Even after five years in university I still don’t like presentations and at times group work. Its the feeling of nervousness and not being able to fully trust group members that make it difficult for me. But for the first time in university, my group members and I were able to choose a research topic of our choice in EDUC 1100 and provide our opinions backed by research. While I won’t be able to always choose a topic of my choice, the researching skills I learned from these two assignments will be something I can use for the foreseeable future.
Prior to this assignment, I would rely on any source information without looking at where it came from. For our research outline and group presentations, we had to find articles using a research database as well as being peer-reviewed scholarly articles. This lead to not only finding more specific articles related to our topic but it also led to finding more articles from reliable sources.
These assignments also improved my communication and collaboration skills. Usually, in group projects, there are only a select few sources of information that are used but for this assignment from various sources, but for this assignment, we had to ensure we had multiple sources and there were no duplicate articles. Being on the same page made it much easier to work with one another and we managed to avoid group-think by looking at both sides of argument. The assignment forced us to look at the Pros and cons of Social Media in the workplace and its effects on workplace productivity. In order to support and strengthen our stance we had to look at the opposing argument to conclude if we were either for or against social media use in the workplace. I was aware of the fact that Social Media can be distracting in the workplace and generally believed that it had a negative impact on workplace productivity, but upon conducting research I began to change my opinion. The fact that social media a vital part of some organizations and the level of reliance that some companies have on social media is something I was unaware of and didn’t consider until I had conducted the research.