Week 3 DIGITAL STORY CRITIQUE: How to Prune Your Cucumber Plant

Two weeks ago, I bought two cucumber plants from Home Depot and planted them in my garden. I watered them daily and they grew like a champ. Just after two weeks, the plants have climbed up on top of the 4-feet trellis and the leaves are giant! I wanted to know more about growing cucumbers, like, how to make the plant produce more fruits than leaves? I did some research and found this video on Youtube: How to Prune Your Cucumber Plant. I followed the instructions of this video and successfully pruned my two plants. I am excited to see the difference the prune will make!

I will be using three traits from Jason Ohler’s Assessing Digitial Stories to analyze this particular video.

Research

The instruction of this video over all is clear and easy to be understood. However, I did not see much evidence of research in this video. As an audience, I am wondering why the pruning is necessary? How effective pruning is to a plant? What if there is no pruning? I would like to see the author adding some examples of before and after pruning pictures. I would like to know if the same pruning technique would work for squash or tomato.

Flow, Organization, Pacing

This video starts with several questions David (the host) asked Susie (the gardener) "Where are we? "Why the cucumber are white?" "What are we going to do today?". My attentions was grabbed by the topics immediately. The choice to organize the story with questions first was a good one in this case. The story proceeds with provocative question after provocative question facilitating a fast pace and great flow.

Presentation

The format of this story facilitated through an interview is not original in itself. However, the presentation is a fantastic one considering it is the only video I found on Youtube actually circled and marked each part of the plant while demonstrating pruning. This technique made it very easy for the audience to recognize the "growth point" (read: the part needs to be pruned). I also like how the gardner paused while she pointed to the different part of the plant so the audience could take a moment to take notes of all the information without being overwhelmed. The last proof of its awesome presentation skill is the gardener gave several examples of pruning using different sections of the plants The repeating and drilling really helped audience understand the content.