FlatWorld Project Reflection

Starting in March, untll the end of April, my class was apart of a 1001 flat world collabrative writting project, with 2 other schools in Colorado and South Korea, where we would write a story about our family, "a family story", which tells a bit about our culture, and where we come from, and then post it so that we could get feedback about our writing from student's around the world. Each week, we would have a different element of writing to give feedback on, like idea development, voice, organization, word choice, etc. And a few weeks ago we posted our final draft, finishing the project, and here's a few things I thought about the writing project.

1. What did you like best about the project and why?
The thing that I liked best about the project, was being able to get feedback about my writing from people around the world, but not always from the same person, so I was able to see different points of view on my story.

2. What did you like least and why?
The thing that I liked least about the project was having to edit truly boring, poorly written, or stories that just didn't make sense, which I had no interest in. With these stories, I had a really hard time in giving feedback other than, for them just to re-write the story with a different idea. Another thing that I got frustrated with, was when weeks would pass by, but no one would ever give me any feedback, for the first 3-4 weeks, I had never received any feedback.

3. What was something surprising that you learned about the other students (from other schools)?
Throughout the project, as I read different peoples stories, and give them feedback on it, I always learned a little more about the culture, history, and family of the person who had wrote it. I was also able to see how different my life was with the people in Colorado and South Korea.

4. How do you think the project affected your writing?
From the project, I think that my voice and word choice has become much better. I also learned how to vary the way my sentences and paragraph's started.

5. Describe the most challenging aspect of the project.
I think that the most challenging aspect of the project is dealing with deadlines, with three different time zones, with one a whole day ahead of the other two. Because of the three different time zones, it got very hard in giving and receiving feedback.

6. Offer some advice to future participants.
Keep up with deadlines, and just don't give feedback one week, or not update your draft another, just because you know it's online, and your teacher can't tell whether you did your homework or not.

7. Other comments.
I think that the 1001 Flatworld project was a new, fun way of writing a paper, that really didn't feel like a paper, while at the same time allowing us to learn about people around the world, their lives, culture, and family history.