Group Projects for School

The one thing everyone warned me about before starting library school was that I would be required to work in teams or do group work a lot. For my Library 203 class I had to listen to two lectures about teamwork and how to be successful when it comes time to work in teams. It was quite interesting I learned that the basic reason for people to fear or worry about teamwork is lack of control. Every reason given came back to the lack of control people feel. I can understand this feeling as that is what my concern usually is. I worry about others affecting my grade and wasting my time. However, learning to work as a member of team is an important skill to have to be successful in most career fields. One of the lecturers was Enid Irwin and he said, “You start your career when you start your classes”. Which I think a lot of people don’t think about, when entering grad school, you want to do well in team work and in your classes because your classmates and professors are potential colleagues or people who are doing the hiring. So, how to be successful in a team?

Both lecturers, Dr. Ken Haycock and Enid Irwin addressed ways of being a successful team member. The first is making sure you approach teamwork with a positive attitude; they both mentioned how this is important and can set the mood for the group and help a lot. Dr. Ken Haycock went into more detail by outlining questions you can ask yourself to prepare. I thought this was very important to figure out what you bring to the team. The following is taken from his PowerPoint presentation:

·         What strengths do I bring to the team?

·         What behaviors of other members of the team really “push my buttons”?

·         What are the implications for how we work together?

·         How do I modify my preferences for the sake of the team performance?

He didn’t list it, but he also mentioned knowing your weakness is a good thing. For example I know my strengths are I’m comfortable with technology and have a lot of good ideas. One of my weaknesses is that I’m a procrastinator, but really good with deadlines. So, I would inform the group that putting deadlines at least for my projects would be a really good idea. Behaviors that “push my buttons” would be if were scheduled to meet and your late. I think it’s important for you to know what you’re bringing to the team, so you can contribute in a helpful way.

The second strategy for success is planning and so many things fit under this. A lot of times teams will just jump into the assignment without thinking. It’s important to step back, get to know each other, determine what your goals are, how you’re going to accomplish what needs to be done and clearly define roles and responsibilities. Planning is a major step that most teams forget because they’re so eager to just get the assignment over with or they have a poor attitude about doing teamwork. I’m grateful that San Jose State University has everyone go through this because than hopefully all my classmates and I will be on the same page. Hopefully. Still nervous about the whole teamwork aspect, but not as nervous.

Skills for Online Success

In my library 203 class, Online Social Networking, one of the units we cover is if online courses are right for you and how to succeed in the online classroom. Some people think online learning is easier and just requires the right computer. This is not true especially if you want to be a successful online student. I took a quiz to see if online learning was right for me and the quiz said I was ready. However, when I started reading over the skills required to be successful, I could pinpoint exactly where my weakness and strengths are.

My strengths would be I’m very comfortable with technology. Technology has been a big part of my life for a long time, so it’s basically second nature to me. I’m comfortable with interacting with people online and feel that I have strong communication skills. I’m self-motivated because library school is something I have wanted to do for a long time. I will admit that sometimes after a long day it’s hard to muster up the motivation. I can be self-discipline when I want to be it just hard to come up with it unless there is deadline coming up. I’ve never been good at getting things done early. I always get them done on time.

Now my weakness or what I consider my gray area would be time management and organization. I have both of these skills it’s just I get busy or lazy and forget to use them. When I do use them (and I’ve been getting better at using them) I’m very successful with accomplishing things. The biggest weakness I have is procrastination  I have tried beating it out of me, but it’s very engrained into me.

Because I’m aware of my strengths and weakness I’ve started implementing things I learned from this unit and things I figured out on my own to be successful. Three tips that I have used for success are: designate regular intervals, create a desktop folder and create a browser folder. I created a folder in my Dropbox that is separated out into a folder for each semester, with a folder for each class. I took my netbook and made my classroom (D2L – Desire to Learn) the homepage along with bookmarking all the other important San Jose State library pages. The one thing I still have to do is set-u p a calendar. I also have learned that my house has to many distracts and have a designated library I go to for studying.

Hopefully by putting all of this into practice,  and organizing myself a bit more the first semester, I will be on my way to being very successful in school. I’m always looking for tidbits on improving my time management and organization skills along with battling the procrastination bug, please share in the comments any tips.