HEIDI BULLOCK

Reflection

Every year, around our birthday, my mom would get out our “baby book”. We would look through and ahhh over the cute pictures and chuckle at the funny things I said or did growing up. This is one of my favorite childhood memories. I wanted my kids to be able to have this same experience. To have a tangible book to look through and remember their childhood days, not just scroll through the endless streams of pictures on the computer with no organization to them at all. This desire, along with my growing anxiety over not having these endless streams of pictures backed up and the possibility of losing them all at any given time, gave me the inspiration and motivation to make this my EDGE project.

I thought this would be a fairly straightforward project. I knew it wouldn’t be simple, due to the amount of time I had already spent letting pictures and memories pile up. My main goal was to just get everything accounted for; know what I had,  where I had it, and where to find it to be able to do something with it.

 I began by getting everything I had all gathered into one place. This included boxes of pictures, some organized, most not; some had dates and information written on them, most did not. I went through pictures- as quick as possible, with the intention of just getting them organized into “what kid” piles. It was irresistibly difficult to just flip through pictures without stopping to remember “how fun this trip was” or “look how much they’ve changed” kind of reactions too often. I had to remember to stay focused, and keep the task with the end goal in mind. After a certain point I didn’t have printed pictures but digital storage: zip disks, CD’s, external hard drives, old camera cards, and old phones with pictures still stored there!  I then began putting all the digital files into one place. I started with iphoto for the initial organization, putting the files into their corresponding years and then into files. Then the files got moved over to dropbox for long-term storage. After doing some research, experts suggested keeping digital files in more than one place. I chose google photos as my back up to my back up files. This was fairly simple to just open and click download photos to google photos. After getting everything into one place, organized, and backed up, I slept very well.

Part of my goal was to mass produce albums (as in more than one!) for each of my four children. They would have all their memories documented and ready for reminiscing any time. While this proved to be too lofty a goal to complete in the time allotted, I was able to achieve the gathering, organizing, and storing of all our pictures. I also produced 3 family albums: 2 cut and paste style albums and one digital (one more soon to come…) that are available to be looked at and enjoyed anytime.

My original outcome was realized as I was able to get organized, relatively caught up, proficient in computer use and skills, and become confident in sharing my creative abilities. I am set up to continue down the path I have created for future memory keeping. I am able to look forward to living our lives fully, capturing those memories, and having a place to put them to remember again and again.

As I worked on my project, I was able to develop my creativity into workable, usable skills. I had to clean up my time management abilities and really develop some proficiency in organization. It was fun to need to learn something because I needed to use it right now. I   then could see that skill grow stronger the more I used it. I learned to operate external disk and hard drives, google photos, iphoto, photoshop, and my basic computer knowledge improved all while creating a usable, valuable part of real life.

I think SUU decided to put an experiential learning requirement in place to give students education in the form of experience that can only be found outside the classroom. This gives individuals an “edge” in the professional world. As I am getting ready to graduate, I have been able to develop necessary skills in a real world situation which makes it more applicable to my life and my future career outlooks. My talents, abilities, skills, interests, and experience all come together and are shown with tangible evidence in my project, complete with the online portfolio I can use.