Group projects are not on my list of favorite things. I understand their purpose, and sometimes they even go well. But I don’t like them. More time is spent in explaining each individual thought process and in negotiating how to approach the assignment than in doing the actual assignment. Quite simply, I get frustrated.
I’m not aiming this complaint at LIBR559 in particular. I’m in my 21st year of formal schooling and concluding four years of graduate school (one MA, one MLIS). Think about how many group assignments I’ve done in those 21 years. There are the assignments when someone flakes on due dates, meetings, or their assigned portion. There are the assignments when it becomes an ego death-match.
Like I said. I understand the value of collaboration and group work – I really do. I recognize that humans are social creatures, and that there is great potential value in sharing ideas and working together. I know they will be a part of my professional and personal life, and I am perfectly well able to pull my weight, and even take pride in the final product. That doesn’t mean I have to like the process!
I’m posting about this here, rather than my personal blog, for good reason. The subject of the current module in class is collaboration, and we’re finishing up a group assignment to create wiki entries. Within a page or two of the 2013 article by Forte & Lampe, my mind went scampering back to a TED Talk I watched last year for another class.
Last year, Susan Cain published a book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking. In her TED Talk and the book, she puts her finger directly on what I think is the source of my frustration with what seems like a continuous bombardment of group assignments. She describes “the new groupthink,” a rapidly-increasing trend that privileges group work over individual. When we were children, our desks at school were probably in rows, and much of our work was done autonomously. Now, go into any classroom, and the desks are in “pods” with groups of four or five children all facing each other. Cain acknowledges it is important for children to learn to collaborate, and that casual interaction at work can be very beneficial.
However, “the new groupthink” privileges the extrovert mind. Introvert and Extrovert are terms that indicate how a person reacts to stimulation. It has nothing to do with shyness, social anxiety, or antisocial behavior. Everyone falls somewhere in the introvert/extrovert spectrum – some are ambiverts, right in the middle. Others, like me, identify strongly with one side or the other. I am an introvert. I am easily overwhelmed by large social situations, I spend a lot of time inside my own head, and I prefer a quiet dinner at home with a friend or two to going to a large party or a club.
Cain doesn’t argue that all group thinking is bad, or that group work should be abolished entirely. Instead, she says, there needs to be a greater balance between collaboration and individual work. Some of the greatest innovators and thinkers in history were introverts, preferring long solo walks to dinner parties. Indeed, Cain remarks, introverts make some of the best group leaders because their natural ability to listen well and not micro-manage lets their colleagues develop ideas and run with them, thus encouraging innovation.
Introverts make up 1/3 to 1/2 of the population, yet those of us who identify as introverts are taught by society to feel guilty for our preference for solo thought or quiet pursuits. How many of us were told by teachers, camp counselors, parents, or siblings that we needed to be “more outgoing,” get our noses out of that book, and go play outside?
Extroverts and introverts have different skill sets – neither is better than the other, and we need both. Collaboration is by nature an extrovert’s milieu, but couldn’t there be ways to encourage the introvert to make use of their skills? It would only be to the group’s benefit.
Maybe education is the answer. While most people I know are in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, I do know a handful of people who identify strongly at one end or the other, just like I do. As a strong introvert, it’s interesting to talk to a strong extrovert – we compare notes, and explain the how and the why of how we react to different situations. One extrovert friend, with whom I have discussed this at length, says it’s very enlightening to hear my explanations. The natural extrovert response to someone who isn’t speaking is to interpret them either as unhappy or unenthusiastic, while the introvert might read the silence as thinking about the subject at hand.
Social media plays into this in a lot of different ways. At times it may seem to contradict itself. Collaboration is no longer tied to geography – one need not be in the same room with one’s collaborators in order to work. Options like GoogleDocs or videochatting via Skype or Facetime are useful, allowing the collaborators to decrease what might otherwise be an endless stream of inane “yes, that looks good” type emails clogging the group’s inboxes. Depending on the situation, this could either help the introvert by allowing them to be in their own space and work without the distraction of other people around, or hinder them by leaving them feeling harried by never really having a quiet time to work through their own thought process.
Every few months, articles show up in magazines and newspapers exclaiming over how isolating the online world can be, in spite of the now global social pressure to be actively social. We’re supposed to post to Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. We’re supposed to comment on other peoples’ posts, and keep up with the newest technological developments. We’re supposed to have a handle on programs, software, and applications that will enhance the group work that is so popular right now, whether it’s videochatting, cloud storage, or group access to documents. I’m not saying group work is a bad idea. The whole “greater than the sum of its parts” thing is real. I take issue with the unspoken social censure that occurs whenever someone protests group work and indicates a preference for working alone.
We need both extroverts and introverts doing what they do best. We need them thinking and creating and working, together and apart. Education and communication – it always seems to come back to that, doesn’t it?
Consider adding a section on how to problem solve collaborative/creative work.
If you can find librarian or archivist specific materials, I find it’s a good way to inform your readers.
I love that Susan Cain talk!
While I completely agree on what you said and I consider myself an introvert, I think that this kind of collaboration (for this class I mean) is a great way for us introverts to do teamwork, like a middle point, let’s say, between an open, face-to-face collaboration and no collaboration at all. I definitely like this collaborative work a lot more than all those excruciating team meetings we’ve had for other classes.
I agree with you to a certain extent, but I think a lot depends on the group and the subject of the collaboration. With some groups in-person meetings are more efficient! With others, the online collaboration is much more streamlined. Maybe I’m just feeling cranky because ALL of my major assignments this term are group projects 🙂
Yessss!!! As an introvert, I will (quietly :D) weigh in on the conversation. I hate group projects too, although for the most part, all the ones I’ve done at SLAIS have been quite rewarding. I feel as if, at the end of it all, we’ve accomplished and learned more than we could if we’d been working by ourselves. It’s a sort of economy-of-scale thing, but applied to learning.
That said, I still hate group projects, and much prefer a combination of the two – you go away, do your own work and bring it back to the group. This can lead to collaboration and discussion, and the “creation” of new products, projects or thoughts that wouldn’t have happened if people were working solely by themselves or completely in groups.
That does seem to be an effective compromise between the extrovert and introvert styles!
I think doing something like also eliminates the negative side of “group think”, where the more extroverted individuals unintentionally pressure the more introverted people into agreeing with them.
I’m no fan of group projects and would prefer solo assignments. This course has been a breeze regarding group work, but last semester one ornery, mean, negative group member made the other three of us in our group cower online.
We did everything we could think of, employed every strategy we read about and this woman never got cooperative. The result was a project that never gelled. I learned a lot less than I would have.
As a teacher, I now allow students to opt out of a bad group at any stage in the process. They could opt out in the real world and sometimes people do.