Reinaldo Diaz SPC1017 Reflection Blog

This group was actually a very fun and productive experience, one that challenged many of my previously held opinions about group work. I walked into this project filled with an enormous amount of apprehension. To say that I was nervous at first would be an understatement; while in high school, I always preferred to do all of the work myself in a group project. This preference was not due to any selfish desire to control everything but instead to years of group project experiences which consistently saw me doing the work for group members who were slackers or having to accommodate their utterly horrible, barely up to par contributions to the project. Because of this, I began to associate the word group project with stress, inequality, and ultimately, lower grades-grades that, no matter how hard I worked, were brought down by the performance of other students. Because of this perspective, I was very skeptical when I accidentally fell into this group, as I did not know many of these people, but I had no idea what I was getting into. Would I find myself again stuck doing work for the other members of the group, or would I have to bite my tongue and compromise my own standards in order to get the job done? These doubts consumed my thoughts in the initial few minutes. Something about my feelings began to change very quickly. As soon as we sat down and talked through how we planned on carrying out the project-assigning chapters that seemed appropriate to all members and how we intended to go about creating the Power Point, my apprehension lessened tremendously. We determined what aspects of the project each person was going to handle, the Power Point style, and the overall appearance of the final Power Point.I am amazed at how efficient and participative every member of the group has been during this process. This group has been the first project that I have been a part of where every single member of the group did what they were supposed to, did it well, and required absolutely no nagging. On presentation day, no members rushed to put their slides together at the last minute, there were no issues and it was amazing to see that every member of the group was well prepared. I am extremely happy that I was placed in the group I was; what at first seemed to be an unfortunate circumstance turned out to be a good thing. In this group project I learned a lot about myself, as I am far more communicative than I sometimes think I am. I feel as though I am able to communicate freely with my group members and discuss any issues that were happening without any awkward feelings between the members. If any of my group members were unsure of something, they were not afraid to ask the question, and I know that everyone in the group responded maturely. It is amazing how safe you feel to be able to communicate with members that you do not know, and for that reason I really think that I enjoyed this group project far more than any other I have been a part of; I feel that our project was an extreme success. I must also say, I learned quite a lot about my assigned topic-the manifestation of conflict in cultural and virtual groups. Although I initially felt the topic would not be very interesting, I am happy to say I was quite wrong. I think that when it comes to conflict, I am a reasonable person. When there is a conflict in my personal life, I generally tend to want to "talk it out," or at least talk it over to where both parties reach a middle ground. In my opinion conflict cannot always be avoided, it's a fact of life when it comes to interacting with people, but as long as it is handled with care, there is rarely anything to be afraid of. However, in studying this topic I realized my own style of dealing with conflict can often be very different than other people's styles, especially in different cultures and with virtual groups where usual cues are missed or are in the wrong context. Cultural communication was very interesting; I discovered that people, regardless of their background and experiences, come from so many different kinds of communication patterns-for example, what one group sees as a direct way of communication, another might take as an attack or an offense. Similarly, what one group perceives as polite or respectful silence or deference; another may perceive as unresponsiveness or an unwillingness to work. These are not characteristics of cultures themselves but are based on the values that we were taught that were acceptable throughout the world. I learned that because we are brought up with such different ideas, people are not always sure of the cues to look for or that someone could be unintentionally offending them. Talking helps deal with conflict but not when both parties don't know how to talk to each other in the first place. Virtual groups add another layer of communication issues with their own set of problems. The cues I mentioned before, like body language, tone of voice, facial expression and eye contact, are often missing when people are in virtual groups. A question that in person would seem friendly can be viewed as an offensive remark when someone receives it in text. These small miscommunications in virtual groups that will be noticed as quickly can go unnoticed as conflict grows until it is too late. Throughout the research process and the Power Point presentation I really gained a lot of respect for communication among groups, especially culturally and virtually. It also allowed me to see how well my own group handled each situation, even though none of my group members and I realized we were working in such a way. We have all been aware of it since we have realized what this project truly taught us. At the end of the day, I believe that our group presentation was incredible.