Goal 4
Contributes productively to
group-based design projects by showing a willingness to listen to other’s ideas
and by extending professional courtesy and respect to others.
In all of the
classes that I have taken since starting this program, we have been asked to
help each other with the different projects and papers. This, I feel, is one of
my strong points. I really enjoy reading other people’s papers or projects and
trying to help them create a better product. I try very hard to word my
feedback in a way so that it comes across as constructive. I also feel that I
am able to use other’s constructive criticism to my best advantage for my work.
I am very accepting of the thoughts of others when it comes to improving my
work.
Discuss
your role as a collaborator and team member.
There have only been two classes where we have been
directly assigned group projects, IT 530 and IT 580. All of the other classes I
took had individual projects, but we did work as a group to make each project
better.
I am currently taking IT 530. We were assigned groups at
the beginning of the semester with a team leader assigned by the instructor. I
was selected to be the team leader for “Team 3”. As the leader, I must also
work as a team member, contributing at least as much as all of the other team members
to the group.
In this post, you can see
how I tried to keep us all on task during our meeting by pre-posting the
agenda. My idea was that in this manner, we could all be prepared for the
meeting and be more efficient. By pre-posting the agenda, I was trying to get
others to add anything that I missed. In this way, I was allowing others to
collaborate with me in creating the agenda if they felt the desire to do so. I
also, wanted to be sure that I was treating everyone respectfully by inviting
them to let me know if I wasn’t. By using an agenda and in asking for
contributions of anything I forgot, I am trying to act as a team member rather
than a dictator of what needs to happen in the meeting.
As we worked along with the initial documents that were
required, we each would put our comments in a different color. We have since
changed those comments to black so it’s not possible for you to view it as we
edited. In one post I say, “I added some stuff to the POS I started last week.
My stuff is in purple. I'm kind of stuck on "assumptions". If you
think of anything else, please add it. I'll start working on my list of
"requirements". I'm pretty clueless as to what this is supposed to
look like, so I'm just going to make a list for now.” I feel that not only does
this show that I try to work as a team member, but I also want input from
others on what I’ve done.
Here is a post that shows
how I’ve added some detail to a couple of our statements in the POS (project
overview statement). I tried to incorporate some of what we had talked about in
our meeting but also wanted to add the detail so that our language would be
very clear to the user. By posting what I had changed and how it was changed, I
was giving the other members a chance to say whether they disagreed with the changes
I made. Had I just changed them without letting the others know, I would have
been acting not as a team member but as an independent worker. This is a group
project so we all need to agree on what is being turned in to the instructor.
IT 580 also had a group project for us to complete. In
this project Scott Esker was the team manager and I was his assistant. In this
group, I feel that there was much more collaboration happening. It was a
fabulous group to work with as most everyone wanted to contribute their best
product.
As we finalized the packet that we were sending to Dave
Knowlton, we had many different posts flying back and forth. In this edited thread, you can read how I contributed to the overall
finalizing of the product. I highlighted my posts so you could easily find
them. In all of the items I’ve talked about in this thread, improving the channel
video, scrapping the video, creating file folders in our final project to hand
in, and final proofreading of documents shows that I want to participate and
contribute to group projects in a positive manner. I feel that I collaborate
well with other members of the team to produce the best product we can.
We were supposed to look critically at other student’s
websites and other documents for IT 486 and make constructive comments on them
to help them create the best product. In this discussion,
I ask Chris what he means about only documenting in his final draft. He tells
me that I have a good critical eye and explains that he created directly into
Kompozer and over-wrote his previous editions. He thought it would be best to
save each iteration as he went along so if there was something better in a
previous draft, he would have this. I learned from this conversation that I
needed to do the same and have saved each iteration of my Jury as I’ve gone
along as well.
Christy’s project in IT 500 was to create a learning
website highlighting Hitler in World War II. I suggested using small chunks of
information as to not overwhelm her learner even though she was targeting
middle or high school students. She took my very small suggestions and ran with
it as you can see here.
In this thread example, I
start off trying to help Kristi with her objectives in IT 510. It gets
complicated in that we start talking about what type of test question goes with
the objective as well as how it should be written. My point in using this
example is that I show that I want to work with the team, but if I’m pretty
sure I’m right about something, I’ll strive to make other’s understand my view
through examples. This shows that by working as a team, we were able to get to
the most accurate answer to help Kristi with her project.
How
have you demonstrated open mindedness with peers and professors?
The first example to come to my head that answers the
above question is one from IT 430. In my first mini-project, I had chosen a purple background for my introduction because it was, “really more ‘me’ than the other colors.
It's bright and cheery...and girly! :-)” (Schalk, 2013, May 28). After several
comments about the background color, in particular Dave’s comment that said
something about the orange rectangle in the upper right hand corner, I wanted
to try to make the background a solid color without the rectangle. So I tried
two different ones, black and later navy. Through the discussions, it was decided that
even though the tone of the project changed, it was better because the
presentation of the pictures were better. By being open minded with the
critiques, I was able to say, “what the heck, might as well try it and see.”
