Picking Up The Pace

This week was a bit reassuring as we got moving a little faster on planning the competition. We still only ended up with five responses to our survey that went out to high school journalism teachers, so that was a kind of discouraging, but we persevered. I think the problem we're encountering is that we really need a lot of guidance from the faculty for this project to be a success. We are just completely lost without their advice, and being independent students that is not something we are used to. So, we are putting that behind us and meeting with our professors as often as we deem necessary, starting this past week.

We met with Mike and Keith on Wednesday and they had numerous suggestions for immediate next steps in our research phase. I cannot believe that we hadn't thought of some of the things they suggested on our own, but we're appreciative for their advice. I started by e-mailing the teachers who did participate in our survey personal thank you e-mails. I'm hoping a few of them will respond back to me with further suggestions, but if they don't at least they know we're appreciative.

We're also going to conduct focus groups with journalism students at Hickman and Rock Bridge to give us a close look at some specific students' needs. We're also doing more general internet research on high school students technology level and other high school journalism competitions out there. I think we're going in the right direction with our research. It's going to take us some time to do all this new research, but I'm very glad that we have a plan of action. We're working this weekend on preparing our research presentation for the class and faculty on Monday. So, we had a good week this week. I'll be out of town most of next week on a media tour in New York City with the Magazine Club, so I won't be able to do as much work next week. I've been trying to do more work this past week to make up for it. I'm glad that we seem to be on the right track for the moment.