Week 9 - Team Analysis

I've said it in previous posts but I'll repeat it here; I think my team for this course was incredible. We did really well despite the difficulties we experienced and we worked really well together. In saying this, like every team, we had ups and downs and there were aspects of our team that made things more difficult.

Start-up Processes-
We formed a team early and starting having weekly meetings straight away so our 'start-up process' was pretty short. We created a Facebook group and started communicating on there as soon as we had five members and from there we began to have weekly meetings on Skype. As soon as we had a group we introduced ourselves and got an idea of who we all were in the first meeting and from there on we were all ready to do work.
Our start-up process for assignment two was just getting a feel for the assignment and getting an idea of what roles we'd all feel comfortable in. We had a little bit of reshuffling at the beginning of the assignment; originally Floyd was going to be editor, then I was going to be editor and then we settled on Michelle and I being co-editors so that everyone had a fair share of work. This was really the only reshuffle we had; we appointed Jess as leader and decided on everyone else's share of the work quickly and once we confirmed roles everyone was happy enough to do the associated work.

Team Roles-
I tried to work out what specific team roles everyone in the team fits but it's hard to know if my team members did fit all the descriptors given for each team role.
I think our leader was a coordinator although she didn't have the strong handedness that's implied in this role. She was very easy going and didn't try to direct us too much but she was also good at figuring out what we should all be doing.
We also had a monitor-evaluator. She wasn't in a leadership role but she definitely provided a lot of the critical thinking for our team.
I think we had a couple of implementers on our team but my co-editor could also have been a completer-finisher; she was both hardworking and had a strong attention to detail.
I was mainly a completer-finisher. Attention to detail and an inability to see the big picture are two attributes that I encounter often when I'm doing work and it was no different in this course. I also almost filled the team role of a specialist for assignment 2. I didn't end up with any writing so I came in at the end to do my share of the work. It's not a very strong specialist- I didn't just do one thing but there was some similarity there.
As you can see from these descriptions we had a lot of do-ers and a couple of leaders. This left us entirely without any ideas people. This worked out surprisingly well; although settling on our exact approach to things probably would have been easier if we had someone providing direct ideas.

Leadership-
Reading through the different Lewin leadership models I think the best fit for our team was Laissez-faire. All decisions were definitely made as a team. Luckily we all think similarly so making these decisions by team consensus was always very easy. On the Blake Mouton Managerial grid I think we were pretty far into the top right (high concern for production and people), although I think there was slightly more concern for if everyone was happy with how things were going than there was for getting the work done. Overall I think our team were all equally capable and committed so leading us didn't really need to be a hands-on thing. We were all doing the paper and the work in it for the same reasons and with similar goals so there was no one who needed to be guided strongly.

Strengths and Weaknesses-
Our strengths included our ability to get work done, our communication, our lack of tension and our consideration of each other. Any tasks each of us had were done efficiently and quickly; we were never waiting for someone, wondering when they'd get the work done. We also never had any trouble getting in touch with anyone or just having our ideas understood by the rest of the team. There was never anything that resulted in any long-term tension in our team. Everyone was very level-headed and reasonable throughout the entire assignment. Finally, everyone did a good job over understanding everyone else's circumstances and being compassionate towards other team members.
Our weaknesses were mostly related to the fact that we had such a range of schedules with a range of time-zones. Two members of our group live in Australia and we all had different schedules. Considering this we did a really good job keeping up with each other and communicating. However, we did struggle with small things like setting sure deadlines for each other and we all missed at least one meeting. Neither of these proved to be anything that set the team back though. I'm struggling to think of anything else that could be considered a weakness in our team; we just worked really well together.

This is my final blog post on this blog so thank you all for reading and thank you all for being such a great team! Good luck with all your future endeavours; I'm sure you will all do fantastically.

Week 8 - Oral Communication in Science

As much as I hate public speaking it's clear that it's incredibly important in science.
I think that oral communication is the easiest way to communicate an idea to the largest number of people. This means that presentations are becoming fundamental to the spread of knowledge within scientific communities and to the general public.

