Initially I was nervous about what my group would be like. I wasn't sure if I would be placed in a group with people that would not want to work hard, people that would not be motivated, or people that would not want to step up and be leaders. Once I learned who was in my group, these fears were almost entirely alleviated because judging from their informational briefs and class participation, I knew this would not be a problem.
Since the forming phase of group operations was done for us, we immediately moved into the norming phase. In the first class, in the short time alotted we got to become more comfortable with each other, we made sure to get everyone in the group's phone numbers and e-mail addresses. We did not get much accomplished but learned that almost all of us had a common interest: entrepreneurship. We decided we would each interview an entrepreneur and use it towards our larger group presentation. A short time after our initial meeting, outside of class Kerry stepped up and decided that we should organize all of the questions we would have to ask our interviewee. We all gave 2-3 questions that we thought would be appropriate to address the communication issues faced in the business world.
Our first non-class meeting took place in the Stamp Student Union. This is when some of our group storming took place. We had to decide which medium to present with, how to split up the project, and how to incorporate our entrepreneur interviews into the project. This was quickly decided and the only thing we really struggled with was how to divide the bigger picture of communication issues in entrepreneurship into smaller categories. This is when I decided to step up and split it up into several categories and assign each person a category based on the information they garnered from their interview. The others were supportive and went along with the idea, which luckily turned out to be successful. We were able to work through a little storming to reach conforming.
While we achieved a lot in our first meeting there was still the actual presentation to organize. We met in the Cambridge Community Center and hammered out the presentation. We agreed Taylor's idea of a Billy Mays theme of the presentation to make it not only engaging to the audience or easy to use examples with, but to make the tricky transitions between speakers a great deal less awkward. We also agreed that using multimedia in addition to a prezi would be the best route towards making the presentation interesting. We put our information into a Google Document, which Mark found irresistible to use as a canvas for his many emoticons and Rachel pieced all of it together to make it into a prezi file which made our presentation look neat and business-like.
I can truly say that at one point in the project each person stepped into the role of a leader, whether it was Sophie setting up the Google Document or Rachel setting up the prezi. Everything worked out smoothly and when it was time to perform we knocked the presentation out of the park. I do not think there was one major flaw in any of our individual presentations as cohesively it engaged the audience while at the same time succeeded in informing them as well. In summation our group was the New York Yankees of groups and everything worked as planned. No one gave any objection to the ideas we bounced off of each other and everyone worked together as a unit. This project was one of the better group projects I have been involved with.
…RIP Billy Mays
Let me just say, I will probably not volunteer to make a Prezi again but although it looks cool, it inspired a sort-of motion sickness within me whenever I worked on it for too long. So much moving and zooming and scrolling and zooming
ReplyDeleteThis group was the definition of greatness. I am glad I did not have to make the Prezi. I tried to make one for my info brief and I failed miserably.
ReplyDeleteHaha, thanks for making Prezi happen :)
ReplyDelete