Section 102 Group 3 – Review of group 4 (made a video asking people in Ethics Week about an issue that they felt was an ethical dilemma)

 

There are several issues with their video. Firstly, it comes off as a project that was done out of convenience, rather than to further an actual goal. This does not mean that the video project was necessarily a bad idea, but the presentation did not seem to fit with the video well.  Neither the groups presentation or the group’s video seemed to show any direction.  I think that videos are good mediums for awareness, however I would have liked to see this group focus in on one issue instead of staying as vague as they did.  Also, it seems like only one group member was involved with making the video.  I am interested to see what this group could accomplish if everyone has helped make the youtube clip.

 

Secondly, this project brings up a lot of questions, but never really analyzes any of them in depth, nor does it propose any solutions to the problems. There is a long gap between having people thinking that something is a problem, and having a conversation start regarding the solution. While it can be argued that such a project raises awareness for issues that are important in engineering, the converse can also be said: most of the issues raised are already fairly well-known, and bringing them up again does little to further progress on the issues. We think that they may have been better served by making a video that was more in-depth and did more analysis on one single issue, instead of trying to focus on every issue under the sun, or so it seemed.

 

Furthermore, we have doubts about the extent of “civic engagement” in this project. In the making of the video, they did indeed engage with the public, by asking passerby about their opinions, but the number of people reached in this manner would have been extremely limited in the larger scheme of things. They say that this video should be shown to other sections, or propagated on the internet to spread awareness, but this doesn’t seem all that plausible. The video is well-made, but doesn’t really take a new spin on things, and thus wouldn’t have any lasting impact that would spur users to proactively spread the video. This goes back to the last point regarding this project’s lack of in-depth engagement and dialogue. Also, there are already plenty of videos that discuss ethical issues in a much more effective manner; contributing to a less well-established field would have been much more effective.

 

However, there are some aspects of the project that we really liked. Namely, we liked how the video engaged with actual people from the public, making it a more accurate reflection of perception and sentiment among the population that really matters: the population as a whole. We also liked how there was a fairly diverse range of questions raised, but again would have preferred a few to be analyzed in a more in-depth fashion.

In summary, we think that this group had the potential for a better presentation.  However, we think that they have a good start and should improve their video idea by focusing their content and resolving and analyzing some of the questions that they generated.