Week 10 - Reflection on this course (Part1)

I think it is time for me to start reflecting on what I have learned within this course. Basically I divide it into two main aspects - technical skills and collaborative skills.

I realised that we learn things from experience and mistakes. I was stressed that I was driven to delicate so much time learning every single sofeware that we need to use in this course, but the outcome of that is, I did learn a lot.

Because Liming and I live nearby, we meet up together to do work quite often. The way we do things together is a bit interesting, but it works - I am the person who researches for, works through all the tutorials, and trying out errors in unfamilar softwares (such as how to do screen capturing by using captivate and fraps; how to export files from director to premiere / edit videos in premiere; how to upload videos on Youtube; how to embed the link in WIKI; modelling and texture importing in ut3; terrain; lighting; surrounding ect), while Liming is working the softwares that she has already known (such as Movie Maker, Director, 3Ds MAX). I always make sure that my "updated" knowledge is available to Liming so that we can proceed the task smoothly. For exmaple, everytime when Liming is up to a stage that she need some more knowledge to continue working on the task, she either passes me the task or learns that knowledge from me. By sitting together and finding solutions, I found that to work with others actually provides me an opportunity to learn from others' strengths, and it gives more options in decision-making.

In order to approach a given task, there are lots of ways of doing that. To start off the project, I looked for different tools for our group communications (to save our some time for meeting up face to face), such as msn and basecamp. I was not nominated as a team leader in the beginning, however I am sort of picking up the responsibilities of a team leader since we do need some sort of hierarchy to make the group running in on a track. They include: orgainising group meetings, allocating and checking individual's tasks each week; taking meeting minutes; giving help and providing advices for each team members ect. By allocating tasks for our group members very week, I found that we need to make our planning realistic, but at the same time, as an orgainising person, I need to move the dead line a bit forward to allow some errors happenning. I think it is a good idea to keep a record of our process, so that we can aways track back to what happened and that provides evidents, which can reduce unecessary argument.I think as a group, we should all learn the lesson from not having any planning right from the beginning. It is essential for a group to set a common goal because that indicates how much efford we would like to put into this project. Secondly, time management is very important within a group working environment. We need to do things that we are committed to do for each week, otherwise, tasks will be accumulated, and it only makes the coming days tougher.

The theme for our next presentation is conflict. As I have mentioned in the previous presentation, our group is working in a context of the existance of conflict. It is indeed a challenging topic for me to study due to the fact that each of us confront a lot of conflicts in this group project. I am going to explaning more about what I have learned from conflict management a bit more.