BCM114 Reflective Blog

After the initial confusion with this subject and how much I feared I was in way over my head, I am slowly coming to terms with organising my Digital Artefact and getting it to head in the right direction. My DA is an independent and opinionated cricket blog for young to middle-aged (the most internet involved) cricket viewers. Here’s how it’s gone so far.

Failed early, Failed often

My earliest failure was the rush to start creating content. I felt firstly a major urge to do what I love, but that quickly turned into pressure to provide for an audience I hadn’t yet developed because the process had not been thought through. So despite putting in a good deal of work to set up my site and get some content up, I received a poor mark for my pitch because I did not focus enough on it’s sources and how I came up with the idea.

This wasn’t an idea that just came to me in a whirl though, I’ve thought about doing something like this for years and may well continue to do it once this subject is over, however I was somewhere between over-confident and inept in staring my DA. Sources of inspiration include wecricket, Russell Jackson’s blog, Jarrod Kimber’s YouTube channel, countless books and many other forms of cricket content that I have always felt an urge to emulate in one way or another. So I got stuck in, wrote a handful of articles, and reached a very small audience.

By jumping the gun and not examining my audience enough, it has made the process of the feedback loop quite difficult as I have found it hard to engage with those who have viewed my work so far.

Another regret is not using my main pages on Instagram and Facebook to help me with feedback for my DA, but on those I am quite a reserved person and didn’t feel comfortable sharing a heap of content on there, but if I was, I would hope to have received more feedback and more insight into what I could improve.

I understand that not many of the BCM114 students I interact with on Twitter would be interested in what I’m doing and I’m not really trying to reach them, so that’s why I’ve set up a standalone page for what I will be focusing on for the remainder of the course.

This will allow me to be dynamic between subject related material and giving my audience what they want, rather than a bit of both like they were receiving on my main Twitter. I am new to Twitter and feel like I have done a poor job on it so far this semester, I have honestly really enjoyed the #bcm114 posting, but I don’t have the confidence to make memes in tutorials and have been trying really hard to show that there is method to the madness of getting this DA off the ground in relation to lecture content.

What I didn’t realise was that Tweets without audio, GIF’s etc aren’t acceptable, which is my own fault, but seems a bit harsh considering I was trying to make quite a formal approach to my DA on Twitter and didn’t see a great deal of crossover with memes and other related material as they are not something I typically engage with. However, living and learning, my Twitter feed now shows a change in that department and this is something I will persist with for the remainder of the course if it helps engage an audience.

Also, this page will make it easier to interact with hashtags and other cricket accounts as it is anonymous and focused on a particular event. I am hoping for more success with the elements of the feedback loop that I was lacking, such as the ability to test and observe, which will then translate into a more user-friendly platform going forward.

FIST

I am hoping that this fast, inexpensive, simple and tiny change of a standalone Twitter page can improve my DA. I will be able to post more visuals on there, another #fist change, and retweet them onto my main page.

So, even though I fully acknowledge this should have been down on paper weeks ago rather than circling around in my head while I tried to appease an audience I didn’t understand while creating content that for all I knew was rubbish, here is some mind mapping for the road ahead, with the road already travelled in mind.

Overall, I have found BCM114 to be challenging, frustrating but also quite fun so far this semester, and knowing what I hope now I am hoping to turn things around and improve my marks going forward.