Month: October 2016

Reflection:

Looking back at my S2 presentation I think I over all did pretty well. In the moment of my presentation I felt like it was going really quickly and that the four minute presentation that I was aiming for was more like a two minute presentation. There were times where I thought I was speaking too quickly or left a thought unfinished. But because I know people’s brains tend to remember things wrong I doubt my presentation was as bad as I thought it was. What I think I did well on was projection. Although it was a weird feeling to be not quite yelling but also not using my normal volume of talking voice I think I found a good in between. The aspects of the presentation I could have improved on where eye contact and moving around more. My notes were in a notebook all written out mostly word for word. That gave me something to read off of and I just need up doing that even though I had the presentation memorized. Next time I will try using note cards instead. One thing in the presentation that I think helped my credibility was that I used quotes from some of the people I interviewed.

Comments:

I thought Helen’s presentation was very good. She projected her voice very clearly and at the right volume. And it was interesting to hear about critical mass. I saw she was using note cards and I would like to try that because she wasn’t just reading off of them.

I enjoyed Jack’s presentation about the bike shops. It was interesting and informative. I liked how he had something (the business card) to pass around to the class. It was interesting to hear how bike shops are more reliant on rentals and repairs now than when the internet wasn’t a big thing.

I thought both of the articles were very interesting. The article “If Kant Were a New York Cyclist” at first sounded like a Doctor Suess story in the way the first paragraph was written. The message in that article that I took away  was that it may seem ok to bend the laws to fit you because you are only one person but it really isn’t. If everyone did that same thing as you did it would cause more harm. For me I normally obey the laws when biking. I pretty much always come to a complete stop at stop signs and when I don’t I do a “California stop”.  Thinking if every biker at the same time were to disobey the traffic laws would be extremely chaotic and would cause a bunch of accidents. Like the article said I know that a bike isn’t like a car so it is more ok than if a car where to break the law but it still isn’t the “right” thing to do. If more and more cyclists start bending the rules to their convince the more unpredictable they will be and get into more accident. There is also the fact that it could teach younger people to behave that way.

While reading David Byrne’s essays my thoughts were provoked and I was also sort of lost. When reading the one on San Francisco I felt lost after the first two paragraphs. He suddenly jumps into talking about technology. The first two paragraphs made me think it was going to be about just his bike ride. It would just be about the sights and sounds. It was but it also had more to it that I didn’t expect. For me it didn’t really have an order and the points he was making weren’t clear to me. It wasn’t a typical formatted essay that I learned in school. It felt like a bunch of thoughts written down on paper in no particular order. That isn’t a bad thing and it was interesting to read. His insights to different issues or topics I don’t really think about were very thought provoking to me. He was talking about the “normal” and how people will play into that role and how there are some people who haven’t learned how to “master those social skills”. I never really realized how true it is that if someone doesn’t fit into the “normal” category then how hard it is for their work to be appreciated or be taken seriously. As someone who  fits into that category it is hard to imagine how life would be if I wasn’t in this category. It is hard enough to being “normal” and having people appreciate the work I have done because there will always be people who try to drag you down but it has to be really really hard when you don’t fit in with society’s norm. In the essay about San Francisco there was a lot of interesting history.

The topic I was interested in was the subculture in the cycling community:

Types of people/ groups

Do they get along?

They way I gathered this information was through interviewing people.

I went out and asked people 2 questions. The 1st was what type of cyclist are you. The 2nd was Do any of the sub groups in the cycling community dislike, have problems with or hate each other?

I interviewed a total of 13 people.

Results were the

Majority likes everyone, no hate.

Quotes. “Cycling is an all around positive experience, people got to do what they got to do, and it doesn’t matter which group their in, their still cyclists and that is what matters.”

“We are all cyclists we all enjoy riding bikes, why hate each other just because our bikes are different. There is no reason to create an inner feud.”

Minority

reason for dislike was hazardous to others on the road.

What I took away from this project was that I found that the majority of the people I interviewd in the biking community get along and don’t dislike or hate each other. They were all very positive and supportive of one another.

Thank you for listening. What questions do you have.

S2 practice 1

S2 Practice 2

S2 practice 3

What I need to focus on improving is looking up at the camera. I was looking down at my notes. I also need to improve not playing with my hair too much it got distracting when I watched it. What I did well was projection.

The TED talk I watched was “The Cheap All Terrain Wheelchair”. It was about how regular wheelchairs don’t work on rough terrain and that people in poorer places need wheelchairs that are durable and affective. The guy talked about how there were already some wheel chairs that were like mountain bikes but they were too expensive. So they had to create a new type of wheel chair that would not only work on rough terrain but also be cheaper than $200 and reparable and work in doors. They used bike parts to make it. How it worked was using levers and the levers detached so it worked indoors also.

The evidence he used was the wheelchair. He talked about how it was made, what it was made of and the trials it took to get to where it was. He talks about how the first two designs of the wheel chair were not affective at all but with the help of the people reviewing it it got to where it is now, an all terrain affective wheelchair.