Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

[edit] About Me

I am a graduating senior here in UMASS, majoring Communication. I am one of the group members in Comm352. This is my class blog: Abccccc.

[edit] Thoughts about the class

I added the class at the beginning of the semester because it only met once a week. Classes that meet once a week are usually 3 hours long. Due to the technical problem of SPIRE, I and other students in the class thought this class only last for an hour. We could get 3 credits for being in a 1 hour class. That's nice. However, we were wrong. There is no such thing as free lunch. Steph is our teacher. The class runs for 3 hours. This is an interesting class. Very different from all the other classes that I've taken throughout my college life. This class has certainly widen my view in group dynamics. I have to say that this class is intense but things we learn are practical for us in real life. I didn't like the class at the beginning of the semester because of the intenseness and confusions but I started to enjoy when we read After Dachau by Daniel Quinn and Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison, especially when we started to work in groups for the subpage on wiki. This class is the only class in college that I can remember everyone's name. Thanks to the tests and the name game.

[edit] First day of class

We all came to the classroom not knowing what's going to happen. There were instructions on the board but Steph did not show up for the first 15 minutes. We followed the instructions on the board and wrote the answers on it. Steph came in finally but she was not satisfied with the amount of effort we'd put in for the quetions on the board. She left the classroom and give us another 10 minutes. We were left in the room with confusions. We did not know what was going on but we followed the instructions. We had a little activity when she came back in the room about the interconnection of the people in class. We were then divided into 2 groups: leader of follower. We chose the group that we belong to and discuss the characteristics of the group. We also had to discuss the handout that was given to us. After that, we had our first TEST. Test on classmates names. At the end of the class, we had to do self and peers evaluations. I didn't even remember the name of the kid that I worked with. So, I just put 'I don't remember his name' on the evaluation sheet. We all left the classroom with confusions and thinking if we should drop the class. At least I did think about that.

[edit] Decision Making

We have many decisions to make throughout the course. The first assignment was to decide whether or not to attend the protest:No Mas Farc in Boston. We were asked to explain the reasons on our own blog. This was my first decision. After reading the article What To Observe in a Group by Edgar A. Schein, we formed four Schein teams.
We analyzed the categories in all of the fishbowls throughout the semester and post the reports on the class wiki. This article is one of the articles that we applied the concepts on our work the most time and also the article The Group: A Cycle from Birth to Death by Richard C. Weber. Reading Book for Human Relations Training (Arlington, Va.: National Training Laboratories, 1982), 68-71. the four stages in group's development. We had been struggling on the process of deciding what to do with the wiki. Ambiguity exists throughout the process as said by other group members on the comments of discussion. We formed new Schein teams on week sixth because we realized that Self-oriented behaviors rarely existed throughout our group development. I was in that group and since the group was removed, I was then in the group of maintenance. It was interesting that self-oriented behaviors existed in fishbowl H & I after our group was being removed. In the process of group development, we were evaluating ourselves and the peers at the same time. We gave and received feedbacks. There is always a misinterpretation on the concept of feedback. We made use of the feedbacks to tell others about ourselves. Here is my own self perceptions to the feedback that I received from the peers. The article Functional Roles of Group Members by Kenneth D. Benne and Paul Sheats also brought us different insights toward functional roles. We had a test for this article but I didn't answer some of the questions correctly. Besides the Schein team-maintenance group, I was also in the group of brewery.

[edit] Project

I was part of the group which decided to do our project on Paper city Brewery. Here is my reflection on the experience as cheap labor with my groupmates.