TED talks are a really good example of how science is made more consumable by oral presentation; they are an accessible, understandable and interesting ways for scientists to present information to anyone who wants to hear it. Articles and other scientific papers are important but oral presentation is a more effective way to get a point across. Speech allows more control over how the information comes across; the presenter can more easily emphasize the important points and use other techniques to draw attention to the core points rather than leaving it up to the interpretation of the reader.

People learn in different ways but it's common for people to learn better by listening to people. This is why lectures are so important in uni papers. I take in more information from reading and writing notes but I still find lectures helpful. I know I struggle a little bit more in papers that have no oral communication and rely on just reading a textbook.

I'm terrible at public speaking. I considered doing the question about past experiences in public speaking but I realized that it would just be a short list of occasions when I made a complete idiot of myself. Because of this I haven't actually done any public speaking for years; I managed to dodge any assignments involving it throughout most of high school and haven't had to face it at university yet. So while this upcoming assignment makes me nervous I'm somewhat looking forward to seeing if I can do any better than I did in those past experiences. It will be good to know where I'm at because I know how important oral communication is in science and I want it to be a skill that I develop so I can effectively communicate my ideas to an audience. Not having any ability to present information in this way would likely be a major hindrance in my future.

Week 7 - Our Team

I don't think I could have ended up in a better team for this paper. Despite the heavy workload and other difficult aspects, I feel that we have been a really strong team overall. In saying this there has been things that we have done really well and other things that have been more difficult.

For this blog post I'm essentially going to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of our team through this assignment.

I felt our strengths have far outnumbered our weaknesses but there was still a handful of weaknesses. 

There was some difficulty in keeping track of what everyone was doing at various stages. 

This was probably mainly because I think another area we could have done better with was setting deadlines for everyone to have work done. We did, however, set some deadlines for the final portion of the report and they worked well. I think this difficulty stems from the fact that we cover such a range of geographic locations and also busy schedules; there wasn't much opportunity to set deadlines because we were all always busy at different times. 

Another problem we encountered was dividing the workload evenly, We decided to divide by the three topics and an editor which only gives four people solid workloads. But after some discussion we managed to divide it better and I think everyone has ended up with a fairly even workload.

All these weaknesses aren't because of anyone making things difficult in anyway; they are all mostly a result of all of us having such different schedules and even living in different time-zones.

Our team had a lot more strengths. So far we've done a really good job of getting work done. No one has failed to pull through with anything and no one has taken an excessive amount of time to finish anything.

Another thing that's gone really well has been our meetings. While all of us missed the occasional meeting there's always been at least a couple of people to meet and talk every week. 

Our Facebook group has added to our good communication. Any concerns, thoughts or updates have been shared and seen quickly which has been a lot of help.

Everyone in our group has done a really good job of doing their bit. Everyone has done their work and communicated well with everyone else which has made the report go much better.

We also did a really good job of supporting each other. Any concerns were listened to and considered and we came to agreements on issues that popped up very quickly with little to no tension.

So overall our group has been really great so far. We managed to write, organize and perform a survey with no hiccups and we decided on our topics and framework with no major issues. The editing process was also as easy as it could be; It was shared between another member of the team and myself and there weren't any great problems dividing up the workload between us. I neither feel that I did too much or too little of the editing. We still have one more assignment to work on together so there is still, no doubt, difficulties to come but I'm confident that we have very good odds of completing that assignment with no serious hindrances.

I'm going to end this with a big thank you to my entire team for all their time and effort they've put into this course. Assignment 2 would have been impossible with a team that doesn't work as well as you all do!

Week 6 - Working in Teams

This week when I was looking through the topics I had a lot of trouble choosing one. I don't have anything to write about on assignment 2, I couldn't think of any different topics to write about and I haven't worked in many teams before now. So I've chosen to talk about all three team role topics; what I think are my strongest roles, my weakest roles and where I stand with leadership roles.

