Metacognition: Mashup

To begin the Mashup my group chose the topic of feminism.  At this point, we had not chosen a point of view as we were still in the information gathering stage.  We began by finding quotes about feminism from Jane Eyre and other works of literature from English this year.  As we gathered these quotes I began thinking about my views of feminism and how I might want this to translate into our project.  We agreed generally on focusing on a positive view of feminism and following the progression of Jane’s feministic values throughout the novel.

When gathering other elements for the Mashup, we began without much understanding of how everything might work together.  We each gathered about seven elements which we thought were interesting and supported a positive view of feminism. We ended up using very few of the elements because as we dove into the ordering of the quotes and elements we realized that much of what we had found didn’t fit or support our changing vision.  At one point, we stopped gathering elements because the process was beginning to seem random.  We kept in mind that a Mashup is meant to help us develop one coherent idea about our chosen topic.

We began putting the elements in an order which chronicled Jane’s life along with the progression of feminism in history in terms of our Sophie’s World quotes.  Then we began to add other elements which we found and it slowly became more clear what elements we still needed.  We continued to search and came up with an order we were happy with for the time being.  The next day, we met for a final time and went through the Mashup again.  We ended up changing the order around pretty dramatically in some parts and taking out and adding certain elements.

Upon completion we felt confident that our Mashup held an important message which we wanted to share.  My thought process changed throughout the project as I formed my own opinion of the topic and point of view from which I wanted to present it.  The most interesting part for me was putting the elements together in an order that made sense. It was almost like a puzzle that we needed to put together except that there was no right or wrong answer. I can definitely see using the Mashup process as a way to think and organize my ideas in the future.