#week5reflection

I know, I know, the word "numbers" probably makes you don't want to read my blog post this week but it's not like numbers as in maths, but the numbers have a connection with our daily life. Like for example, our social lives, does that encourage you to read this post yet? I hope so. Plus, I suppose it's the right title for this week reflection because yeah, that's what this all about, numbers.

This week we had some conversations and discussions about teams, (since the theme itself was Work Teams). We learnt about different contents, for example: The Dunbar's Number, The Group Pattern Language Project, Group Size by Chris Corrigan, et cetera. I personally learnt things I've never thought of before, because I thought the "perfect" number of members for a team like our group is going to be three until five. I thought five members for a team is good, a group of four is better, and the right number should be three.

But eventually, after I read about The Dunbar's Number (because that was what I supposed to read in the class) I found that the right number of people in a group should be in between five and seven. Because it said right there that a group of two could be creative but lacking of resources, a group of three is not balanced because one person would be feeling left out, and so it came to a conclusion that five or seven is the perfect quantity of a group.

Dunbar also calculated using maths that the maximum amount of people in a big company or maximum number of connections would be 147.8, and people would round it off to 150 people. So 150 connections would be enough, no more than that. Although, I don't think one has 150 strong ties and I don't think that we need to maximise the number of close bonds we can have in everyday lives. I found a blog post that supports my view. But, what I see is this 150 number is relevant enough for a company or for people who wants to start a business, then I would say 150 strong relationships could be useful.

Oh, numbers.

(Source: Wordpress)

This week we had hangouts with Marteen (our NGO) and Nancy as well. With Marteen we were talking about our assignments, last week he said he wanted us to focus more on agriculture rather than social innovation in general because it's so very very broad, like really broad. Then this week he told us that we are supposed to focus more on food consumptions because that's closer to our everyday lives. Unfortunately the connection were not very good so we didn't get so many informations this week. 

Although we had a really nice conversation with Nancy, we were talking about Marteen's website which is the main part of our assignment. We were discussing about the deficiencies of the site and now we had ideas about what to advise Marteen. Nancy really helped us with that one.

Yay, Nancy!

(Source: Me)

You know, the reflections are longer as week goes on, there are so many things to reflect on and to learn from. Which is good, I just hope I don't lose my writing style because I think I'm starting to lose it. I don't know though, you tell me.

So, moving on. About my group, group 6, The Matrix (yay): I would say that for me personally, it's working well this far in general. What works well is how we always manage to complete the tasks we have per week without spending too much times. What I'm thankful for is how nice people in my group, like Maggie is organised as (a place regarded in various religions as a spiritual realm of evil and suffering, often traditionally depicted as a place of perpetual fire beneath the earth where the wicked are punished after death.) and is so nice as a person. Maria is always cracking up jokes which makes the whole situation fun and not to stressful. Domantė is often stating the obvious which is really funny to listen to. And Eva is laughing almost at all times, either it's because of the group's jokes or tumblr jokes.

What's challenging for me personally is how fast the other members think and sometimes I can't catch up, it's on me though. I have to improve my way of thinking. As for the size, sometimes if we have five people sitting together we would often get distracted, it'd start like this usually: Maria'd start talking with Eva and Eva'd laugh for sure then the three of us would get confused about what were they talking about, then it's either they would explain to us or not. If they do, we all would get distracted and so yeah. Then after a while either Maggie or Domantė would remind us to get back to the assignments. It's not a big problem (to be honest it's kinda funny) but if it's named distraction then that means it holds us back from our original goals.

I don't think as a person I have a problem with the cultures we have in our group, everything goes well. Task is something that I see as a piece of work that needs to be done within a period of time. And for me as long everybody is contributing and is done before the deadline then we are doing well and I'd say more or less we do exactly just that.

We did decide something in the last meeting that we'd have a "distraction pen", it's just a normal pen but we'd mark someone with it if she gets distracted in the middle of the task(s). And I think if one can't make it to a group meeting it's best to tell the rest of the group that she can't make it and give some pieces of informations or ideas for the group so she'd be still contributing.

(P.S. I sincerely apologise if I unintentionally said something horrible about someone because I didn't mean to)

Internet have many facilitation tools either free or paid. Of course paid ones are most of the time comes with the better quality, but we as a students are much more dependent on our budget which is rarely big.  Free stuff here I come.

