Look, let's just put this behind us, I'll be over at tumblr when I need to do certain things, and I'll be here when I need to do other certain things. We have an understanding.
Cool.
Alright, well, time to collate my stuffs.
Here's some tea before we start.
Update:
This is following the introductory briefing with over 400 students across 4 BA dsciplines including mine, Graphic Design.
It looks like this is how things will turn out for my set of blogs:
- sife-land blogger (this one) will be for my more detailed and more deliberate entries
- sife-land tumblr (http://sifeland.tumblr.com/) will be for my n'importe quoi and personal endeavours
- Bigger Picture 2012-13 Group 7 (http://myblog.arts.ac.uk/groups/bigger-picture-2012-13-group-7/) will be where I post duplicates of posts from this blog (for assessment purposes etc.).
I have a mix of people in my group from my own course in Graphic Design, to people from Ceramic Design, Product Design and the Architecutral Studies course. 26 people in all.
We've set down ground rules, and have yet to break the ice fully, but during today's latter half seminar we were being taught about small group psychology and management.
So apparantly, according to some bloke by the name of Bruce Tuckman who came up with the theory of group dynamics, he believed he had sussed out the behaviour of small groups into a model which he split into four main phases of a linear development:
1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming
4. Performing
Going through these phases in order:
1. Forming:
Is the stage whereby everyone in the group is orientating themselves, testing boundaries, seeing what they can say, and what they can do and gauging the reactions of the members of the group. We learn about each other and try to avoid conflict, try not to upset anyone, try not to show too much of ourselves at first - much more open to taking direction from others for the time being.
2. Storming:
This is the volatile phase of a developing group, whereby people will begin to have disagreements and arguments. This is where the group truely takes shape in structure, ideals and goals, a lot of clashing visions and types of leaderships as well as allocations of workloads. The lecturer explained that this phase would exhibit the "hissy fits" that are seen in adults as the "ugh, I am not being a part of this," "argh, I can't believe you'd rather do that!" etc. It's where the group is likely to "blow up".
3. Norming (norming? what kind of term is that?)
After all that energetic activity, the group starts to settle down, "group feelings" are created and standards are shared, enough debate and compromise has gone on to finally come to unanimous agreements amongst everyone. We can start to see people actually getting along after Storming.
4. Performing
The phase when everyone is actually getting on with work. Each person has a role now, and they fulfill it for the sake of the group's progress. The structure has settled, members are flexible and task-focussed. They handle difficulties together and balance individual contributions with group aims. They have a tradition now that they follow.
This is however, as the lecturer cautioned, only a model of how most or many groups will function. So for all I know my group will be completely different and bat-shit off the rails. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Most likely not. I hope.
The lecturer then gave a load of helpful tips about how to manage groups, but being young and inexperienced I stopped paying attention, obviously, and rather busied myself setting up my group's organisation methods online via google docs, recording contact details, setting up the facebook group - I kid, I did all that, but there's so many extensive notes I took in group management that it's probably a bit too much to write up without the temptation of just copying and pasting what I copied from the lecturer's slides.
Here's to a beginning to what may be an awesome project of an exploratory learning process.
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