October Fourth, 2016

I feel as if Earth Team has now got a much firmer grip on the project in the days following the meeting with Professors in which we decided to go a different direction, the direction of the famous travellers of the Silk Road. I am very happy to be studying Marco Polo and his life in the more honest realistic sense rather than on a television show or movie. The act of studying him is actually very involving and rewarding. Having been in attendance at betty place lab a few days ago, I saw Tierney show us all how to work with and utilize special tools of both storyline JS and timeline JS, which was really helpful as it gives me a sense of what the timeline (which earth group has decided on) looks and feels like, which always makes a project easier.

Fall Break is coming up and I am excited to return from it and begin to learn more about the Mongols, especially with my focus on Marco Polo, any information I can receive about his time with the Mongol Court, his relationship with Kublai Khan, or his activities for the Khan, I would be happy to hear it.

Howdy,

A few days ago, Friday morning to be exact, Jake, Brian and I all met with Zhihong and Eric to discuss the re-making of our project and the reassessment of our initial interests. This meeting led to the conclusions that instead of focusing on the agricultural and medicinal aspects of oases along the Silk Road, we should focus on the famous travellers that made their way across the Silk Road and use their journals, stories of them, and their writings throughout their lives to piece together not only a story map of the history of the travelers, but also a time map of overlapping and progressively more recent travellers across the Silk Road.

I think this take on a project focus is great and I can’t wait to start really digging into the meat of the project and discover things that the group and class will love to know.

Hello All,

This is my first post and I know it is late but I feel as if I have been so stressed and confused lately that I have been slow to start on the technicalities of this project. So far during this project my team, Earth, has been attempting to push past a lack of resources and aggravating dead ends as we attempt to further develop our topic and discover the facts we need to discuss and present on the research. I have fallen behind in my passion for the project as Team Earth is starting to be full of holes in our project proposal. It is due to this downtrodden feeling that I have not been doing my best work so far in this course, and I apologize for this.

We have been showed how to use our web page, our wordpress posting and ways in which to delve into our research and all of these methods and programs are user friendly and wonderful to utilize in this project, which will add substance and also professionalism to our work that may not have existed on such a broad scale in the work. Through these methods of research and idea development I have studies the available texts on the structure and design of irrigation and agriculture in oases of the Silk Road, a search that proved to bear little fruit in the end unfortunately, and I have also been trying to explore the texts pertaining to the effect the oases had on the rest of the Silk Road, whether it be through culture, religion, or farming practices. Upon discovering the sheer difficulties of finding any pertinent knowledge about this specific subject, I began to realize that there was a need for a change because the topic we had built our project around was failing to give us material that was both worth mentioning, and also trustworthy/detailed enough to give us a new area of our topic to speak more specifically about.

As far as the group goes, I love my group. Sam, Jake and Brian are all hard working and attentive which makes for a good set of teammates to complete this task with. I think something we need to accomplish more frequently as well as more systematically and easily is meeting up as a team and spending time together discussing the details, our ideas, as well as our own research topics within the project. These meetings will be a huge help to the whole group and I can tell already that the moment that we get everything figured out meeting wise, our group will be a super group due to our dedicated work and coordination.

Eric and Zhihong have been monumentally helpful in our quest to discover what we really wish to learn about and have provided Team Earth with idea as well as suggestions as to where to look for the information we need and also methods for actually showcasing our work as a group via the group website.   Their help has proven very influential and will continue to be one of our group’s greatest resources as both of these professors are treasure troves of knowledge, experience and advice. Since the topic we have chosen, seems to be working out very poorly, I think the group should have a meeting with the professors to suggest revisions and or major overhaul of our end goal of our work.

Tierney has also been amazing so far as she has set up the whole website and spent a large portion of her time preparing for us to come in this semester and immediately start working with the digital aspect of the course, which I am very thankful for. I am very much looking forward to working with the digital pieces of the course as well as being taught to do these things by Tierney.

I am the reporter for Team Earth and it is my responsibility to my group that I present our findings and report in throughout the semester with basic facts, updates and helpful pieces of information for the class. My reporter role is centered around the use of communication and the detailed understanding of the groups work on a whole, not just my own parts that I focused more heavily on. I will be working closely with Jake, Sam and Bryan throughout the process not only on the complete project (as is expected) but I will be working with them individually to get a sense of the ways in which they want me to present their information as well as anything they would like me to focus on explicitly, should they feel that would be beneficial. I think that I will work well as the reporter due to my ability to deliver when it comes to presentation, I enjoy this form of interaction with people as it allows me to illustrate and elaborate on facts and ideas my group is discovering, connecting, and help to entertain new thought processes among the entirety of the class, thereby keeping with the class goal of unification amongst the groups and not the isolationism that occurs in group projects sometimes.

I am excited about this course, I have been looking forward to this course and attached January Term for some time and I feel my excitement and desire to perform and absorb as well and as much as possible will help me along during my semester of work to be done. I believe that Earth Team will come to a better path in terms of the topic and we will succeed in setting down a path rich with resources and material. I believe all this will come down to is a meeting between the group members to decide upon our interests and passions lie and discover if they have the resources or specificity needed for a project of this scope.

There is only one last point I would like to make :

Earth Team is the bees knees

Peace out Blogosphere