strategy
  • Draft timeline with your goals/milestones mapped out over the Summer Independent Study Period

Honestly not quite sure how to do that yet. I will update this as soon as possible.

TBC.

References:

Spirit Walker (Chronicles of Ancient Darkness) Michelle Paver