Reflections on the Group Project

As I have already made references to group dynamics in earlier posts, I will try and keep this short so as to avoid repetition.

With the last nine weeks having gone by rather quickly, I’m pleased to say that Karl, Neng and I have finally managed to complete our group project on Virtual Communities.

Although we experienced some communication difficulties to begin with, which lead to one of the group members leaving the group to concentrate on their own project, I believe that overall Karl, Neng and I worked very well together as a group.

As our ideas concerning virtual communities evolved throughout the course, we ended up changing the direction of our group project constantly. Researching material on the topic I believe really helped us define and shape our ideas for the project. Above all however it seems that the animated discussions we had within the group in order to find a suitable definition for the term community which we could all agree on, lead us to decide upon exploring the concept itself by means of the project.

Whilst we didn’t allocate specific roles within the group, we nevertheless decided to divide the project thematically. I found this very effective since it allowed each of us to thoroughly research one aspect of ‘virtual community’ we were particularly interested in. It also helped relieve individual work load and thus made us work more efficiently. Even though our styles of writing differ immensely, we decided not to edit our website’s content. I actually believe that the different styles of writing in relation to our case ctudies work quite well, since it bestows a certain sense of character upon them.

The only concern I have in regards to the content is the fact that we haven’t been able to cover all the numerous ways the term community can be understood within cyberspace. I realize that we only had limited time available, which naturally requires selection. Besides, we ended up becoming a group of three only, which made it somewhat difficult to cover the whole range of virtual communities and their different aspects in the first place. Despite all this, I believe we have coped really well by managing to take into account the most important aspects of virtual community within our case studies.

Personally, if there had been more time, I’d have enjoyed studying Second Life and/ or World of Warcraft as a virtual community in addition to Social Networking Sites for this project. World of Warcraft interests me on a personal level mainly because my teenage brother has developed a passion for it. As for Second Life, the concept still intrigues me. Since I could not consider it in regards to this project however, I have chosen Second Life as my subject of study for my essay for the New Media/ New Technologies module that ran parallel to this course.

I’m also very pleased with the look of our wiki page, which was designed collectively. We went for a rather minimalist design and decided not to include too many pictures so as to avoid making the website look unnecessarily crammed. If you ask me, we have successfully transformed a rather unaesthetic wiki page into a pleasantly-designed website, which was probably the most challenging aspect of this module.

Indeed, I have tried my very best to make our web page look as consistent as possible. As a result, I’ve become very confident with using the wiki and have also acquired some basic html skills.

As I have no doubt mentioned numerous times before on here, I can be a bit of a perfectionist as well as extremely determined. Hence when faced with a problem I preoccupy myself with it until I have found a solution to it. Whilst this is certainly positive in that I don’t allow problems to demotivate me, it can also hold up progress. I have thus not yet stopped agonizing about the wiki programme’s stubbornness in refusing to accept my cell padding changes from 10 to 20, albeit having tried everything in my power to no avail. I have made sure though that I paid attention to more important issues and not allow it to impede our progress. Nigel in fact gave me some good advice last Monday: there are more important things than fretting about cell padding, even if it is (only) going for a beer in the pub. ;o)

Having finished the project, I have to admit though that I am nowhere closer to an understanding of what community is. The term community has certainly evolved and come to mean so many different things at once, it seems impossible to establish a unanimous definition. As I have already discussed the notion of community here, I will not go into much further detail. I nonetheless feel that I should add to my previous consideration of the notion of community where I have expressed a sense of belonging for a village community tied to the street I used to live in for most of my life. It occurred to me that the reason I have chosen to move to a metropolitan city like London may be linked to this kind of village community. Whilst it undoubtedly provides support in many ways, it is also incredibly suffocating. Nine weeks ago, I would have associated the notion of community with almost exclusively positive attributes. Whereas now I have gained a better understanding of how often such positive traits are inextricably linked with negative aspects.

Overall, I’m very pleased with how the group project went. Apart from some (may I say major) initial communication problems that were nevertheless quickly resolved, we haven’t encountered any major drawbacks. I even believe that throughout the group project my decision making skills have developed.

I’m satisfied with our final project and I also believe we got on very well as a group even though it was the first time Neng, Karl and I have worked together. I’d therefore like to end this post with a big THANK YOU to Karl and Neng! It was great working with you!