ICT for Social Change(Advocacy Reflection)

De Jesus, Maverick Ian M.

Sir Jaypee Gatmaitan

Empowerment Technologies

March 19, 2019

Advocacy and ICT

Advocacy videos of various topics about current issues of different scales, from personal to societal, were produced as fulfillment of the subject requirements in Empowerment Technologies. The following are my insights about the task.

Personally, I have a preference of working alone or doing tasks on my own for, in that way, I can keep track of my progress or growth easily. In doing the advocacy videos, which require group effort, I can say that not being a team person helped me contribute somehow in doing my assignments. For starters, I volunteered to do the video editing because of my desire to gain more experiences and knowledge about it for future and personal purposes.

As the group’s video editor, the most notable situations for me revolve around editing, which has a fun twist – I get to decide the sequence of the videos or plot. There is this one time when we are tasked to do a video against animal cruelty and the video clips for the plot our group planned initially exceeded the two-minute limit. For that, I didn’t include some of the clips and I slightly changed the flow of the story that resulted to a satisfactory output.

Our group has coordinated very well internally by utilizing each other’s strengths and filling up one another’s weaknesses. At first, roles were assigned to those who can fulfill them best such as the acting roles, directing, script-making, shooting, and editing. Some of us are still learning through the process, especially me, while giving our best to meet the criteria. In my opinion, the Socratic Criticism done to evaluate the good points and the bad points among even the smallest details really helps us to improve gradually and perform better. But even with all of these at hand, some members fail to participate having no contributions at all due to some reasons. This has a negative impact in terms of maximizing and optimizing our team work.

Now, about the advocacy videos that we made, there are three, namely: about identity theft which we picked as our first, animal cruelty, and love adversary between lover and bestfriend. An advocacy is the act or process of supporting a cause or a proposal (Merriam-Webster). In this sense, advocating through videos is one specific way of showing and spreading awareness about various issues in an easy, effective, and efficient manner. These are all possible due to the emergence of the Information and Communication Technologies or ICT which allows us to convey our messages and standpoints about any problem to almost any part of the world in one click.

Among the three videos, I favor the second that we produced, the one that shows our opposition to animal cruelty. It has a good concept about having a dog’s point of view in delivering the heartfelt message. Furthermore, the great coordination and sequence of the plot is also remarkable. I find the output very satisfactory even though I struggled a little bit about what transitions and filters to use in editing.

Wrapping it all up, I am really grateful to have the opportunity of doing the advocacy videos as it increased my awareness about contemporary issues and how to address them. Moreover, I also enjoyed the whole process, learning many things and new skills that could be useful to me in the future.

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Citations:

Cover Image - https://coteries.com/2018/12/14/rockstar-software-developer/human-head-with-an-interface-icons-2/