Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
How to succeed in this unit
Session 1 2021
1
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Outline for Today • Why Teams?
• Team Scenarios • The Good
• The Bad
• and the Ugly
• The first steps when you get your group details • Time Management Tools
• Responsibility Management
• Peer Review Calculation
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Why teams and team work?
• Why team work?
• You exist because of others! To think life is about going alone you are wrong.
• Shock horror!
• A business with employees is essentially a team. A long term team! During your career it is a good chance you will only exist in teams. You may be the “IT Guy”, yet there will be admin, sales, accounts and many more. They will all have their understandings, their… their.. “personalities” that you have to be able to work with.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Why teams and team work? • Collective intelligence
• It is a fact two minds are better than one. The reason is because of the other minds perspective and interpretation of the knowledge being created.
• Wikipedia – An Example
• Self healing! Users fix 42% of ‘graffiti’ almost instantly as soon as it happens –
a result of people working together.
• A 3 to 4 error comparison of Britannica to Wikipedia
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Why teams?
These people rule the planet
IQ
These people ‘can’ only influence the average
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Groups: The three different types of groups:
• The good
• The bad
• And the ugly
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
• The Good
• When they meet for the first time, introduce themselves, and go
through what their goals for working together
• Exchange contact details which lead to non-textual communication (Phone, Skype, Hangout)
• Organise a constant meeting time (Virtual or Face 2 Face)
• Take simple minutes during their meetings – who is doing what, actions to be done before next meeting
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
• The Good (cont.)
• Everyone knows their place
• You can really easily learn your place by knowing the roles of the other members within a group
• They are resourceful.
• If they find they don’t have something they find some one who does – Henry
Ford was resourceful
• There is a team leader.
• One person is the central point for others to refer to if they don’t know their place, or have a resource. That center then goes outside the group to source it – such as, ask the lecturer
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
• The Bad
• Yeah! (Fist pump) Let’s get this done!!!
• No one takes responsibility. Instead everyone is motivated to knock it over as quickly as possible.
• No plan is communicated. Even though you talk with each other a lot!
• Everyone is trying to work on everything.
• The goal is the submission time. Work towards that. No breakdown of when things need to be done by when.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
• The Ugly
• Who’s that guy…. He looks strange.
• Segmentation within the group starts early because of egos, personalities, and belief their knowledge is greater
• Members stop communicating. When it is close to the submission they can do ‘their part’ to get through. Their part being what ever they want.
• The ones who are putting in the effort to work hard don’t reach out. They’re not resourceful.
• Each member blames everyone else.
• They submit a fail. Then wonder why?! That’s not fair!
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
First Steps when you get your group details
• Make contact with all team members. Initially by email, then start to use other mediums, such as phone, Skype, Google Hangout
• During this contact introduce yourself if you don’t know them. Tell them what you are strong at. What you see you could add. How do you work.
• Organise a constant meeting time.
• Don’t Judge. Everyone is unique. Therefore, accept the difference and think how they can be used to produce a better result.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
First Steps
• Pick a team leader. If you don’t like the ‘leader’ word, then choose another word. The Savior, The Guy, The Man, Sultan… Realistically, coordinator, organiser, manager
• Set actions for what each person has to do before the next meeting • Eg. HB – To create a breakdown of each section in the report, such as
headings.
• Talk more not type more.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Time Management
• Here’s a hint. Facebook is not one!
• Facebook is a chronological environment. Things move to history with every future action. It is good for communication, not completing actions
• Trello: http://trello.com – its free
• It allows you to work in an asynchronous environment where time doesn’t
exist.
• Advanced To do system and can show what is to be done, is being done and what is done.
• Short video about Trello: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xky48zyL9iA
• It’s up to you. You’re in control.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Time Management
• Personal Time Management • To do lists
• Break your tasks down into minor tasks
• Personal due dates for minor tasks
• Put in your calendar time for working on those tasks
• Todoist – http://todoist.com – It’s free • There are extras for a fee but not needed • Personal Task Manager
• Google Tasks or Keep – It’s free
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Responsibility Management
• Everyone has different responsibilities in their life – being able to manage each one of these allows for a balanced life.
• Responsibilities are overarching areas of your life, for instance: • Education – Your degree
• Family
• Health
• Professional/Work
• Each one of these responsibilities will have projects/goals, tasks and actions you want to complete.
• For instance: your group assessment is a project, and it is going to be made up of many tasks, which will be made up many actions.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Be pragmatic with your group assessment
• To achieve an outcome is to complete the sum of actions that make the outcome whole.
• Decompose your group project and assign responsibility for tasks amongst your team members. Therefore, the completion (or state) of your project is the sum of the tasks completed by those responsible.
• With assigning responsibility assign due dates. What is the cut of date before responsibility is taken away from a team member (maybe)?
• You decide as a group how to manage it
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Shared Understanding
• By knowing my place in a group I can work out the places of others.
• Shared understanding is needed to successfully collaborate. Without it a team cannot work effectively together.