We as a students in online facilitation must be creators and contributors. In order to understand both sides of the game, so we could improve our quality of facilitation. Teachers in other way should be either spectating or contributing as facilitating group. The feedback of how the facilitation should’ve went can only be given after the facilitation itself. I don’t know if I must mention the reasons, but it’s called feedback for a reason. And the other is that we must make our own mistakes so our teachers could explain them for us simply pointing them out and correcting our path, not putting our feet in their engraved one.

To generate better facilitation experience enhance dialog between facilitators. It provides a dialog and the breakout of ideas, especially if you’re people motivated to facilitate. I’ve tried getting online feedback myself (not exactly a facilitation) and it’s not an easy task. I’ve posted in numbers of forums which I’ve found and only one person responded. But what a person he was! When I told him more about my project he gave me a lot of tips, places where I could find information and even corrected my grammar in my text! If you look deep enough you can find people like this in forums and then they can be your gateway to more enthusiasts which could be a valuable facilitators for your study. Before that, I couldn’t believe that these kind a people exist.

Of course in team’s facilitation I believe there’s one more very important thing is to keep in close contact with your colleagues. It depends on your project, but meetings offline are crucial for project success.

As you think about the learning you are embarking upon here at the university, reflect on the role that your instructors and fellow students play in facilitating yours and their learning. What are they doing? How is it facilitating learning and teamwork based on what you have experienced so far? What has been useful? What would you like to see and experience that you haven’t yet in the facilitation of this course from yourself, peers and faculty? What can you contribute as a peer facilitator? For your commenting on others’ blogs this week, maybe you notice where another colleague has contributed to your learning through their facilitation and let them know when/where it happened and how it was of value to you. Are you game for that?

Learning in a group is always a great experience. The more groups you work with the more you start to understand how groups work. You understand what the most efficient form of collaboration is and how to achieve it. I have found that every group is different. Different people work best in their own conditions and their condition may be different to other people. All groups also need guidance, otherwise everyone in the group is lost and no work gets done.

what I have enjoyed within my group is seeing the enthusiasm and contribution they all have to show towards the completion of this project. At first things were a bit slow within the group, but now that the project is much clearer and that we have a full group, we can really build momentum to finishing this project.

To begin with, I would like to explain in easy way what facilitation and facilitator is. This describes the best: “Facilitation is the art of leadership in group communication. A facilitator is one who fulfills this leadership role.” Deeper (as I understand this): “facilitation is like making art with others, also, being a communicable leader. Facilitator is the one, who does everything to make others tasks easier.” University is still like a new, unexplored planet for me. Teachers and classmates help me to “survive” on these trebling floors. I am learning from them, I hope they are learning something from me also. We are communicating very much. The main platform is “Facebook”, because it is the easiest way to do this, we have our groups, we can upload all files, show results, chat and do mostly everything. now we just started to use “Google+ hangout” to make conversations between us. I don’t really like this way, I would prefer to use “Skype”, I think, that it would be easier to communicate. Wednesday’s “hangouts” are reaaaaally helpful to understand everything. I think its not only for me, but also for others. Without this it would be harder to find solutions and to write a blog every week. Lectures are very important, too. Before my studies here I thought that The university has to be the place where teachers wont show initiative to help you, you have to find everything by yourself and so on. But.. I found this course in other, better way. Teachers want to be like friends, communicate, they help us, they give us information sources, say what do we need and try to plug the information to our brains. I like this much.

To be a good facilitator you need to have many skills, but, in my point of view, it is “enough” to be COMMUNICABLE, FLEXIBLE AND BALANCED OBSERVANT WITH RICH IMAGINATION AND PATIENCE, WHO HAS A LOT OF CONNECTIONS, IS NOT AFRAID OF AFFIRMANCE AND CHALLENGES AND, ALSO, CAN KEEP SILENCE.. J

Facilitation is like art, as I wrote, we are designers - we can understand the art. We all are facilitators. Maybe not at the university, but anywhere else.

p.s. I really like what ive found about online and offline facilitation: http://www.mindmeister.com/767714/online-and-offline-facilitation-different-and-alike I think this describes mostly everything about facilitation.