This has been an exceptionally rough day for working on the research project. Study abroad meetings are draining my energy and I had to devote way to much time today to finishing up my Chinese visa. Additionally on top of that stress it’s been really difficult to make sure I’m still able to do the preflights and readings while putting as much time as I can into this research project. It’s been nice to know I’m not alone and I have heard that a lot of other students have been struggling to accomplish preflight assignments so close to the final due date.
However despite the difficulties of planning for China and maintaining class work while still putting in time on this difficult project, things are going well. Team Earth is scheduled for yet another meeting tonight, and ideally tonight is the night we finish everything. Shortly I will begin typing up the introduction to our team page using the notes we came up with in our next meeting. Our groups Story Map is nearly complete and only the addition of Sam’s slides and some light editing are needed in order to go live with the map. After the meeting the page will be ready for it’s due date on the 15th and the team is really excited about that.
If everything goes well tonight and everyone brings with them their completed assignments then this night should mean a lot of stress off of our shoulders. I think that the introduction page and the story map will be complete at the least which will be very exciting. I am also hoping to get another member of the team to create something for our additional information page. I’m excited to get to utilize the anchor links that Tierney has taught us but I think we need more information their. While the additional information page is not necessary to the class I think it would be a nice addition to our page that adds some depth.
Hopefully tonight at the meeting everyone will be prepared and calm enough that the idea of pitching additional information will not sound completely ludicrous. While we’ve talked about the additional information page before something tells me that peoples minds may be different after working on the project for so long. This all being said I’m feeling very exhausted and worn out from both this project and especially the meetings and tasks I had to do today for the Jan term.  Here is a photo I am hoping to use for the additional information page:

 
 

As we near the end of this assignment I am becoming increasingly nervous which is proving to both be a good and a bad thing. On the plus side my nervous feelings surrounding the project are pushing me to put more and more work into my research and writing. On the downside however this class has began consuming a lot of my work and attention span. I now have all the research I think I will need for the final project, and all of my ideas have been typed up and I hope are ready to go onto the final website. I’m a little hesitant because despite being ready, our group hasn’t yet revealed our completed final work to one another yet.
We had an amazing meeting this Wednesday and I’m feeling really excited about the things we have planned for our website. Our members all seem to have great work done and I know they both excelled in research after getting to see some of their amazing resources during our meeting. We also had a great meeting with Tierney that proved to be really helpful in terms of our website planning. We got to draw out how we wanted our webpage to look, as well as learned some awesome web developing skill I hope to be able to put in action during our web implementation phase.
Our group has set deadlines for a lot of final pieces so I think that it all should fall into place well in these next few days. The main portion I am feeling a little nervous about now is all of our ideas coming together on the story map. Our meeting was really helpful in getting me to rewrite some of the ideas I had jotted down as well as helping to re-shift my focus to help support the team. I had a great conversation with Sam that really helped me change up two of my story map points in order to help the flow and work better with the work he’s producing.
I am really excited now to see the final project, My only hesitation is that without a concrete deadline from the class before the last due date I’m worried about everyone on the team being ready at the same time. However, despite all of these worries I have a  feeling it will all work out.
Here is an awesome artifact I found, I was worried about not getting an image of the letter from Guyuk to Pope Innocent but found this Creative Commons image of the Persian Letter! What is awesome about this is it’s the letter that John Di plano Carpini brought back with him to deliver.

In the past two days the Earth Group has had two incredibly successful meetings and I can’t wait to keep moving forward with the projects. Not only have the projects been big in terms of the kind of information that different members were able to share about their projects but also because of the ideas we came up with together. Our first team meeting we had two big planning breakthroughs that I think will be really exciting for our final project. One of them was more logistical and involved us sketching out some ideas for what we wanted our story map to look like and how our pieces would all look together as one. After working on that for a while we had a very successful conversation with Tierney about different resources we could work with which has really taken us down an exciting path.
One facet of our webpage which I’m excited for is that as a group we discussed doing something similar to additional information pages. The idea behind them was that we have a lot of incredibly important and useful information that doesn’t quite fit into our story map but that we know people would want to learn more about. The idea we’ve been tossing around about that issue now is to implement a sort of side bar or tabs in order to organize these ideas. While that idea is really exciting and I hope it works out we had an even more exciting breakthrough in our team meeting tonight.
We got music to play on our page
It may not sound exciting, but Brian through a painstaking process of  forum post reading and youtube watching was able to embed music into our blog page that begins playing as soon as the page is opened. Likening himself to a hacker or an android he managed to save the day.  So far we can only use youtube videos but the fact that our page has a unique and awesome element to it already really has me excited for our final outcome. On a more logistical note we had a great meeting in terms of planning and I think that the ideas we came up with are going to really help us. Not only did we plan concrete meeting times for the rest of the assignment but we also put in place some really helpful deadlines and drafts to help encourage us all and keep us focused throughout the next few weeks of working on the project.
Additionally I’ve been getting better at finding images that may be useful to me like this one of Kublai Khan.
 

