Oh, collaboration, you fickle minx. I haven't quite forgiven you for that fiasco in Comm. Theory a few semesters back, but I'm willing to overlook that mess on account of being really tired and needing to get this blog post done. What can I say? I'm a swell guy.
I want to say 95% of the groups I've ever been assigned to have functioned in what Lunsford and Ede call a "hierarchical" fashion, where roles are given to each member based on what said member is capable of doing. The stoner in your group that you wish you could trade for the foreign exchange student is not going to be designated the leader, but because everyone has to pull their own weight, maybe you let your plant-smoking companion design the power point. Hey, he was the one that said he was heavy into graphic design. More power to him. In hierarchical collaborations, group work is divided up and done solo, with occasional group meetings here or there to make sure everyone is on task and up to date.
Maybe that's why that Comm. Theory presentation sucked so hard: I trusted the rest of my group to handle their pieces of the writing. One student had to handle section A, I was handling section B, and then the third and final member would take the relevant info as outlined by the rest of us and put it together in some kind of on-screen display we could use as reference during the lecture. When Section A failed to materialize until the day before the project, and Section-PowerPoint failed to materialize at all, I realized the hard way that collaboration and cooperation aren't necessarily the same thing.
The group and I obviously didn't see eye-to-eye on what we were doing. Because they didn't value their solo work, they couldn't value the work of the group: as such, we got a B (bolstered mightily, I might add, by the fact that my third of the project was the most kick ass project on Speech Codes delivered in 2010). In terms of the individual grades, because my part of the assignment wasn't lackluster, I got an A. The others didn't fair so well when my professor saw blackboard conversations between the three of us that were extremely one-sided. I was the only one posting things when they were due, and I got very little in the way of response from either of my group members. Looking back, I'm pretty sure that foreign exchange student and I would've totally aced the presentation and set the grading curve.
There was no collaborative voice for my group, no way to offer one another assistance, at least not without me doing all the work. Aside from the word "Nacirema," the others knew next to nothing about speech codes. I ended up speaking for roughly 20 out of the 25 minutes our group dripped mediocrity and self-loathing all over the stage. Because we weren't able to back each other up, one person had to bear the weight of the entire project . . . and it sucked.
It sucked hard.
I want to say 95% of the groups I've ever been assigned to have functioned in what Lunsford and Ede call a "hierarchical" fashion, where roles are given to each member based on what said member is capable of doing. The stoner in your group that you wish you could trade for the foreign exchange student is not going to be designated the leader, but because everyone has to pull their own weight, maybe you let your plant-smoking companion design the power point. Hey, he was the one that said he was heavy into graphic design. More power to him. In hierarchical collaborations, group work is divided up and done solo, with occasional group meetings here or there to make sure everyone is on task and up to date.
Maybe that's why that Comm. Theory presentation sucked so hard: I trusted the rest of my group to handle their pieces of the writing. One student had to handle section A, I was handling section B, and then the third and final member would take the relevant info as outlined by the rest of us and put it together in some kind of on-screen display we could use as reference during the lecture. When Section A failed to materialize until the day before the project, and Section-PowerPoint failed to materialize at all, I realized the hard way that collaboration and cooperation aren't necessarily the same thing.
The group and I obviously didn't see eye-to-eye on what we were doing. Because they didn't value their solo work, they couldn't value the work of the group: as such, we got a B (bolstered mightily, I might add, by the fact that my third of the project was the most kick ass project on Speech Codes delivered in 2010). In terms of the individual grades, because my part of the assignment wasn't lackluster, I got an A. The others didn't fair so well when my professor saw blackboard conversations between the three of us that were extremely one-sided. I was the only one posting things when they were due, and I got very little in the way of response from either of my group members. Looking back, I'm pretty sure that foreign exchange student and I would've totally aced the presentation and set the grading curve.
There was no collaborative voice for my group, no way to offer one another assistance, at least not without me doing all the work. Aside from the word "Nacirema," the others knew next to nothing about speech codes. I ended up speaking for roughly 20 out of the 25 minutes our group dripped mediocrity and self-loathing all over the stage. Because we weren't able to back each other up, one person had to bear the weight of the entire project . . . and it sucked.
It sucked hard.
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