#week3reflection

I feel that our group, East Field 72, works best either before our class/coaching section or directly after a break where we have all had something to eat. Most of the time though, someone has to take charge to make sure that our group work and team activity's get done. Though it sounds hectic we do end up finishing the group. Same thing cannot be said about my personal blog and my Tumblr experience. MY inability to to post concise and on time material. I can sit here and discuss excuses as to why this is happening, but I wont. This is a problem I have addressed and will be solving.

Some small ideas i have that could possibly help my group and myself are: 

Meeting up either before or a different day then class.

This could really help take away some stress that our team is currently feeling and help create better and bigger ideas.

I personally love working in groups, I find it so much more fun to be able to talk to someone else about the same project. I always feel that a group project can be much more powerful than a one-man project mainly because of the reason that if someone is stuck, anyone in the team can help them. This gives much more integrity to a project because everyone can secure the amount of work done.

However working in a group can sometimes be very challenging. Team work requires a lot of communication and trust. When working in a team you have to make sure you can count on all your team mates to pull through. This can be frustrating at times when you come together at a meeting and someone has nothing to bring to the table.

In my group I haven’t really had any team work problems, everyone knows as much as the other and they know what to do to pull their weight. The only major problem was that we started off with only 4 group members (including me) at the beginning of the project. This was a problem because we had to fill all the roles of a full group with just 4 of us (these were the roles assigned from the Belbin test). Later (within this week) we gained 2 additional members! We were thrilled. I immediately told them to do the Belbin test, and to our luck, we got 2 people who were good at completely different things to us. I was quite happy about this because we having troubles filling the roles they were good at.

Inside East Field 72

  Three weeks in to the project and the structural foundations of East Field have withstood a couple of ‘cultural quakes’ and absences, but apart from these two things the team has gelled together. We have had productive and interesting conversations and discussions both socially and while working. For the most part there is a great team spirit and we enjoy each other’s company.

  However in the coming weeks I strongly believe that a member of the group is going to have to put a real effort in overcoming their cultural beliefs in the role of women in addition to become a little more tolerant of ideas that may not be their idea. I would also like to see another member of the group make more of an effort to attend more meetings and discussions or input more heavily when he/she is able to attend, I understand juggling multiply courses and curriculums is challenging but if you cannot contribute fully to both courses then it is not fair to just “tag along”. The rest of the group has been making a real effort to involve the other group members in the project and to their credit the other two members did fulfill their task when we set it last week.

I haven't work much in a group before i started to study IDE, so it's something new for me. In high school if i had some project to do it was usually my own responsibility to have it done step by step from research through conclusions to final presentation.

Working in groups can be challenging at the best of times. Team work means communicating, working together, sharing out work and ensuring all work is done. You are dependent on group members to get work done which can be very frustrating if it doesn’t all go as you want it to.

When told we were going to work in random groups, I was afraid that the group work would be as challenging as previously stated.

In all honesty, our group is getting the work done as necessary and on time. However, at times it feels like work is not quite equally shared and some people aren’t doing as much of the group work. Additionally, some seem to have their mind otherwise when we are trying to work together. Currently we seem to have a bit of trouble coordinating work at times and shaping the work into a useful document.

In the coming weeks I believe we should try to become more of a team. We need to work together better, with everyone working usefully for group benefit. Although we have ‘roles’ from the Belbin test, I do not believe that these clearly represent what people need to be doing. Leaders, shapers, coordinators, visualisers, resource investigators and team workers all need to do work together.

I just started to like blogging (maybe it’s because of my mood, don’t know)!

What about our group and our work. We main thing – we just got a name, its designated to GUILIANA ORIZZONTE and the name is THE HORRIZONTAL COMMUNITY - Looking beyond the horizon. I like this name; I think everyone from our group likes it. And the name doesn’t mean anything baaaaaad J

My group works very well! At first, I thought that we would do less of group work, but now I’m happy that we have to do mostly everything with it because we can help each other and we can do just everything. All members have big imagination, can help and explain. Also, we have our roles, we do everything and more what is required, we are trying to do everything together because it is better than doing everything alone, we can contact to each other and so on.

This is the third week of studies but I think that’s only the first one, time goes sooo fast! I don’t know what to expect in coming weeks but I hope it will be fun, as it was! These weeks were really good (I thought that at university has to be only theory and veeery much not really interesting things to do) I like what do I have to do, that I can have some free time to spend with my friends and to explore the Netherlands. These studies had changed my opinion about school, everyone says that you would miss your school very much, you won’t like the university and etc., but now I really love this university (I really do not know why, but..) and I miss my school but not as much as everyone said.

I think that this part of studies is the easiest one because now we are exploring, trying to know about what we have to learn, teachers are still very good for us (I hope they would be like that forever J), we do not have so much of homework. But.. I don’t know what to expect later. Maybe studies would change and it would be like an awful daily routine? Hope – not.

About group sizes, I like working in my group, it is enough to be in a group with five more person. This group is not so big, and not so small. Small groups makes us to have a very big responsibility.. and bigger groups can make us to be invisible, because there are some people who are like that, they want to say their opinion but when others are shouting out loud and trying to say their (the most important one) opinion – it’s not as good as it is in small groups. All in all, I think that the best group size is of 4-6 people. Maybe it’s only my opinion...

We might be on week 3 of our group work but I haven't been here since the start, I only joined the team a week ago and I am trying to catch up with them so I guess that's what I find challenging.