Thoughts Regarding the TED Project

Overall, it went pretty well.

My worst fears for this project, as you can guess, were composed of several notions. One of these was the thought that my group was totally disorganized. That was just one thing i was a afraid of. I mean, our group after all was disorganized, and that's not surprising if one considers how huge the project was, the number of members in it, the tasks assigned, and the different approaches taken by each individual. I'm just pondering here, but now that i think of it, no project is perfect after all. There's just no way to create this sort of ideal project unless every group member thinks as one (which I also believe is physically impossible). Every individual is going to think differently, and no matter what group it is, each person is will have a different mindset for the project.

That's why i thought it was a really smart idea to create a task page and allow members to work on little sections of the project on their own. I thought it was a great idea, especially when everybody seemed too lazy to collaborate on one major idea. Collaboration in that sense, is very difficult. Meeting for 3 hours on a saturday to discuss the project would have just meant hell for every academy student.

So i liked the task page in that sense. Still, going with what i said before, i noticed how people treated the whole idea differently. The purpose of the task page, going with what i believed, was for people to clarify whatever aspects they were covering in the project- and if it wasn't that, it was made at the very least to inform people of what you were doing.

Telling people to write up at least 3 tasks for themselves just seemed to defeat the whole purpose of the page. Some people; like me, for example; were made to carry out and perfect ONE major task within the TED project. The 3-task quota forced me to split this task and simply be LESS clear about it. Better yet, the thought of doing 3 tasks also reinforced the idea that it's "quantity and not quality" that matters. Any half-brained student could write up a few sentences, change the title of a page, add an image, and label what he did as three separate tasks.

So that's just one major flaw that i noted within the project, and perhaps it's me who's partly responsible for my group being a little disorganized. It was me, after all, who focused soley on one issue and failed to communicate in regards to anything else. Now that i think about it, i probably should have provided help to some of the freshmen who really had no idea what they were doing. I really think I should have been more supportive and collaborative.

But still, even in spite of that, i think the project went fine. Most of us (the academites) are just glad that it's over. Our presentation went pretty well (aside from the time crunch), and i think everyone did a good job.