On Monday, we spent the first half of the class discussing what we had done last week while Carol was away. After giving her the 4-1-1, we picked the categories we would be working on for our midterm project. We started out with about 16 categories on the board including: politics, position within the international community, culture, environment, economy, education, history, human rights, etc. Realizing that the discussion over which topics to pick was taking longer than expected, Carol and the rest of the class decided that we needed to just take a vote on which 4 or 5 categories we would run with for the semester.
Our goal for Monday was to try and place everyone into a group so that we could have start working on the research component of our upcoming presentations. Luckily, we accomplished this goal and divided up into 5 groups.
This class got Ryan and I thinking about how we function as a group. Do we need to work on how well we work together? Is the way we make decisions the right way to go about it? Or should we be talking to Carol about a new way to make decisions in a quicker and more effective manner? Just some food for thought.
On Wednesday we had a Lumen Prize committee member, Dr. Lucinda Austin, and Sarah Vaughan, a Lumen prize winner, come to inform our class about the Lumen, a funded opportunity for students to conduct scholarly research.
We also discussed our Periclean tee shirt design again. We wanted to show Carol our design and confirm that it was “okay” with everyone. In addition to revisiting the tee shirt idea, we also revisited our discussion about the class structure.
Carol announced that in order to help speed up our class decision-making process, from now on we will be having half an hour timed discussions before the conversation is tabled. Carol also implemented the “rule” that once someone makes a point, they are not allowed to restate the same point until after everyone has spoken. Hopefully these two “rules” will help speed up our decision/ collaboration processes.
We then moved on to talk about the groups that we had set during Monday’s class period. As a class, we went over the basics of what each group would be researching and came to the conclusion that there would be some overlap amongst the groups.
After making sure that everyone approved each of the groups criteria, we took a class vote on who would be our Periclean Class speakers and began to spit ball ideas about our elevator video, which Oly and Cam will be the point people of. So, if anyone has any ideas/ comments make sure you notify them! Lastly, shout out to Devon for receiving the job at Smitty’s! We will definitely come see you!
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