Weekly Reflection Post

This post is going to be a bit different from my usual learning portfolio posts, because instead of reflecting on a project, I’m going to be reflecting on my week. This will become a regular part of my blog now, so expect one before each weekend. But for this week, there are a couple of things that happened which were pretty important. The first was the conclusion of our first project of the year, which was about identity, podcasting, and more. However, I’m going to be writing an entire reflection post on that project, so I won’t write about it again here just to say the exact same thing in a couple of days. So for that reason, and the fact that not much happened in the final week of the project anyways, I’m not going to talk about it too much in this post.

However, there is another project I’m actually going to be talking about, that we just started this week. It’s called “The Greatest Canadian”, and that’s exactly what we talked about in the first class of the project. We started off by defining great, and then as a group we had to come up with some great people around the world. I thought of Stanislav Petrov, who I had been reading about earlier that day.

He was an officer in the Soviet military, and was operating a nuclear early warning system that malfunctioned, and said that the U.S.A had launched nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Had he relayed the information, there probably would have been a nuclear war. But he did not relay the information as he was supposed to, as he believed that the U.S. would attack with all of their weapons at once, so he marked it as a false alarm. He ended up stopping a nuclear war, and that certainly is a big accomplishment, but does that make him great? Well, the class agreed that great people were known for certain attributes or things that they did, so I do think Petrov classifies as great.

However, the project is about great Canadians, and the next thing we did was learn about a few examples of great Canadians. Apparently, there was a tv show with the same name as our project, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

It had a goal similar to ours, identifying people in Canadian history who were great. We watched part of an episode about Terry Fox, which helped cement our understanding of what people thought of as great and why Terry was considered to be just that.

Now that we knew what we could define as great, we got to look at the project plan and see what we were going to do with such knowledge. Well, apparently our podcasts from the previous project were not a one off thing, as we are going to be making a podcast episode in the near future. The subject of this podcast episode? Well, the greatest Canadian. The project plan also mentioned an interview, which I assume will be part of the podcast episode we are making. However, we don’t know what the interview would be about yet, so I started thinking about the other parts of the episode, and it’s a good thing we did that entire project on podcasting, or this project would probably take an extremely long time. I think my skills have definitely improved on that front, so my main problem is coming up with someone who I truly think is the greatest Canadian. I did quite a bit of thinking about it, but I couldn’t really think of anyone outside of the obvious Canadian heroes like Terry Fox or Wayne Gretzky. I’m sure I’ll have more time to do research and think about it, so I’ll have to wait until next week to write about it. That pretty much sums up my thoughts for the week, at this point I’m just looking forward to what’s in store. So, that’s about it for this blog post, see you next week.