I know it's kinda late, as the next lesson is tomorrow, but anyways, here we go.
Well at the beginning of the lesson we heard some general knowledge about blogs, microblogs and podcasts.
Blogs are some kind of journal or diary but they are not in private but published on the WWW.
As to microblogs, the most popular one is Twitter. They are called microblogs because in the sent messages only 140 characters are possible.
And least we have podcasts. Podcasts are blogs made out of videos and audio. A significant percentage of audio podcasts are also used for getting information about a specific topic or learning.
That was the short overview about blogs and so on. As an assignment we had to find podcasts that interest us and write about our favorite one.
That was not very easy for me, as there are many topics I find interesting and i haven't listened to podcasts before :)
I must say that after looking around for about an hour I couldn't really find a podcast that I would list as my favorite. I will blog about that at a later time, when I can find anything interesting about podcasts :)
So, now we reached the next part of last weeks lesson: Collaboration
In the following I want to name the topics and write a little about them.
Group Sizes
Groups can consist of 3-20 people. 5 or less members are called primary groups and 6-20 individuals are called secondary groups.
Small groups are more like few people pairing up in teams, but their advantage is that their structure is defined faster so they can start working after only a little amount of time.
Stages of Group Development
Groups that consist of 6 or more members need to pass some stages of group development so they can start working on whatever they have to work on.
In 1965 Bruce Tuckman was the first to propose a model of group development - the "Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing model" - which became the most accepted model and the basis for models that were made later on.
Group Members
Basically there may form different role types in a team, but the team can control wether these roles are allowed or not in the different states the group is in.
Those role types can be for example: "der Redselige", "der Ablehnende" or "der Clown".
Hierarchy in Groups
Members of groups can often have certain roles as for example the leader. Raoul Schindler developed a theory about these roles and calls them Alpha, Gamma, Omega and Beta.
Alpha:
As the name anticipates, the Alpha is the leader of the group and is the one who wants to fulfill the goal of the group the most. In every group there is an Alpha.
Gamma:
These are other team members who support the Alpha. But Gammas are the decision makers.
Omega:
This kind of group member is not interested in the common goal of the group. It could even happen, that the Omega sympathizes with the "enemy". There is an Omega in every group.
Beta:
A Beta is the expert in the group. He knows everything about the goal. There is not always a Beta in the group.
It is interesting that the Alpha can possibly turn into an Omega and the other way round.
Teambuilding
Building teams is the first step to work together on one goal. As we reached this point of the lessen, we had some activity going on in class.
MARSHMALLOW CHALLENGE
In our teams we had the goal to build the tallest freestanding structure. That sounded interesting at the beginning...and it also went on very interesting ;)
We got 20 pieces of spaghetti, a marshmallow, 1m of tape and a long piece of yarn.
The rules were that the structure had to stand without falling off and the marshmallow piece had to be on top.
The winner of the challenge, that means the group with the tallest structure, was promised the rest of the marshmallows in the bag as a prize, so our motivation was very high :)
Here is the result of our group:
Unfortunately we didn't win, but our 47cm tall structure was second ranked :)
And all in all it was a very fun challenge and we learned how it is to work as a group especially with the pressure of time (we had 20 minutes).
As to the assignments of last weeks lesson, I will continue in the next post, this one is long enough I think. :)
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