First Presentation

Hi,
First I have to say that when Jessica choose the groups I wasn`t sure how was going to be the development of the assignemt with my group. I have to accept that for me sometimes it`s difficult to work in group, specially with people from another culture. Now I can say that I had a lot of fun with my group doing this assignment, we had good comunication, and each one made valious contributions to have a good presentation. It was an interesting experience and I`m so glad to have worked with DongWook and Hao. From my personal experience I can say that we had a good engagement level with the presentation, which made possible to share with the class our personal experience saving money.

When I just started sharing with the class my experience I was so nervous, for me it`s so hard to speak in public. I get so stressed, my ideas get mixed in my mind and sometimes I can`t be clear. Therefore, I consider that it`s good to have this kind of excercises and spaces in class because the more I practice, the less nervous I get.

For my future presentations I would like to work on my confidence, prepare more my topic and "borrow" from the other groups the things they did good.

Finally, I want to say that all the presentations were interesting and each one had something valious, such as graphic material, good pictures, good videos, and the use of new tools to make beautiful and organized presentations. I think we all did a good job, and it was a good start for the coming presentations.

Gorilla Experiment

I was really focused on counting the basketballs and I didn't realize when the gorilla passed the first time. Then, when I heard the question "did you see something unexpected?", and I watched the video one more time without counting the basketballs, I saw the gorilla. My reaction when I saw the gorilla was to ask myself why I didn't see it?, it's huge and obvious!

This experiment made me think about Singer's reading. Sometimes we don't see the obvious and big things we have right in front of us until someone open our eyes and show us the reality in a cruel or extremist way, as Singer's did. We get kind of blind being focused on specific things that we forget about the rest of the world, in the same way we forget that there are a lot of people outside waiting for our help, like those kids in Singer's reading. Probably this "blindness" we all suffer is an unconscious illness we don't want to discover, and consequently our mind prefers to live in denial.

The positive and interesting point is once I realized what was happening, I was more aware in the next experiment. Even though I knew what was the trick, I couldn't realize the changes in a couple of videos, which make me feel uncomfortable and I had the same reaction as in the gorilla experiment: "it was obvious, why I didn't see it?". However, It was fun and interesting to try to discover the tricks and then reveal them.