This assignment is on-going over the course of the semester; you will have one due at the end of week 3, at the beginning of week 4, and the end of week 6; that makes three entries, total. These are individual assignments. The nuts and bolts are pretty simple. Each entry should be in the ballpark of 200 words. What I'm interested in encouraging is thinking about the communication that is happening on your team. I'm not terribly interested in this being a finger-pointing outlet for your frustration with poor communication (there will be other opportunities to vent about that).
What I want instead is to see you thinking critically about what is actually happening in your team. To this end, I've given you four prompts. You just have to choose three (the fourth journal topic is a response to the Gladwell and Suroweiki articles we'll be reading).
Topic One
In your teams, find an article (one per team) geared toward a general audience (newspaper or magazine) about engineering and communications. It can be an extended book review or a analysis of some trend or an examination of an event or new research. But I would like it to be concerned with the idea of communications. Also of interest would be articles that touch on social or ethical implications of engineering.
Topic Two
What is working in terms of group communication?
OR
How might I/we run our small organization better?
Topic Three
What are some of the problems that we're encountering in the project? (And how might we mitigate those problems?)
Topic Four
What are my strengths as a communicator/team member? What are some of my weaknesses?
You can respond to these in any order that suits you (except for Topic One, which must be done first), but please label your submissions with the appropriate topic title.
You'll email me your posts on certain Fridays. I would imagine that you'll be sharing some of your thoughts with your team as you go, but I'm not going to mandate that (by making this public).