User:Elovewel

Welcome to My page

This past winter, I traveled to Bali, Indonesia for one month. I arrived back into the US two days before classes start. I flew into the Logan airport in Boston, and quickly found my way back home to Martha's Vineyard to pack up my car and head to school. I arrived home, packed up my entire car, full of books, clothes, tv, etc. I was all ready to go. And then it started to snow...a lot. It was windy and snowing hard. I called the Steamship Authority to make sure the boats were still running...nope. I was stuck on the Vineyard. Pissed off and frustrated I emailed Steph to tell her I wouldn't be able to make it to her class the following day...the first day of class. woops. Here I am a BDIC student, so I wasn't even technically enrolled in the class yet, and I couldn't even make it the first day. Having to take a boat to get anywhere, is the biggest downfall to living on an island.

My contributions to Com352 Group Dynamics. The second week of school I arrived to Steph's Group Dynamics class on monday, incredibly apologetic. I sat through class, trying to pick up anything and everything that i missed last class. I was so confused! I thought everyone in the course knew what was going on, and it was all explained in the previous class that I missed. Turned out everyone was just as confused as I was, which was slightly reassuring. But still frustrating because I usually like to have some sense of whats going on... That class we were assigned for homework to read What To Observe in a Group by Edgar A. Schein. This is an article we would continue to work with and reference for the rest of the semester.

The following class is when we first began to talk about our class project: designing our class Wiki page. At the time I didn't even know what a "wiki" page was. So during this whole discussion I felt more as a group-observer, occasionally asking questions when I was confused, acting as an information seeker. (These roles I am attributing to myself come from an article that we read towards the end of the semester. Functional Roles of Group Members, by Kenneth D. Benne and Paul Sheats.) After discussing possible ideas for our wiki page, we were sent home with an assignment to further research some ideas, read more on Steph's ideas, and then respond on her blog post: Time to DECIDE, what will you create? Here is my first contribution as an opinion giver. I discussed the reality of the wiki page. Many people were suggesting ideas about current events. Things happening "today." Global discussions as well as local concerns. My concern was how often would we ACTUALLY be updating this wiki page. If we are going to write about current events, things that are significant to us at the moment, then we would need to constantly update the page. Current events change. Being realistic I came to the conclusion that it only makes sense to create a page that is static, or only needs to be updated occasionally.

While discussing about possible wiki page ideas, we were greatly focusing on Schein's article, What to Observe in a Group. Steph had us break into groups, each group representing what we were suppose to observe when watching a group. There was the

1. Task and maintenance group 2. Communication skills 3. Decision making 4. Self oriented behavior

I was a part of the Communication group. We focused on things like, body language, eye contact, who talks, how often, tone of voice, etc. Here is what we observed after watching one of the fishbowls in class. Each member of our group took on one of the aspects to observe, and focused on that aspect. For this fishbowl I focused on body language specifically.

Evaluations Almost every class we filled out evaluations of our classmates. On top of this we also evaluated the class in general: what we were confused about, what we liked, didn't like. Here is some of our feedback. I was a part of class #8. For some reason a lot of people were absent that day, so it gave the class a completely different dynamic. It was small, more intimate. We did the arm wrestling exercise, which was another one of Steph's tricks into teaching us a valuable lesson about team work. I wrote Steph feedback saying, I enjoyed our many discussions we had in class during Steph's presentation: since our class was much smaller today I feel that everyone was able to participate. There was a good conversational tone which was comfortable and interesting. I also enjoy our larger class setting, however it is always nice to change things up once in awhile.

Look Me in the Eyes Some where in the mix of all this our class also read the book, "Look me in the Eyes," by John Robison. It is a book about autism, but more generally, a book about communicating. John somehow found out that Steph was using his book in our classroom, and contacted Steph. We all wanted John to come to our class! And he did! When he came to our classroom, we discussed what it would be like to speak what was on your mind, without having regards to other peoples feelings. We focused on decision making and completing tasks in many different settings. We also learned a great deal about John's life, as a writer, a rock band photographer, and a family man.

Back to the class wiki... Our class discussed some ideas for the wiki in our individual blogs. Heres one of mine. I liked the idea of using our individual interests in our wiki page. It is easy for us to write about something we care about. I also strongly felt that we should incorporate our class into our page, hence Class wiki page. Many people wanted to do a Survival guide to UMass wiki page. Which I completely didn't understand why we would do that. Heres my response to that. I definitely stated my opinion on this matter, fulfilling the role of an opinion-giver. A survival guide to me, seemed too much work, and almost completely irrelevant to Group Dynamics. It is a great idea, for a UMass website in general, but maybe not for our class' purposes.

There was a good amount of confusion and discussion going on about what the wiki page should be. Most everyone agreed on incorporating our own interests, however some wanted it in the form of a UMass guide, some wanted it to be more like Myspace, while other just wanted to focus on the course itself, Group Dynamics. After much storming, (defined by Weber's article, The Group: A Cycle from Birth to Death) We came made a decision. We decided to stray away from the Survival Guide, and came up with a page that would feature all of our individual interest, keeping the entire class in mind. This was displaying our many different frames that we represent in our class. We divided our class into groups. We first divided it by peoples interest. Everyone who was interest in writing about music would be in one group, etc. Along with these content groups we also included a process/design team, a Schein team, an informed consent, and an evaluation team among a few others. It definitely took a good amount of storming in order for our class to get past the frustration, into a more productive, and adult discussion. I think we all realized what needed to be done, and the short amount of time we had to complete it. Everyone put their stubbornness aside and the class wiki page was underway.

[edit] Where I am today....

Here is our class wiki page: Com352 Group Dynamics.

I was a part of the Study Abroad section of the class page. I wrote about my experience abroad in Beijing, China. As well as my experience traveling around Bali, Indonesia. I also contributed to the Design and process team. We designed the main page of the wiki. I specifically found out how to change the color of the background, using this html color wheel, as you can probably see by our colorful main page.

Besides finalizing our class page, which is a huge relief. We have also focused a great amount on the Benne and Sheats article, "Functional Roles of Group Members." Defining these roles and observing my own, as well as other people's group behaviors has given me the skills to identify member's roles within a group. I am by no means an expert at this, however I know I, along with the class, have come a long way. I have also come to appreciate role flexibility within a group. I have always believed that it is important to be flexible in many other aspects. When meeting people for the first time, it is a good skill to try and relate to the other people. When meeting a prospective employer, it is a good quality to have many skills and be somewhat malleable. It does not mean necessarily changing your identity, or that you are conforming, it just means that you are complex, and have many skills. I can now see when a role needs to be fulfilled within a group, and I can try to fulfill that role.

To see the rest of my blog posts from this semester, click here.