134 Group 4

We plan on getting our information for the project by asking open-ended questions. We want them to be able to go on a tangent about things, so we can acquire as much information as possible. I hope to be able to ask a question and find something that a person is really passionate about and I think that the best way to achieve that is by asking open-ended questions in a VLOG style of format. We plan on checking out a video camera and DLSR camera to capture the meetings. I think the best plan of attack when we meet with OLLI is to already have a direction we want to go in and have each person complete a certain task. This week as a group we discussed and put together a calendar of our upcoming events and meeting times. It is a challenging task to try and set up meeting times since people are so busy and have a life outside of school. However, this was an easy task as a group to accomplish since we communicate pretty well together. I don’t think I would change anything with our group. I am happy with the way things are going and I think we have a good topic.

Creating a team schedule is an extremely important aspect of being successful in this project. We need a schedule to stay on top of our goals and to keep things moving along. There are deadlines we have to have things done by and if we do not have a set schedule, we would most likely not get things done. For our project, we decided to do it over OLLI. We chose this topic because we thought it would have the most intriguing story line behind it. These people are sure to have interesting life stories, and we plan to ask them why they came back to UNL to study. There are many things we could zone in on, but the overall topic we have been discussing is how those who are retired are treated differently and the biases they have to deal with in their lives. One problem we may run into is having easy access to the age group whom our project is over. Katie emailed the director of the program, so hopefully we can get in touch with them about interviews and other things concerning the project. At first, we were not sure on which idea we wanted to dive deeper into, but after presenting, we felt we could get the most interesting content from OLLI. This week, we will agree on one day to meet every week and meet sometime this week to create a team schedule.

Creating a schedule is important to the success of a project because it keeps all your deadlines in order and makes sure you have content ready to go in order for the final edits to be made. Plus it keeps the team on track. Our team settled on the OLICC project because it will have a compelling story and it will be something that we can get some good content on. I think older generations will have a lot of good stories to tell and compassionate stories. It will also give some good video shots and interview style shots. I think the challenges we will face are that some of the content may be dull and it may be hard for some of the older people to focus on what we are trying to accomplish. This week we figured out what our project will be over and what our roles will be. As a group we are facing what our creative strategy will be and how we will be going about making the creative parts of our project. I think in the future we will be put together and have a solid feeling about what our project is about and how we are going to finish our project.

Creating a schedule is important for the successful completion of a project because if you do not have a plan set in place, your task will not get done efficiently. I am a strong believer of breaking down large tasks into several smaller tasks. I believe that this method is very effective and gives me miniature goals to hit and keep me motivated. Our topic for our project will look at how society treats those who are retired differently than middle-aged adults and young adults. We will do this through the university’s OLLI institute. I hope to get some interesting stories from the participants and bring some attention to the fact that those who are older are sometimes looked at differently and treated as though they are less important. Some challenges we may face include communicating effectively as a group. It may be difficult to align our schedules to those who participate in OLLI. I think it is important that most of the group can be present when we go over to OLLI to gather pictures, videos, and stories. This week I created the PowerPoint slides for our presentation. Communication was a challenge, and discussing how our presentation was going to look and who would be saying which slides was very difficult, as not many people responded to group messages. Hopefully, my group can work on communicating this semester.

This week we created our team contract and started thinking of more ideas for the project. When we made the contract, we decided who would have each role for the project. I’m on the photo/video teams. I think things will go well for our group, but first I think we need to get a little more comfortable with each other, to work better together. I think meeting more than once a week will help with this significantly. Next week we will be deciding on what our project will be, and I am excited for that. I think everything will start to come together and things will start to be smoother once we actually know what our goal is. For now however, we just need to focus on brainstorming and deciding on a project idea that we can all be passionate about and have a good time with. I think that aspect is key to yielding our best results. We have a few ideas so far, but nothing for sure yet. We will be meeting at least once a week from here on out, as we used the the CATME scheduler to find times that work for everyone, so that will help us move things along.

