The interview I conducted with Mr. Powers was only the second interview I had ever done. When I conducted my first interview, the interviewee was very talkative, so I had no issues getting a long interview from her with only a few questions. The interview with Mr. Powers was just the opposite. One of the reasons our interview with him was so short was because we based a lot of our questions off of false information we had about him. We were then forced to work off of the few other questions we did have. We had follow up questions for his answers, but we still were not able to get enough information from him. When we interviewed Mrs. Powers, we were much more prepared and were able to get a longer, more in-depth interview from her. We learned that you should not base all of your questions from one piece of information and that the more specific the question, the better. When you ask very general questions, you tend to get very general answers, and therefore short ones. When you ask specific questions, the interviewee will give longer answers with a lot of detail. Plus you can ask a lot more specific questions than you can broad ones.
This project was my first time working with a group larger than five people. While working in a large group had its benefits, I found the process overall to be much more challenging. In order to evenly divide the work, we decided to split up into small groups and have the individual groups dictate what each person would be doing. That worked for the groups that had been assigned to do the individual interview pages and the group that created the website. However, there was still a lot of confusion in the group that was assigned to make a video for the home page. They were not sure exactly what they were doing and how it fit into the project in relation to all of the other things we were putting on the website. I feel that a lot of the confusion surrounding the project could have been resolved if there was a project leader to manage all of the different groups. With the way we had the project structured, there was no one who could take on this role without having another person in their group take on extra work. However, if we had designated somebody to be the project leader from the beginning, then we could have divided the work differently. I feel that for all future group projects that involve the entire class section, it should be mandatory to have a project leader to ensure that everybody knows what they are doing and that the project runs smoothly.
