Since what we have done last week was oral presentations I thought maybe I could write myy critics about it. overally, i think that these presentation task was not really successfull. Either because we (as students) did not care about it much (not unlikely) or we just didnt spend enough time on it during the classtime so we couldnt get what we were expected (equally possible)
I dont know why but something with the presentations was just not right? most people talked about a lot of irrelevant subbjects like directors and other movies of the directors and well budget and so on... what does these have to do with the messages anyway? However I can not put all the blame on individiuals because we havent done any preperation for these mini-presentations. Well the purpose of these were to practice for the main presentation but since we are being graded I believe that there should be also some sort of preparation.
I am not sure if we are being graded as a group or individually but if we were graded as the whole group, there are also some problems. Forget about teamwork and spirit and "we are all in this"... In some groups (hopefully not mine) there was a big difference between some members: Some did good job and some did really senseless presentations and I think its totally unfair to give them the same credit.
Well, I'll start with the part that's easier to answer: the grading bit, as I'm pretty sure I mentioned at least a couple of times I graded both the presentation as a whole - in terms of relevance of content, organisation of content, transitions from one person to the next,time management etc... as well as individually, so basically group members ended up getting the same grade for the content & presentation and another grade for your individual performance based on your use of language, eye contact, fluency etc... and the end grade you received was the average of these two. I think that's probably the fairest way to grade a group presentation where you are supposed to prepare it together but if you have an alternative suggestion, I'd be happy to hear about that and seriously think about it.
YanıtlaSilAs for the other bit, I, too was disappointed in terms of how little focus of the presentations was on messages and values; and I agree this experience makes it quite clear that we needed to do more explicit and direct work on analysing messages prior to your presentations; obviously just seeing a few examples in the documentary we'd watched earlier and the messages these scenes were examples of(in "the electronic story teller") was not enough... That's something I've been finding a bit difficult to judge since there is such a gap between different students levels of awareness and I did not want to do "overkill" in order not to bore the more aware students to death, but it seems like I should have:-( sorry for that:-(
It also seems to have to do with being able to read instructions carefully or not and if you're not sure about asking for clarification. Since the instructions for the presentation did only ask for an analysis of messages I was really surprised to be presented with info on directors or the plot etc... especially if it wasn't connected to the messages at all... So, I guess as you have mentioned in your post, we are all to blame to a more or lesser degree.
Do you think that the idea of what a "message" is is sort of clearer now? or do you think we should dwell on that a little more before we have your big presentations?
And please feel free to give me any further feedback you might have regarding our classes, it's hard for me to know what you're thinking, so I really appreciate any feedback.