Within our group I think I need to take steps to get everyone out of their comfort zone and really try to help us make a very cool and creative project. I have a vision for when it comes to a creative piece and I believe that I have a talent for composing ideas and ordering them to make an idea and a story. Good characteristics come with paying attention to each others strengths. The characteristics would be organization, prompt completion, one idea and flow, and pride with a sense of purpose when something is completed as a group. I think a team doesn’t work well together when they argue, can’t compromise, don’t have an idea of what each others strengths are. This week I helped set up the contract, divide us into our jobs, and help everyone in the group find what they might be better at doing for the project. We faced a challenge of still trying to figure out what our main point and topic is going to be and what kind of final put together project we want it to look like. In the future we will be coming to class with material and final ideas to help boost us ahead and put us on the right track.

For our team to be successful this semester, we are going to have to communicate effectively. We have been communicating through GroupMe so far, and that has been working well. Another thing we must do is respect each other’s opinions and all contribute or do what we’re assigned to do. That will help us greatly throughout this semester. Sticking to our team contract and schedule to get things done before our deadlines will be extremely important as well. If everyone is sticking to the schedule and doing their part each week, we should be successful in reaching our end goal. A group that is successfully working together means that everyone is going to meetings and actively participating in the project. At meetings, I think it would be a good idea for us to think of ideas before and respectfully build off of one another with feedback. In this group, we all want to do well and make the best project possible, so I think if we all take the time to get things done, it will work out well. One thing that can make a team not work together well is if some people are doing more work than others. This will upset people, and this is why we are making a detailed schedule and description of what we’re doing. This week, we thought of a couple ideas for our project, and made the team contract. For the team contract, we all contributed and did a couple parts. Unfortunately, we still do not know what day we’re going to meet on throughout the week, but we decided that it will be once a week. Next time we are together, we will make a schedule and figure out what day we’re going to meet.

This semester my group needs to communicate to be successful. We need to express our ideas and all contribute to the project. I think it is important that we all have a topic we can be excited about. Some characteristics good teams exhibit when working successfully together include equal participation, effort, hard work, and ensuring that everyone is producing the highest quality of work possible. When team members are not giving their best efforts, not participating in group discussions, and failing to meet deadlines, a group can quickly become unsuccessful. This week we collectively sat down and made a contract for the semester. We discussed our expectations of everyone within the group. We agreed that we should all equally participate and be putting in our full efforts. We decided an appropriate amount of time it should take to respond to group messages and how to handle any conflict within the group. I think the group contract will be very helpful to refer to during the semester. We also came up with three ideas we can pitch to the faculty next week. I am very interested in doing our semester project over a group on campus called OLLI, which allows people 50 years of age and older to take classes to continue their education while in retirement. I think it would be interesting to hear their stories and some situations and biases that they struggle with as they are aging. 

A characteristic of a successful team is that they can communicate effectively. Teams that can accomplish this are able to get ideas across to each other and then they are able to build on each other’s ideas. Another characteristic is a hard-working team that knows the deadline for every event and knows that there will be a lot of work ahead and isn’t deterred by it. I believe if we are able to do just those two things then we will be able to be a successful group who makes projects we can all be proud of. However, if a team has bad communication then it will be hard to be successful in anything you do. Like setting up meeting times or completing a project on time. This week I helped the team by talking and filling out our contract. We had a hard time deciding on what day to meet because we all have busy schedules but we were able to agree on meeting Sunday or Wednesday night for about an hour or so. I am not sure if I would do anything differently because we can’t control other people’s schedule and I thought it was something we effectively worked around.

During our first meeting, we talked about a couple different things. First off, we made a GroupMe, so we can stay in communication throughout the project. Next, we talked about the project and what we could potentially do it over. We also talked a little bit about what times may work to meet up throughout the semester. One thing I think that could be made into an interesting project is talking to someone or a group of people who isn’t from Nebraska. Potentially, we could talk to them about what stereotypes we have about where they live, and they could tell us about what they think of Nebraska. I have always been interested in hearing about what people who aren’t from the Midwest think about Nebraska. We all have bias and stereotypes even if we don’t mean to. We could even try to find someone who isn’t from the United States and dive into what their thoughts were before they came here. A challenge for using this idea could be finding someone who would be willing to talk to us and go into depth about what they think. Another challenge in this idea may be finding good times to talk to this person or group of people.