EDC 633 - Community of Practice Ethnography: Dancing

Reflection of working on this project:

On October 10, 2009, we hosted a 30th birthday party celebration for my sister-in-law at the Omni Hotel in Charlotte, NC. All of our family and friends dressed very nice to make this event stellar and rememorable. The party had a DJ who played a wide array of music from Pop, R&B, Jazz, Rock, etc. This guy was great and he kept the party going all night long. As you'll notice from this video project, this event had attendees that included family and friends from all over the country to help my sister-in-law celebrate her night to the fullest.

Based on the theory of Wenger, this video project will include the characteristics of the CoP: 1) The domain - The gathering of friends and family, 2) The community - The participation of the joint activity: Dancing, and 3) The practice - Each person invited to this event has a connection to my sister-in-law to where they can share similar and different stories to express good and challenging times. These stories shared today will be added to another set of stories for years to come.

I chose this event for my project because I wanted to 1) Observe the interaction of guests dancing, 2) Observe which songs seemed more favorable for more people to dance based on the expertise of the DJ crossfading (mixing) songs to keep the party going, and 3) Observe attendees who just wanted to sit/not participate in the activity of dancing.

As the observer, it was a challenge for me to not be a participant in this event because I like to dance and have a great time, too. This event was a success and my sister-in-law truly enjoyed herself for her 30th birthday celebration. Overall, this project allowed me to further understand what a Community of Practice (CoP) is and have fun when composing the footage covered for this grand event to help celebrate 30 as the new 20.

Again, thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts.

Challenge faced while composing this project:

I was having a difficult time finding a media converter to convert *.3GP files to *.AVI. Thank God for Prism Video Converter. It's free and it works a whole lot better than other programs claiming to do the same thing. I'm just thankful for being able to get this completed.