Weather: Sunny and beautiful
Listening to: The Rat Pack: I'm Gonna Live Till I Die
As many of you get to know me throughout the next few years, you'll become very aware that I have the attention span of a 3-year-old. As much as I would like to have the capability to sit down and accomplish each task on my increasingly large to-do list in an efficient and focused way, alas, I cannot.
I logged in to my Blogger account this morning at 11:00 sharp, promising myself that I would blog until 11:30, then change into my running clothes and run, and then do other homework and get myself to work on time. But then, after several trips to the coffee machine and checking my e-mail, I logged in to my Bloglines account to see what my classmates were blogging about. Just for some inspiration.
It's now 11:23 and I've just started typing.
Class this week and last not only made me ever more aware of my dislike (and inability) of sitting still and focusing on a single task, it also made me ever more aware of an increasingly annoying part of my personality; I don't work well in groups.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like other people. I do. I'm very loud and I love interacting with people, but I work most efficiently by myself or when I have complete control of the project or task. But one thing was made apparent to me in this past week: I need to get over it.
Group work will never go away. Ever. And if I want to be successful ANYWHERE, doing ANYTHING, I will need to teach myself how to work better in a group.
With all of that said, however, I enjoy group discussion. My group had a very lively discussion about the various articles, and as we moved around and discussed our findings with other groups, we used the gained insight to refine our previous discussions. When Esther asked each group to report on their "Ah-ha!" moments, we all looked at each other, stumped. After some prodding from Esther, however, we all agreed that our "ah-ha!" came not from what was in the articles we discussed, but rather, how we read them. Some of the group members read the articles on the computer screen, and some had printed them and read them on paper. We also discussed the fact that the article assigned to our group was easier to read, not because of the wording, but because of the formatting. While 2 of the articles were written as if they were typed on a typewriter, the one we preferred was written in a magazine, and therefore was formatted as such. It had color, the text was broken into smaller chunks and was therefore easier to process, and the format easily led the reader's eye from start to finish. Using this as our moment, we confidently presented our findings to the rest of the class, who agreed with us!
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2 comments:
I would never have guessed that you didn't work well in groups. Perhaps you'll want to think about how technology could be used to assist students such as yourself. The difference is that you're aware of the way you do or do not work best. YOUR students may not be as fortunate.
Wow this was a really long entry ... I can tell you like blogging and enjoy writing ... I want to keep track of everybody's post, but I will have to skip the long ones once we get toward the mid of semester (nothing personal) ... The format of a long text on line is not appealing to me, that is why I have decided to print all materials I can and have to read for this class, I don't care for the price anymore, but I just can't read long things online.
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