The Social Media World

DH project: A review of the Veterans Legacy Program

The establishment of the Veterans Legacy Program (VLP) is “to memorialize Veterans’ service by telling their stories to the nation. The partnership between the National Cemetery Administration’s (NCA) and the University of Central Florida is to develop a digital humanity program through the creation of a big humanities project. This project is a part of the UCF History department and Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR).

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How is the project organized?

 

A team of faculty and students, Teachers and volunteers organize the VLP. Burdick in the DH guide provided the fundamental elements to organize any DH projects. The different experience of the VLP teams helped them organize in the group (p5). Hence, the faculties involved in the project are history, digital media, and education. Moreover, the experts in the team are army veterans and their presence help to provide the content with more knowledge. The sustenance of this project is through a fund from the NCA.

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How does the project add to the students’ knowledge?

 

The VLP website has excellent lines of information that helps students and teachers. The primary audience for the project is students from K-12 grade. The content on the site include different sections and skills — the biographies of veterans whose visual database include information and short stories about the veterans in the project. The users can search with names, year, place, race, etc. and they can locate the area of this person in the virtual maps.

 

The virtual tour section consists of a variety of online guide for the veteran’s stories and how that augmented reality guide was designed impressive. This section will help the student to keep updated with the legacy and have a sense of being part of this community. I think it is essential for everyone to have this project as a reference to know these people and how they defend and sacrifice for this country. The Mobile app that helps to augment the reality in the cemetery is very helpful to direct the visitors to the graves. This app conveys Florida National Cemetery, St. Augustine National Cemetery, and Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.

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The design of the interface is simply such that the audience will easily find the information. The website contains contact information and social media icons.

I would appreciate this project as an international person who is interested in learning about the US veteran’s history. I checked some of the text and virtual materials on the website to gain more information, and I found it interesting.

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My ideas on the development of the website and contribution to the project are in tow section. First, is to add a live chat with a historian to ask about information or resource. The second section is to add the social media platform in the interest of the age of the audience K-12. A study from the Pew research center shows that teens age 13 to 17 uses Instagram with 72% having the second app among social media platform and 69% have Snapchat. The study was to investigate the usage of these apps to gain information among teens. The study finds that most of the teens were accessing the internet form their smartphones. A good explanation was that YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat are complete mobile phone applications. Therefore, it is good to add Instagram to the platform in the VLP project to present photos and Snapchat to display every event in the project that can motivate the students to volunteer and spread the project as well. I think the addition of games and class materials will help in improving the skills of the teachers regarding the students in K-2nd. Also, it is also good to update the twitter account with more interesting tweets that will make the students participate in online conversations and contribute to the SM content.