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] Matt Westgate's Page

Welcome all! Here I am at a Sox game for my buddies 21st!

[edit] Welcome to Class: Communication 352

When I first walked into class I was under the impersonation that it would be similar to any other class I have taken in my four years here. First day we would receive the syllabus, the professor would explain what the semester would be like and we would leave early. Boy was I completely wrong! We get there and after a few minutes of waiting for everyone to settle in we soon split into two groups. People who defined themselves as "leaders" went to another room. While people who defined themselves as "followers" stayed. I defined myself as a leader so I left. We sat there trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. There was alot of confusion which basically laid the foundation for the way the semester was going to go.

The first few classes Steph broke down the barriers between student/teacher to which we were all familiar with. It took me a few weeks of getting used to her methods, but I soon began to realize what was happening. She told us that we were going do "something" with this space in the WIKI, but what was up to us. She told us that we also needed to create names for our weblogs. Over the course of the semester we needed to post opinions on certain happenings throughout the class. If you want to see my blog click here

[edit] Fishbowls and More Confusion

Just as I was beginning to understand what this class was about, we were going to create a final project and that would be the basis for our grade, we started these "fishbowls". We split into 4 Schein Team groups. These groups were based on an article about what to observe in a group. The 4 groups were task and maintenance, decision-making, communication, and self-oriented behavior. The purpose of these groups throughout the semester was to analyze the type of behavior in the number of fishbowls we had. I was part of the decision-making group.

Our GroupOur group had to analyze a number of different aspects that went into making a certain decision. Look under Decision Making here to get a better idea of what we had to do

Click Here to see what each group had to do

Fishbowls discussed a number of topics from content/process which confused me. Why are we putting so much effort into analyzing how these groups function if were trying to put together a final project?

It hit me... Steph wanted us to be able to see how these smaller fishbowls were functioning in order for us to see how our larger group was functioning as a whole. It all made sense now!

The important fishbowl: After weeks of debate we finally were able to agree on a project for the WIKI that everyone had an interest in. We were to create a guide to Umass that was made of of all our experiences here over the years. Here's a link to what I helped create.

Click Here

I brought alot of information forward to my group. As a student I played many different intramural sports. Basketball, football and soccer were all ways for me to stay active throughout school and I never would have thought that I would do a project on them, but found it interesting when I brought this information to the table for the Wiki. My page is only a sub page of the final project.

There were many groups that had different interests and created pages for them. If you want to see the final project Click here

As I am making my personal page, we are in the final week of school. It has been a long and confusing semester with Comm 352, but it has been an experience that has broadened my way of thinking and learning about things. Most importantly we learned how to be successful as a group and we were able to complete this project.