My preferred Belbin team role is definitely a 'completer-finisher'. In the lecture for team roles the attributes assigned to this team role were an attention to detail, quality control, introverted and difficulty seeing the big picture. All of these apply to me and my approach to doing work. My second strongest role would be an 'implementer' (hardworking, needs guidance, rigid and hates change). However, this doesn't fit me as well; I am hardworking and do need guidance most of the time but I deal quite well with change. These two roles are both do-er roles; in what little team experience I do have I have always found myself to be one of the people who just gets on with doing the work as soon as I know what the work is.

My weakest roles are definitely those in the idea category. I'm really bad at coming up with my own ideas for things to do. I do much better if I'm told what I'm meant to be doing. This tendency can be seen pretty clearly with these blog posts; this post is the furthest I've wandered from the list of topics given to us and it's just a modified take on the topics. 'Plant' (innovative, creative, unrealistic, sensitive, get ideas from within) is probably my weakest team role. I struggle a lot with work when I have to come up with the idea and in previous team roles I've always left it to other people to do that. I also don't feel that I'm much of a 'resource investigator'. I'm not an extrovert and while I'm not horrible at communicating it's not really a strength of mine.

Leadership roles sit somewhere in the middle for me. I'm not really bad at being a leader but I'm also not first to put my hand up. I think I work best under a 'coordinator'. I don't need a 'shaper' to force me to do work but I do need someone to tell me what my role is and what I need to be doing. I think I'd work more poorly with a shaper as I wouldn't respond well to any pressure from their aggression. I think I would be okay working with a 'monitor evaluator' but I would work better with a coordinator.
If somehow I do end up being leader, which is usually when no one else will be, I'm a shaper. In my team experience I've only ever been a leader when no one will do any work and so being aggressive with an unmotivated team is where I've always sat with leading a team.

In saying all this I haven't worked in teams a lot and when I did they weren't really 'proper teams'. I'm only 19 so the last time before this course that I did team work was in high school and I managed to avoid it through the last 3 years so it was in the junior years of high school. At that age who did what was less to do with who would do the best job in which role and more to do with what social group each member of the team was a part of. In the few times I did do team work at that age I found myself as some form of do-er or as both a do-er and a leader because other members of the team didn't want to do any work. So to say I have any real experience in team work is generous, it was more often a case of doing work and putting everyone in the groups name on it.

So this is what I think I am. It will be interesting by the end of this assignment to see if any of my opinions have changed on what team roles best suit and don't suit me!

Week 5 - Thoughts on Ethics and Science

Ethics in science are complicated and there's no code of conduct that applies to all of science but despite this ethics still play a vital role.
Ethics are important in science because they determine how we react when any choices arise and help us determine which action is the right action to take. While there is no set code of ethics for scientists there is still ethical principles that are generally adhered to and they usually show up in any code of conduct relating to a scientific field. As Resnik (2015) suggests honesty, carefulness, openness, freedom, credit, education, social responsibility, legality and opportunity are all important in approaching science. There are limitations on these principles (how can one have both the freedom to pursue anything whilst also acknowledging social responsibility and legality?) but the important thing to take away is that all of these ethical factors are considerations in any decision made during scientific study and when deciding on a code of conduct in a scientific field.
The easiest way to see the significance of ethics in science is to imagine if we didn't adhere to any of these ideas. When ethical codes/principals are not followed in science the most dangerous consequence is the potential harm to people that can come from a disregard of ethics in relation to others but there is also consequences such as inaccurate and uninformed science or the possibility of scientific knowledge becoming inaccessible to people. Without a code of ethics in science people wouldn't be able to trust the results of scientific study or the scientists performing study.
As a science student I feel ethics are important because they give me a clear idea of what limitations and responsibilities I will have in my future. The field I'm pursuing doesn't have as divisive ethical conundrums as say medicine or biology. Geography and Earth science deal more with honesty and education and other principals to do with furthering the subject and sharing information with others. These are important ideas as they are fundamental in making progress in these fields; problems like global warming don't get solved if the scientists researching it don't have an obligation to share their findings with a wider audience.
So overall I feel that ethics in science are necessary as they protect scientific fields as well as protecting people from science.

>Resnik, D. B. (2015, December 1). What is Ethics in Research & Why is it Important? Retrieved January 8, 2017, from https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/whatis/