 

The readings for the past few classes have been incredibly useful in my research. It’s been really refreshing and rewarding to have so much material all of a sudden to work with and I’m very excited. One of the biggest challenges I’m facing right now is with The Secret History of the Mongols. I’m incredibly grateful that I was able to find the full text online but skimming through it to find valuable information is proving to be difficult. While the amount of useful primary source information is overwhelming in The Secret History of the Mongols I am having trouble choosing what information is most useful for our story map.
Right now my goal is to find as much information as I can on the time period in which Marco Polo was visiting the mongol court from within The Secret History of the Mongols. In order to make sure our story map is the best it can be I will need to meet with both members of my group as soon as possible so that I can insure the information I am gathering is useful and will improve our story map instead of just being repeated information.
Another Idea I’ve been toying with recently is of adding a fun side bar of information on our page giving some general background on the practices of the Mongols. While I think that our map will do a great job of providing a lot of information, I think it would also be good to provide the readers of the site with some more background info. I was thinking about doing a small paragraph section on the importance of the horse to the Mongol people. I think giving people an option to delve deeper into the culture of the Mongol people and learn about why they were such an effective military would be really useful. I’ve typed up a few drafts of what the paragraph would look like and have gathered what I believe will be all the sources I need for it. I also found a portrait of Genghis Khan that I think will make a good title addition above the paragraph to draw people in.
I’m excited to pitch this idea to my team and seeing if maybe they too would be interested in making an additional info paragraph  to help add some density to our page in the end so the readers have lots of options. I’m feeling really good now that I have so many sources to look through and am getting really excited about being able to learn so much.  I can’t wait to start the next set of readings as I think they will prove to be very useful as well! So far things are going great !

Today Sam and I met for what would soon be the most crucial meeting I have had this year. All of my stress instantly melted away as my beloved teammate told me that he had found some amazing sources that would blow my mind. And he was right. While I am very happy about the direction our project was going in I had only come up with one solid lead when it came to research. That all changed today however when my teammate revealed to me that he had just found the holy grail of resources.
Sam found a wonderful book that as an alternative to Marco Polo presents the stories of four travelers from around the world who wrote about their experiences traveling the silk road and interacting with the mongol court. Not only is this resource good for our project as a whole but it also makes me feel a lot more supported because It contains some very good mongol resources. I am really excited to get to go through  this book with Sam and I think it could become one of our most useful resources in our project.
As far as research goes, truthfully it is moving very slowly. Being weighed down with classes I haven’t had a lot of time after completing my other homework to do intense research and so I have not delved nearly as deep as I wanted to at this point in planning. However despite this setback I have a plan and a lot of faith in myself that I will be able to accomplish it. I’m planning this fall break to do some catch up internet research and find some books that I will be able to check out when I get back on campus at the Hege Library.
Ideally I will also be able to lay out an outline for the portion of the project that I will be contributing the most too. I am really excited to see what our project will be like when it all comes together. While I think our team has a lot of research skills I believe that our best work will come when making the actual webpage. I think our group has a lot of creative thinkers who in our meetings have already had a lot of great conversations about our end goal. Because of the success of meetings like this I have been feeling really good recently about the direction that Team Earth is headed in.

