Management Reflective Paper

Introduction

The oxford dictionaries define collaboration as the action of working with someone to produce something. Ghodsi & Laal (2012) stated that Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction and personal lifestyle where individuals are responsible for their actions, including learning and respect the abilities and contributions of their peers. When people come together to work on a certain project, they are creating a group that will collaborate to achieve their task. Different levels of collaboration can happen between individual, groups, departments, institution, sector, nation, and even businesses who are focused on achieving a task (Katz & Martin, 1997). In colleges, collaborative learning is used as a tool to make students share ideas, learn from each other and understand how to work in groups which they will need in real life experience. This paper is focused on my reflection as a member of the Yellow Team campus collaboration activity for management for information professionals.

Feelings

In week one, we were asked by the tutor to pick an item from a brown paper bag, at first I thought it was candy, but later, I found out it was the name of a colour. At the time I picked the colour, I didn’t exactly know what I am supposed to do with it, though I guessed it will have something to do with group related activity but I waited for further information from the tutor. During the lecture, the tutor Jane Burns explained what each of the colours we picked stands for which confirmed my earlier guess that it will be used to place each student in the class in groups and information relating to the on-campus collaboration activity was put up on Blackboard. The collaboration activity from information on Blackboard will be group participation on the 9th of February in a collaboration challenge which requires that all members of the group will have to participate and there will be challenges in place that each group will try to achieve and points will be given for each challenge met. The tutor did not actually state what the challenge will be which left us all wondering and asking the big question, what will this challenge be? and how are we going to accomplish this task? Since most of us don’t know each other and to enable us to identify each other, the tutor sent an email on the 28th January with the email contact of all groups to each participant, this helped us communicate easily among ourselves to plan on how to get ready for the task. My group scheduled to meet on Monday 30th January at Library study room to brainstorm on how we will execute the task. During the meeting, the main question that each of us continued to ask is what will the challenge be?   but we all know that this question will remain unanswered until the day of the challenge. We drew up a couple of plans and accessed what we might need for the exercise. As part of our plan, we decided to get a whistle to use to signal each other in case we have to a split during our search to accomplish the task in time. We also got torch light, in an event it gets dark before the challenge is concluded.

Analysis

The campus collaboration activity took place on the 9th of February in Week three. We all arrived in class at O’Brien Science centre and different colours of bandana was given to the team captain of different groups to help identify each student and the group they belong to alongside an envelope which contains the group task which will not be opened until we get to field and have received our task box from the volunteers. My group the Yellow team got our Yellow bandana and we all tied it where we feel it fits best. The tutor gave instructions and code of conduct regarding how we all are expected to conduct ourselves throughout the duration of the task. The most important part of the instruction was that under no condition should any participant go into the lake and any group that breaks this rule stands to lose the entire 15 marks. My group led by Dave our group captain headed out for the task which is supposed to take off from the O’Reily end of UCD (i.e. near the Egg) and we received our task box from the volunteers when we got to the task point. Our group captain opened the brown envelope containing our task and the mission stated therein was for us to get all the( …..?)ducks in the task box safely from the O’Reilly building side of the lake to the James Joyce library side of the lake. At first, the task seems very confusing and we were trying different approaches amongst ourselves to see if we can complete this task in time. Some of us had to throw some floating balls we found in our task box to understand what is the direction of the wind at that time and if the direction favours us by taking the floating balls to the library side, then we might be able to place the ducks in the water to float to the library side. That theory didn’t seem so work as the floating balls never made it to the middle of the lake. With quick thinking among ourselves, we came up with another idea which was to place the ducks in a plastic bowl like objects we found in the task box and use cello tape to tape the ducks tightly into the bowl. We used tiny ropes and pegs found in the task box to construct a long rope and taped the rope to bowls that we placed the ducks in. We then placed the bowl in the lake with the ducks securely taped inside it, we dragged the bowl from the O’Reilly end of the lake to the library end of the lake.

Conclusion

After the exercise, I understood how valuable this task is and I learnt a lot from the exercise. I learnt from the task that team approach to solving problems and quick thinking skills can help solve problems during a task. Collaboration activity can also help build self-esteem in certain students who find it very difficult to mix with their peers and also it creates a very good atmosphere for cooperation among students. The task also made me understand that time is very important in certain task and one needs to plan and manage time properly.

Reference

1.Jasper, M. 2003. Beginning Reflective Practice-Foundation in Nursing and Health Care. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes.

2. Katz, J. S., & Martin, B. R. (1997). What is the collaboration? Research Policy, 26, 1-18. Available online at:  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/20df/e4ac96f4f8c7f9e114919fcddc0dbe6784ce.pdf

3.Laal, M., & Ghodsi, S. M. (2012). Benefits of collaborative learning. Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences 31, (1),486-490.Available online at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042811030205