Week 2 Journal

For the second week of class, our group compiled our bibliography while doing further research on our topic. As mentioned in my last post, I thought that our group could benefit from more organization, in the form of a group leader or assigned tasks. I feel that we came closer to this over the past week, with Katie becoming essentially a “compiler” for our group’s work, in that she took work from each of us separately, and she then compiled it into our final bibliography. As I mentioned in the last post also, I think one of my strengths as a communicator is that I am very open and hope to keep everyone in my group on the same page. I have tried to use this skill by inciting more conversation amongst our group, and I think that it has been working. Every fifteen minutes or so while working, we will have a quick chat with one another to discuss, and we also have a “debriefing” chat at the end of the period where we draw any conclusions about what we have done and decide on responsibilities for next class. Naturally, as we become more comfortable working together in a group, we will feel more able to communicate freely and openly with one another, as is true in all social situations.

Week 1 Journal

For the first week of class, our group decided on and refined our topic, as well as did some research on it. Thus far, our group has not had any major communication issues, although I think that a little more organization in our group would help us. We discussed possible topics in a very informal, conversational manner, and the two final choices, as well as a sharing of e-mail addresses, emerged from this discussion. The sharing of e-mail addresses definitely assisted our communication, especially before we had our team webpage. Our group gets along very well and we made sure that we were all satisfied with the eventual topic before moving forward, so we have no disputes thus far. However, it would be beneficial if our group were more talkative when doing work together, so that we were all on the same page about what was going on in the group. I think some sort of organization, such as a group leader or divided/assigned duties would help us in this regard. For example, when performing research for the bibliography as we are doing now, I don’t know what types of resources and websites the other members are using or focusing on, and for all we know, we could be doubling up and citing the same website unnecessarily, since we are working quite independently and blindly. I think one of my strengths as a communicator is that I am very open and hope to keep everyone in my group on the same page, but one of my weaknesses is that I sometimes have trouble understanding and interpreting others who think differently than I do.