Working Collaboratively, Apart

I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t quite sure how working on a group project without being able to meet with your group in person was going to work. However, I was presently surprised with how well everyone was able to work and how productive the tools we had at our disposal were.

I’m new to GitHub and the command line of my computer. These tools were invaluable when working on this group project and they are very powerful in terms of what they can do. Being able to pull changes from the master branch on Dr. Schacht’s repository, editing the files, and then pushing them back to Github to merge the changes was actually kind of a fun process to complete and a highly effective one.

I think in general I have learned throughout this course that there are very few limits to the things Technology can do. I think I particularly liked this course and the work we did in it because it was process-based. I learned the steps to a sequence and did them over and over – for someone who craves routine as I do, this was rather enjoyable to complete. On top of that, given the current status of the world, being able to push Github journal files every week or so gave a sense normalcy to everyday life.

Throughout this semester, we spent a lot of time talking about the things technology can do. Little did we know that by the end of it, we would be relying on technology as heavily as are now. Using Zoom to meet with our groups, collaborating on TEI files, working in Google Drive to make edits to the timeline and the blog post, each group was able to complete their project. Technology can just do so many amazing things and connect people from where ever they are to complete something they can be proud of.

While getting started on this process was a rocky start I’m sure for some groups, the transition to working solely online, and then learning how to work together on a goal from different places was hard to do, I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish. Finals are stressful, but I think, despite the workload that this project was, I was able to relax while completing this project because the processes were the same in the TEI file and the Timeline. There were steps you follow to complete the Timeline and the tags in the TEI file don’t change, the coding language doesn’t change, so it felt more straight forward than other final exam group project have been.

Working with a group during a period of social distancing has certainly been a learning curve for me and hasn’t always been the easiest thing to do, but being able to get closer to technology and see all the amazing things it can do has been the most enjoyable part of this process. Technology can do anything you can put your mind to at this point, you just have to take the time to learn it. This course has given me the platform to learn a lot more about what my computer can do and it has been an enjoyable one for those purposes. I look forward to learning more about the different things my computer can do and what else I can do with technology to work on things with a variety of different people from the comfort of my own home.

Stay safe everyone, good luck on finals, and cheers to our seniors.

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