For what was a 5 week project, the time seemed to go by extremely quickly. This may have had to with the little amount of time that the group had together in the first half of this time. I do believe that this somewhat difficult process has taught me a number of things about the struggles that you can face when working in a group project.
Our first workshop was spent talking about how would go about this project, outlining our collaborative contract. I didn’t realise how important this lesson would be until weeks later, when I found myself in a situation that required me to go back to this to look at the dispute resolution procedures. After three weeks, extremely little had been completed with the group project, and my other members were not attempting to communicate with the group in a way which contributed to the task.
After this lesson, we were finally underway with some of the more daunting tasks. The first of which was the most helpful. We had as of then been unable to decide on how to present our findings. This meant our research had been adding up, but no content was being written in a format that we knew would be helpful to us. I believe if more time was spent early on discussing this, being as harsh as possible about any loose ends that may have appeared, we would have been able to sooner define the task at hand in a clear manner. This would have allowed us to set tasks for each member to complete ahead of time, rather than on an ‘as needed’ basis.
We had also begun proper levels of communication after this class. We knew we were running out of time, so a level of panic most likely fuelled the sudden increase in engagement with this task. Everyone began to show up to meetings and classes and delivering their required tasks on-time. I am relieved this happened, as we would not have been able to create the product submitted if we weren’t able to rely on some consistency in the group.
As for our actual product, I am in two minds about it. I do not believe that it is of an acceptable quality. Overall, it feels rushed due to its inconsistency and lack of direction. When members stopped communicating with each other, we were pushed to choose a website as our medium of choice in order to produce something manageable with what time we had left. Our writing could have been of a higher standard, but no collaboration was done on these pieces. The pages were stand-alone tasks, in that we were responsible for one page each. Even this did not work out in the end, as the case study required a complete overhaul the day of submission.
The task also clearly asked us to ‘creatively’ engage with the material, which I am uncertain we have done. We certainly had some very creative ideas in the first lesson, but this was before we had done any level of research into the topic. We also had a very wide scope at this point, something we struggled with quite a bit. Once we got a hold of this, our approach to the topic was unique and I believe we have produced an interesting take on the task, but our ‘creativity’ using the website format may be lacking. A higher level of interaction or stimulus could have been achieved with this task. We attempted this by supplying some interactive examples in the form of youtube videos to present some of our findings. This worked to some degree, but I believe the argument was built into the text so much that in some cases they did not add anything unique. If more time and thought was put into this, we may have been able to create our own content to fulfil this purpose as well.
I like to think that my own input in this project was valuable. I attempted communication at every point in the task, expressed concerns about the task, my own work status as well as the work of others when suitable and was an active participant in group meetings. I also took minutes of the meetings, sending out emails to everyone with updates, as well as organised the tasks everyone was required to do and any future meetings. More importantly, I was consistent in my role, and did not ever feel like I was letting the group down in any way. There was one occasion where I missed a deadline, as I had to prioritise other commitments. I knew this beforehand, and was able to talk the situation over with Daniel until we were able to find a solution that was manageable. Even when I was struggling to meet the expectations of the group, I made every attempt to make them aware and find a solution.
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