Wrapping Up the HCP and SMC

I. HCP Reflection

1. Overall, the HCP project was a very rewarding process yet very time consuming. The process began with using a website bookmark to record all of my resources that I researched online. I used Diigo after Delicious started to have some issues and made summaries and tags to distinguish each source from another. I then created annotated bibliographies for my main important sources in order to refer to them later and for the actual draftingr process. I wrote 2 drafts after receiving helpful peer review.

2. One specific objective from the rubric that I felt learned the most from was the historical dimensions: this was to present a historical perspective about the topic I was writing about and weave research studies conducted in the present day into the literature review. I learned how to read and analyze complex research studies while extracting bits of information that were relevant to the literature review and constructing it in a chronological fashion in order to demonstrate that studies pig cognition.

rough draft vs final draft

The process of me learning the material can be easily identified in a comparison of my first draft and my final draft. In my final draft, my introduction was very cursory when trying to explore the historical component of the research project. I mentioned only that there were studies of animal cognition throughout history and that humans were trying to understand the minds of other animals. However, this does not explore the full scope of the decades of research conducted throughout the centuries. I fixed this by realizing that there were most likely people who have investigated this topic hundreds of years before and so I searched up key people in animal cognition by entering in search words on Google. These key words included “important animal researchers in the 18th century.” These words proved to be effective because I discovered Romanes, one of the first people to present a convincing argument for the welfare of other animals.

2. SMC

What I Did.

When we were creating the homebase, we wanted the website to appear friendly and homey in order to attract people into viewing the website instead of graphic images that would deter people away from the campaign. Each person was responsible for updating a certain part of the website in order to divide up the work. The first three days involved just sharing knowledge in order to raise awareness. We shared general factors leading to colony collapse including companies that use pesticides and GMOs and the instances of global warming that had an impact on the agricultural economy. Many of our facts for the next day were statistics about the bee population and economics of the bee hive. Most of this information was from websites concerning the bee colony collapse or retweets from bee organizations and companies that supported the use of clean and chemical free foods.

We wanted our viewers to initially share and retweet our information and images. Later in the week, we wanted them to actually take action by posting selfies with themselves and flowers, taking pictures of sustainable food, signing a petition, and sharing a picture of things that people are planning on growing into their garden..

The hashtags that we created were #beezystateofminduci (taken from our campaign usernames) and #beethechangeuci, which was meant to motivate people to want to start changing the way the lived our their daily lives. From using the hashtags to sharing our images, it was supposed to make it so that every little single action had meaning.

Logos was used during our posts that were promoting the statistics. Using the statistics provides a logical foundation as to why there should be a campaign in the first place. The logic is that if our lives depend on bee pollination for food, measures should be taken to sustain the bee population. Pathos included using aesthetically pleasing pictures of flowers and food items in order to make people realize that bees help us in way that we id not even realize and took for granted.

Since our posts were meant to raise awareness among millennials, we used language that was familiar to our audience such as “selfie” and “hashtag,” as well as utilizing trends that were familiar to the younger generations, such as the craze of posting food pictures on Instagram. We mainly used buzz words on Twitter mainly to get people to click on our links such as “bad” and “warning.”

The infographic was made using canva as a collaborative effort where each of us found facts and organized some of the graphics and text. Bonnie found the website to work the infographic and organized a good chunk of the material.

The Response

We followed 1276 people and organizations on Instagram and 301 people on Twitter. A total of 254 people on Instagram and 106 people followed us on our main account. Adding up our individual accounts, we were able to get around 400 followers overall. About 200 people visited the website as well. The posts that received a lot of attention were a picture of yellow flowers and a picture of a parfait received the most likes, about 55 and 40 respectively, where the parfait received the most of positive comments (4).

Posts that didn’t receive much attention but still received a decent number of likes was our post about the petition. People seemed more hesitant to want to commit to the petition.

Posting more frequently on the websites would have been more effective or actually posting pictures with our faces would have been better because it shows our followers that we are real people and we are not spam robots.

Learning Experience

Working together in a group is definitely not a new experience for me. I utilized my skills from working with class groups in high school and clubs to help contribute to the group without seeming like a dictator. I learned that it was important to reply immediately and efficiently and be honest about the work so that everyone can help you if you are having trouble keeping up with the posts.

Social media is integral part of the 21st century because it is accessible, affordable and universal. This is a means where everybody can be connected and very efficient method as well. Using hashtags makes people see what is popular worldwide in a very short amount of time and limited characters, making it easier to search for a certain topic or keyword.

I learned that Instagram was solely for posting pictures and those that were professional or decent quality were more liked and commented on. Twitter was more commonly used to links, videos, and websites and pictures as well. It allowed for quicker means of messages bcause of the limited word count.

I learned more things about bees' roles in the ecosystem because I never realized how much of an economic impact they had on world in agriculture and jobs. Their natural behavior helps organize some of society's basic needs like food.

I learned that making an argument on social media relied heavily on pathos. People respond to emotional appeals more often and passionately than logos and ethos.

Individual Evaluation

No one in my group was really in "charge" of anything. We discussed what we planned to do and we each made revisions to our plans according to the situation at hand. I helped mainly with coming up with ideas and asking people in person to follow our accounts and spread the word. I also got my group talking when there was a lag in conversation and helped everything get done as much as possible in class as to not waste time. I helped overall my group to be more efficient by reminding them in a group text about the day's themes.

Our team could have utilized our own personal social media accounts to better advertise the campaign. We should have been more aggressive in our posts rather than just post pretty pictures of flowers. We should have found a way that was more compelling.

I, as an individual, could have shown my face in the campaign in order to make the post more relatable and more convincing to others. I could have done a better job of reviewing my peers' posts