This happened
many times in IT 430 as we had 4 mini-projects to complete. Here is a post
where I talk about how I used different suggestions, why, and how I thought
about the outcomes:
June 6, 2013 9:20 PM
Here
is a link to my second version which is the version I posted: http://sdrv.ms/17sswjf
In
my next revision of my flyer I took Gretchen’s suggestion of typo corrections
(Good catch, thanks!) as well as not abbreviating SIUE. It really changed the
look of the title.
Jennifer
suggested that my boxes were too close to white and made too much of a white
space in the center of the page against the black. So I chose the next gray
darker than the one I had which it seemed no one could tell was gray anyway.
http://sdrv.ms/17ssGan
My
son suggested that I take away the drop shadow on the “at Southern Illinois
University at Edwardsville” and it created a nicer look for the long line. http://sdrv.ms/17ssTKO
Now,
I don’t like the darker gray in the text boxes. It just looks dirty to me. I
don’t think that something like that would attract the attention of educators
because it looks like the desks at about Christmas time if they haven’t been
washed. Yuck! But that is just my opinion. I welcome opinions.
Rhonda
This post shows that I’m willing to
try suggestions. It also shows that even though I’ve tried the suggestions, it
doesn’t always mean that it was the right thing for the project. I feel that it’s
important to still be critical of my projects even when using other’s ideas.
The
next little bit, you will see some examples from IT 486. Brainstorming the initial idea shows how I took the input
of my instructor, Dave, to produce a workable topic. As you can see in the
thread, I wanted to just do brushing and flossing as my topic. But Dave said
that was too narrow and I quickly came up with the topic of the entire
preventive visit, “the cleaning” as most people call it.
In
this document, Brainstorming, I show how I collaborated with my peers, but
also a target audience member to get ideas to make my website fun as well as
educational. I found that I needed tons of input to create a website that would
be interactive and educational. I knew that I needed something where the
children would want to come back and do it again to really get the concepts
into their heads. By listening to my peers, my instructor, and my target audience,
I was able to come up with some really cool ideas. The problem I faced was the
lack of knowledge and software to really accomplish them. I did modify the
finding the cavity on the x-ray game into a
workable format for this project, though.
Going back and looking at the
question heading this section, I’m thinking about how I respond to feedback
from my instructors. The best example I can come up with is this section of the
jury. If you look at my Goal 4 for Jury 1, you
will see that it’s completely different. In a feedback email about Goal 4, Dave
said, “Notice all the scaffolding questions in the jury
guide. You don’t really address them
here in any meaningful and substantive ways” (D. Knowlton, personal
communication, November 1, 2012). So I decided that since he was one of the
people who would be critiquing this in the end, I had better address those
questions in the jury guide.
How
have you contributed to group decision making?
In reflection
papers that we had to write for IT 580, I say that at the beginning of our
project, I was much more a listener than I wanted to be. I have a tendency to
listen during meetings rather than contribute. However, if I can contribute, I
try to do so in a positive manner.
My first reflection paper that I wrote talks about how my
group envisioned our project. I speak a lot of “we” in the paper so it’s not
terribly clear how I contributed in the decision making process. One thing I
was clear on was a design I created for our
potential title of the project. As we talked, the vision of how the title
#succeed should look if we chose to use it. So, while we talked, I played with
GIMP to quickly produce this. In the end, we didn’t use this design, but we did
use the concept of it with our final title of The e
according to me.
In my third reflection paper, I really get into how my
contributions to the group have changed because it was a group rather than an
individual project. I think the following paragraph sums it up nicely:
In working with a group for this project I became more
aware of how others think about design. This ties into Csikszentmihalyi’s
Polarities that Owen (2007) describes. One of the polarities is “Extroversion and introversion. Seeing
and hearing people, exchanging ideas, and getting to know other persons work to
extend interaction; working alone to fully explore and master abstract
concepts” (p. 23). This is really how our group worked. We met face to face and
via Collaborate several times. There was a great amount of exchange of ideas as
well as plussing (Lehrer, 2012) those ideas and throwing out unusable ones. But,
for the most part the real work was done individually. By having other people
to be accountable to, I feel that my work may have been at a higher standard.
But also, I thought more about the whys
of what we were doing. I questioned my thinking much more before presenting it
to my peers for evaluation. I found myself asking myself, “how does this add
value to the project?” “Will the others in the group be able to see the value
in this idea and increase the value?” But I also found that I would present ideas
without asking those questions in the hope that the others would see the value
and be able to add to it (Schalk, 2013).
References
Schalk, R. (2013, May 28). Rhonda
Schalk—this is me; background color. Blackboard
discussion.
Schalk, R. (2013). Jury writing #3.