This Wednesday, the fellowship of the earth met once again for an illustrious and exciting meeting of the minds. Our powerhouse of a team met for a team meeting to decide how we would move forward with our newly agreed upon topic idea. We decided to break up into three individual tasks that will eventually come together to form the greatest project of all time.  Each member of the project has decided upon a point that they are really excited about and are happy to be working on. Austin will be studying Marco Polo’s travels and taking a critical look at what it means for him to the be the most well known traveler. Sam will be taking a look at other travelers and how their stories relate or clash against the white European narrative of Marco Polo. I myself will be working on looking at the Mongols and the Mongol court and the history they left behind and their records of the places these travelers visited. Ideally when we bring all of our information together we will be able to paint a detailed and beautiful image made up of multiple narratives showing what these travels were really like.
I am really excited to get started on this project, while I am starting to worry there wont be varied  resources to help me on this journey I am incredibly interested in my topic. The mongols interest me greatly and I think that getting to study the history they created and wrote compared to the popular narrative is an opportunity I can’t wait to really get started on. Once again however I am feeling hesitant and a little anxious to the amount of resources I have. My first research steps are going to be in acquiring and looking through the book titled The Secret History of The Mongols. It has been recommended to me numerous times and sounds like the perfect first step for me embarking on this project. My next goal will be searching for research papers written on the secret history of the Mongols, in an attempt to find more sources and detailed analysis.
I must say I am much happier with this project then our original idea as I feel like we can really dig deep on this subject and pull out some new and creative ways of looking at the silk road. The topic is also just incredible to me and  I can’t wait to read over travelers descriptions of their amazing journeys.

One thing I have learned so far in working on this project, is that a lack of resources is a sure fire way to loose hope and motivation. My groups initial project idea which we were all very excited about had very few resources on the topics we were researching and so after running into the roadblock of no information over and over again wore us out and made me personally have less motivation in working on the project. I’m writing about this issue despite the fact that we have a new direction in our work full of resources that i’m excited about, mostly because it’s a good reminder to myself.
I think that I need to be aware that despite the fact that I have a lot of resources in front of me now, somewhere down the line I may run dry and this issue could start again. I need to remember to not give up hope and simply stop working on my project and to actually dig deeper and really try to work with both the physical resources I have in terms of text as well as the people in my life who are here to help guide me on this project. Both professors have been a huge help for me so far even early in the projects beginning and so I need to remember that they’re here for me if I need them later on as well.  I think I also just need to remember that running out of resources on a certain topic isn’t the end of the world and I can’t simply give up when I have a group relying on my input and participation as well as the fact that the final work we produce is graded.
That being said however, I have very few worries about running into a lack of resources in the future, and although it is definitely a possibility and something I am feeling a little bit anxious about, I need to remember that it is an obstacle I can overcome. This all being said I am really excited about the new direction this project is taking and one of the best things I have learned from this experience of shifting focus is that a shift in a new direction when confronted with an obstacle can sometimes lead to something more exciting. The projects direction now has me even more engaged and happy then before and It wouldn’t have been possible without a shift in focus. I can’t wait to get started on the new research!

This morning the earth group had their long awaited meeting with Eric and Zhihong and it went amazingly. We have left behind our original plan of focusing mainly on agriculture and medicine and have moved in a new and wonderful direction. As of right now our plan involves taking a detailed look at the many travelers who along the silk road visited the Mongol court. We will be cross examining and comparing the multiple accounts and primary documents we have from the travelers, as well as looking at how the Mongols presented themselves in their own records.
I feel much more confident about our groups plan right now and am feeling much more involved and excited about working on the project instead of fearful and anxious. I’m personally very excited to get to work on any aspect of this project because the topic as a whole interests me and the primary resources are especially exciting to read. I think this new start is really what our group needed to get going on the project and really start to delve in on our research and get involved in our project in a more intentional and driven way.
The stories of travelers is a topic that has always been interesting me, and as a child I was fascinated by historical journeys across the world and the way the travelers would describe the new world that they were seeing. Our new project topic allows us to look at these kinds of documents and do the important work of dissecting who’s writing them, what kind of lens they’re viewing the world through and comparing them to one another to try to paint the most accurate and telling image of the time. I’m especially interested in getting to see how Marco Polo’s travels compare to some of those for whom the travel was a political mission or driven by religion.
Another big step that I am excited to take is to make sure we look at the travelers visiting the mongol court who not only came from white European nations but also those who came from Persia, Arabia, Russia and hopefully even smaller civilizations so that we can get the full view that were looking for in this project. I am incredibly grateful for our team being so flexible about this topic and for our wonderful professors for helping guide is in our decision making process and supporting us sin finding a topic we were excited about.

