Cooperative Learning

This is, in my opinion, one of the hardest concepts to grasp as students. In a perfect world every student would put in the same amount of time, effort and work into each group project they do. However, our world, for whatever reason, does not work in that way. I, as a student, have had many group experiences. Some were great. Everyone participated and put in the everything they could. Others were not so great. In those cases, one or two people would end up doing basically the entire project.

For the i-movie project, I'm not quite sure how to classify it. Everyone contributed their ideas and we are all in the video. However, when it can to combining ideas into a single concept, it became difficult. We each had our own ideas and we had a difficult time trying to come up with something we would all be happy with. We finally settled on the idea of a "blog video". However, I don't think we all had the same general concept in mind. All of our individual blogs turned out differently, which is good. It shows personality. But maybe not the way we eventually wanted it to look.

I think our biggest struggle was communication. I felt that we all had trouble trying to get across our ideas and what we thought the video should represent. There was miscommunication about who was going to get the video camera when and what we actually wanted to do.

Another big issue was that we didn't do the video as soon as we should have. We were all busy with other things and it seemed to be the last thing on our minds. But when the time came around, I felt we didn't get to do as much as we might have wanted. Plus, we were all stressed so our stress levels were high and we all become very argumentative. I know that I became kind of mean because I just wanted to get the video done.

Eventually, we finished and our final project is pretty good and gets the points across. I, however, have realized that working with other people doesn't get any easier as you go along in life- especially if you like to have it done a certain way.