Reflection 8

Date of meeting: June 27th, 2009
Location of meeting: Group 3 Chatroom in D2L
Time of meeting: 11:56am - 2:30pm
Names of members present: Jason Nesler, Kristen Underhill, Kevin Jack, Nate Anderson , & Amy Sanders Names of members absent: All Present
Names of any guests attending: No Guests

For this special meeting, we focused on the final project. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, so it made it easier on us to sit on the computer to work. We started just to have a little conversation amongst ourselves. As I said in an earlier blog, we started to open up more a little bit as we got to know each other.

As soon as everyone arrived, that's when we got down to business. We started with the roles each and everyone played. I noticed that I kind of hung back of this question. Even though I've noticed through out the class (and in groups/teams in general), I tend to be more of a follower than a leader. I've always been the laid back type of person, who only talked when I needed to. When I'm outside of class or work, I tend to be more of a leader. Since I spend a lot of time roaming the streets of the Twin Cities, I tend to know more about what's happening around town. But I will admit that I have my times that I'm a follower. Going back to groups inside of school or the workplace, I like to avoid conflict as much as I can, hence why I don't get involved unless if I have to.

Speaking of conflict, we all agreed that there wasn't very much conflict within the group. We knew that time was our enemy and wouldn't have time to do things if we had conflict all the time. While we knew that conflicts is a normal thing in life, we worked everything out to make sure that our goal was met: Getting the assignments done. But I will admit that there was a little conflict amongst the group but it was easily resolved. The part about wanting to do the discussion questions BEFORE talking about the final project still upsets me (it was mentioned in a previous blog). Again, I just went with the flow of things. One of the biggest things that we agreed on regarding conflict was the environment that we were in. As I said in my first blog, this was the first time I used the chat feature on D2L. To be honest, I wasn't a big fan of it. More than often, we would have the problem of trying to move on to a different topic but after that's introduced, the previous conversation continues. A lot of times, I got confused on topics, especially in an online environment. It's often difficult to monitor other people's nonverbal communication in online environment. Trust me. I've gotten people mad at me or I've gotten mad at people because of what was said in an online posting. We didn't have that problem here all that much (everything was pretty much straight forward) but I'm just making a point of what can happen in any kind of online environment. Personally, I wanted to use that web program that we were supposed to use.

We talked about how everyone made some sacrifices to meet at least once a week. Since we all have busy schedules (some work during the day, some work during the evening/night, have classes, etc), we did a very good job making concessions in order to meet together. At first, we were skeptical on Wednesday nights. Two people had to work during the evenings and 2 others worked during the day (I got my work hours cut on Wednesdays so I was available all day). We used e-mail, the D2L chat room and discussion boards as our main ways to communicate with everyone.