Introduction

👋 Hello readers, I’ve just finished a project in school that I’ve been excited to tie together for quite some time. Over this year (and my highschool career), we’ve covered a swath of topics and time in history. Looking through the lens of significance, we’ve broken down many of the most important events in human history. Recently covered was the start of WWII, the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now the Cold War. 

• The Cold War was a time marked by ideological conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, and pervasive fear that gripped the world for decades. Let’s dive in.

🕰️ Where it started: We were assigned a book to read over spring break, for the new project when we returned. The book was a dead giveaway titled Hiroshima by John Hersey. I was fortunate enough to make it to Maui on my spring break, so I happily read on the beach. I quite enjoyed the book and got to talk to my grandpa about it quite a lot. Most of my WWII knowledge comes from my dad, so I got to spout a ton of random Manhattan Project and Hiroshima lore onto him. He was an engaging audience, and trying to explain what I’d been reading and learning in class was a great challenge that tested my timeline of events.

• Day one, we learned about and wrote a theme statement for the novel Hiroshima
• We used literary devises and prose to support our theme claim
• We used quotes to provide evidence of our support

 

Content

💻 How we learned: We developed ideas during this project by watching The War Game. The War Game is a groundbreaking British pseudo-documentary film that depicts the devastating consequences of nuclear war on a small British town and its inhabitants. While watching this, we pushed the boundaries on how we reacted, analyzed and critiqued a text. Watching this film twice, to give a full set of focused notes on both the style and theme allowed me to focus on each more precisely.

• We continued this into Turning Point, a TV show on the cold war as a whole
• We looked a key events and figures, as well as themes

📝 Take note: Something that we were learning while doing this dive into the Cold War, was knowledge management. Learning how to Zettelcasten -insert link- was one of the hardest parts for me during this project. I wouldn’t consider myself a very organized person, but I feel like I can usually keep my affairs in order. Learning about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Zettelcasten, and Commonplace are among the most disciplined things I’ve done this year. I’m far from fully utilizing it, let alone mastering it, but I’m beginning to get into the pattern and reap the power of the system. 

🔄 Revision required! Learning how to effectively organize my notes, thoughts, and ideas was much harder than I thought. The concept of Zettelcasten is not entirely complex, just take fleeting short notes of things as they happen, and categorize them by linking ideas together. In practice though (for me at least) this was much harder than on paper. 

• I made many attempts and even more revisions to my notes until I started to feel I was getting the hang of it
• Doing it over and over again forced me to get into the system and improve

Product

📥 I completed a podcast with my buddy Carter for my final product. We decided to research how fear influences global politics and espionage. We spent time researching, building and producing three podcast episodes on various facets of our topic. We edited our podcasts to make clips for short form consumption. We thought that this would cater to our audience online more, and give you more information faster.

Reflection

🧠 What I learned: Through this project, we worked on the decision making competency. “I can make decisions which are considered and well-informed.” I showed this by demonstrating knowledge of the main events of the Cold War. During my podcast, my partner Carter and I describe key points in the cold war, through our topic of spying and espionage. Additionally, I developed a Zettelcasten to build a PKM system and started a bank of knowledge that I used for my podcast notes, and can add to in the future. Finally, Carter and I picked an interesting text format that we’d never tried to conquer before and had a lot of fun. We used games, short-form media, and visuals to reach our audience and inform them of our driving question.

👀 Looking forwards: I’m exited to add onto my PKM and take my new history and podcasting skills to tackle the next project in my path. I think if I can master Zettelcasten, I can really get a boost on my productivity. Right now, I’m the kind of person that really needs 24 hours to think about something, and come back with an idea. If I could utilize a PKM, I do that in an instant.

🎁 To conclude: I really enjoyed this project, as I got to pick a very interesting topic to research. I had a great experience working with my childhood friend, and learned many new hard and soft skills. Thanks for reading everyone, take care. Declan.