Reflecting on Group Activity

Supplementary activity 6.4: Reflecting on the group dimension of professional practice

If you have time at the end of this unit, please comment, either in the course wiki or on your blog, on the issue of how collective work can fairly be presented for individual assessment as evidence of competence. For example, would less technically adept group members be justified in claiming that their own competence had been enhanced by working together on this with others who were more proficient? How could they evidence such a claim?

Emmm, with great difficulty. I consider the best thing to do in these types of situations involving group work is to allocate a proportion of marks to the group for the overall output and then allow each student to evaluate/mark each others contribution with the remainder of the marks. It may even be appropriate to allow the students to have some input on the marking criteria.

Overall I enjoyed our group work. I was a little worried in the beginning that there was limited collaboration, however in the end it worked out nicely. I was a bit worried about taking the lead with another group member as I was keen not to tread on anybody else’s toes, or come across forceful. It was also a risk in introducing new tools to the group like, Skype, Etherpad and Google Docs however everybody seemed to get on with it really well. Without these tools the activity would have been so much more difficult to complete and co-ordinated in time. I feel that the work was distributed equally; everybody had a chance to contribute and influence the direction and content of the presentation.