Project Description: We started out the Happiness project with reading multiple different articles, watching many movies/videos, and reading the book "Brave New World." Throughout the project, we looked into the different things that play into happiness and unhappiness, one major things being technology. We created annotated bibliography's with at least 4 different sources that talked about the ups and downs of people's happiness due to the use of technology. We then constructed and researched a question that connected to what we were interested in. My question was: Why does doing what you love in the long run, make you happier than success? As a class we had a structured academic controversy (SAC). Our prompt was, does technology increase happiness? Then we all had to put together an experiment that we would do and blog about for a week. My experiment was complimenting at least one person everyday. At the beginning I took the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire and my score was, 3.69 out of 6. At the end of the week I took the same survey to see if my overall happiness level increased. With a score of 4.34/6, I found that it did increase. The final product of this project was our happiness movies. We were able to pick our groups, as well as the topic we wanted to focus on in our movie. My group and I were interested on focusing more on the idea of passion. We did a little more research into the statistics of happiness levels increasing due to people following their passions. We connected the concepts of the movie Happy, the book Brave New World, and other research we have conducted before into our movie. We also interviewed three people who all have different passions, but have came to the same conclusion; doing their passions have brought them happiness.
My Annotated Bibliography:
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My Happiness Experiment:
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Project Reflection:
What have you discovered your truth of happiness is? I have come to the conclusion that my true happiness comes from pursuing my passions, as well as being with my friends and family. Know that I think about it, I realize that when I am either playing volleyball or skiing or cooking/baking, I am truly happy. I love the feeling of exercising while doing sports that I love. Know that volleyball and skiing seasons is over, I have been feeling more down than normal. I have also found that being able to see my friends everyday at school has had a positive effect on how I am feeling each day. I am always able to go to them with a problem I am having or if I just need some lifting up. Also, being able to be there for any of them makes me feel needed and like a supportive friend, which at the end of the day, makes me happier.
What was the greatest challenge you faced in this project and how did you work through it? One of the greatest challenges I faced in this project was, trusting in my partners and not taking control. I have a tendency to take over project because I have trouble believe that my partner(s) can do work that I think is up to my standards. I don't know why I do this because this has never happened, I just fear it will. One example of this is when my group got into the editing stages of our movie. My computer didn't have iMovie and one of my other partners as doing our stop motion animation, so I had to depend on my other group member to do most of the editing. I would sit with her in class and edit, but since we had such a small amount of time to edit, she had to do the rest of the final touches at home. I feel like it turned out pretty good, but I definitely has trouble not being apart of the final edit. Seeing my partners do such a great job with everything they did, definitely help with my problem of not believing in others.
How have you grown as a group worker in this project? I have definitely grown as a group worker in this project, but one of the biggest ways was communication. Throughout the entire project work time, my partners and I had to communicate about our visions and ideas for the project, we had to divide the work up, set up interviews, get b-role, and edit. All of these things were essential parts of being successful in this project, so we had to make sure that we communicated anything and any time we needed. I feel like one of the most important times my group and I communicated was when we weren't yet finished editing our video and it as due the next day, we had to make sure we supplied Ainsley with everything she needed to finish editing the video. Also communicating with her while she was working on the video was a big part of making sure I was able to help in any way.
If you could refine any part of this project, thinking back through the entire project, Brave New World through experiments to videos, what would you refine, and how would you refine it? If I could go back and refine one thing in this project, it would be, going deeper into my research. While we were doing our annotated bibliography's and SAC packets, I finished early and I had the chance to do extra research on either the topic at hand or on something that I was interested in, but I didn't. I didn't take advantage of the resources that Sara provided for us as extra things we could look into, and when I had extra time, I didn't look into more things that could have improved our video. So if I could go back and refine one thing, I would have taken time to increase my knowledge on our video topic.