As we really begin moving forward with this project, I’m beginning to feel more and more anxious. I’m incredibly excited about my groups topic, and I think that in the end we’ll produce a wonderful work, but as of right now I’m feeling a little bit uneasy. The main source of anxiety however comes from my own individual contribution to the group and not to the group itself. So far the team has been amazing, the process of choosing our topic went smoothly and everyone seemed excited to be coming up with the topic together. The topic grew pretty organically amongst our group(which is ironic because were team earth) and there was  a lot of excitement and initial research being done right away within the team.
As I stated earlier, my anxiety has come from my own personal role in the research project and how I will go about doing my work. Originally I was very excited to work on the irrigation and agricultural structure portion of the project, but seeing Austin’s excitement about the project I was more than happy to have him specialize in that section. Currently I am focusing on the actual crops that were grown using the agricultural techniques and how the trade with these cities affected larger nations. While I’m excited about my section I can’t help but think that I will have a difficult time uncovering enough resources for my piece of the project.
Sam and Austin both have sub topics that are much broader and have multiple facets to them and so I worry that my portion of the website will be significantly lacking in comparison to theirs. Right now this is just in my head though, as I have worked very hard on the project to date, and have contributed a lot along with all of the members of my team. I just worry that this project will become more stressful then interesting as my subsection is not something I know anything about and am worried that there won’t be enough resources to help me find my footing. Aside from my personal anxieties however, the research project is going great so far. Our team has a large amount of broad resources already to begin diving into our topic and possibly refining it more, and I love my other team members and our silk worm.
One of my biggest hopes for this project right now, is that our final result will be more than just text on a page. There are a lot of great resources on the web and tools we can use to make our page really stand out and I hope that we get to utilize them and really make our website our own. I want the digital silk road to be something that anyone can stumble upon and be captivated by, I want it to be accessible to someone who hasn’t already taken multiple history or religion sources and most importantly I want it to be fun. My goal for this project is to help build and create a website that people want to look at, Ideally the reaction to showing it to others would be the polar opposite of when you ask a classmate to proofread your final paper.  I want to help create something engaging and exciting and all together beautiful.
Along with these hopes however come some of my biggest worries about the projects, and the obstacles we may run into as we work. I’m worried about our final result being too dense and academic. Were doing immense levels of research and readings, in groups full of strongly academic and well educated people and I’m worried that our output may be too academically driven. While this is a website that is built on research and academic work, I think it’s important that we maintain something that isn’t only accessible to the people whose research we used to help get us there. If we create a website that is page after page of text about the silk road we haven’t really started anything new. If we fall into that trap, we end up just creating an online pool of resources for anyone who want’s to do something with that information, which while valuable isn’t what we set out to do with this project.
I do however still maintain a lot of faith in this group, I think we are a class of highly creative, intelligent people who with unique backgrounds and understandings of the world can come together to create a project that is truly new and wonderful. I am confident that as a team and a larger class we will overcome any small barriers that get in our way. I don’t foresee technology or group dynamics becoming anything larger then a minor interruption in the larger project. I believe that we have a class of highly resourceful students and that issues regarding the actual construction of the website will not be a problem. I think if we face any challenges as a group  they will be on a larger scale, about what the final project will look like. That being said however, I don’t think it will be because of a lack of ideas or a clash of ideologies but simply because we have so many unique and creative minds in our class that everyones aspirations for the final project may not be represented in the way that they want them to be.
Overall I am incredibly excited to be part of both my team and the silk road project as a whole. I think what we have before us is an incredible educational experience and a chance to work on a research project that involves much more than restating other authors work. This is a project that really calls the people working on it to be innovators, and to dig deep and create something new and unique. Although the only research project work I have done so far was on the proposal for our ideas and working as the recorder, that alone has been a wonderful experience. Getting to see the blueprints for my teams project and looking at the goal and seeing the kind of awesome research work we’ll get to be doing is frankly pretty exciting. Despite any anxiety I have or worries I have for myself in this project I think the Silk Road Research project will be like nothing I have ever done before, and I couldn’t be more excited to see how it turns out.