5 point framework-Sudan & Armenia Collapse project

This semester we’ve been learning about collapsibility, and what leads up to collapsibility. We’ve been reading a book called Collapse by Jared Diamond, we’ve been using his 5 point framework to measure the how good of a chance we think that a country will or won’t collapse.

My two countries were Sudan and Armenia. I chose Sudan because I had already looked up some information on Armenia and realized that they shared some similar problems. I wanted to make my project interesting and interactive, so I decided to create a website that looked at collapsibility as a whole and specifically for those two countries. I researched all of my information for Armenia first so that I would have a better idea of what to look for when I researched Sudan. However, it took me much longer to find information about Sudan than it did about Armenia. As I started to look for the same subjects that I had found for Armenia, each subject had at least two layers of information.

 For example, South Sudan is now independent so I had to look up information for both South Sudan and North Sudan. I then took that information and split it up into smaller portions of that information to explain my overall topic/message to the viewer.

Again I wanted to make my scale interesting to look at so I used a Prezi to set up the scale for both countries with a brief explanation of why I gave this portion of the five point framework that rating. I used the 5 point framework multiple times because I though that it would be the least confusing for the format I chose. I was originally going to separate each portion of the framework into different pages but that might have been overwhelming for a lot of people, including myself so I decided against it.

I think that the five point framework is pretty easy for me to grasp after reading the book because its repeated very often so I knew what I was looking for when I had to apply it to other countries, like the two I chose. The harder part was justifying my rating, I had to weigh out consequences more than I had been so it felt like a little bit of a stretch at first because I wasn’t sure if I had chosen the right number or not.

If there was one thing that I could change it would be to work harder on this, time wise. I usually manage my time very well, because I like planning and I have steps for almost everything when it comes to schoolwork. But this time, because I had my capstone in 3 days with constant problems occurring I had to run back and fourth between the two and that left me less time to actually work on the project especially with multiple technical difficulties, I didn’t leave myself enough time. Therefore, I think I basically through myself off schedule, which resulted in a late benchmark.