• To achieve a shared understanding there must be a way every member can acquire the understanding.
• Project Plan – Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
• Responsibility Breakdown
• Schedules, such as a constant meeting time or when others are available.
• The sole reason people like forming groups with their friends is because there is a preexisting shared understanding with their friends.
• This understanding doesn’t relate to the reason for collaboration. You know your friends, and because of that you think will be easier. This isn’t always true because you still have to create a shared understanding for the project
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Peer Review
• For the group project, there will be a confidential peer review form that every individual group member must complete and submit separately
• It will be made up of who was responsibility for what sections of the report, and who contributed to that section
• This peer review is silent and individual, other group member will never see it!
• It is import to distribute responsibility early as this will be the guiding plan for who is to do what
• Used as a basis for distributing marks
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Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Peer Review – Specification Document
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Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Peer Review Example – Specification Document Calculation
Task
John Smith
Jane Doe
Sam Capper
Peter Frank
% Complete
Average Contribution (25% each is equal)
33.42
3.33
50
8.3
This group got 7.5 out of 10; a Distinction. Because of the peer review and the contribution results no group member gets the same mark:
(Result above is the result of collating and averaging all peer reviews for group)
Total marks up for grabs: 7.5 * 4 = 30
John Smith: 33.42% of 30 = 10 Jane Doe: 3.33% of 30 = 0.99 Sam Capper: 50% of 30 = 10 Peter Frank: 8.3% of 30 = 2.49
Note: No one can achieve more than the max mark for each assessment item.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Why reference and cite?
• To distinguish your thoughts and ideas from others
• Attribution – Give credit where credit is due
• Demonstrate comprehension of relevant literature
• Supports and strengthens argument
• By writing the answer in your own words, based on what you have learned from reputable sources (which you reference), you show your comprehension of the material.ßTHIS is what we expect from university students.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Referencing and Citing: What it isn’t
• It’s not copy and paste!
• It’s not writing a section without any in-text referencing and then placing a list of references at the end of the writing or document (this is called Bibliography)
• By not referencing you are implying other peoples thoughts and ideas are yours – not by copy and paste, but rearrangement of text to make it look like your work and your ideas
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How to Paraphrase
• Paraphrasing is the process of writing in (your own words) an idea, knowledge or process that you have learned about from other sources.
• You are interpreting what you have sourced
• Being able to correctly cite sources indicates your ability to gather
knowledge and comprehend what you are learning
• Provides evidence that you didn’t just make something up, with a link back to where you learned about it
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Abstract
The Editing Process In Writing: A Performance Study of More Skilled and Less Skilled College Writers
Two groups of college writers (more skilled and less skilled editors) corrected and commented upon the sentence-level errors in two tasks (a self-written essay and three essays written by others), under two conditions (no feedback on location of error). Analyses of students’ corrections showed that, while the more skilled writers almost always corrected more errors than the less skilled, the two groups performed similarly on the self-written essays where neither corrected many errors at all. Both groups performed better on the standard essays and better with feedback. Analyses of students’ protocols showed that three strategies which were used for correcting errors (consulting, intuiting, and comprehending) varied with task and condition.
Hull, Glynda. “The editing process in writing: A performance study of more skilled and less skilled college writers.” Research in the Teaching of English(1987): 8-29.
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Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Paraphrased idea from the abstract, referenced
You should always have your writing proofread by others. It has been shown the more experienced a writer is the more they are able to identify errors, however when working on their own
writing they are no different to average writers (Hull, 1987).
Hull, Glynda. “The editing process in writing: A performance study of more skilled and less skilled college writers.” Research in the Teaching of English(1987): 8-29
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Cite while you write!
• There should be no excuses why you cannot cite and provide a list of references.
• There are numerous tools available to you for free which allow you to cite while your write and construct a reference list.
• Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LWwcl01uUE&feature=emb_title
• Hint: Your textbook is a reference
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Turnitin Similarity – What not to do!
Any of these large sections of copied text will lead to an automatic academic misconduct investigation.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Turnitin Similarity – What not to do!
You may have under 20% similarity, however if you have a section similar to below, an academic misconduct investigation will commence.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Turnitin Similarity – What not to do!
Quoting is not a substitute to paraphrasing. Quoting should only be used in rare cases, for instance, if the statement is significant to a larger body of knowledge and can’t be paraphrased without loosing it’s meaning, or if a person’s perspective is revealed through a personal quote.
You don’t quote to answer to a question simple because you believe it is the answer! This type of behaviour shows you have not comprehended the knowledge to formulate an answer in your own words so you just copied it.
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Turnitin Similarity
It has picked up these individual words or small sections because it found it from a larger body of text, and the placement pattern of these words or individual words are identical to numerous sources. Although small, still try and remove them. It just shows your paraphrasing needs improvement. Small amounts of this is okay.
This first part (1) is not acceptable
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Before Submission – Tips
• Ensure the similarity index is under 20%
• Once you are under 20%, check your text for any issued
• If you find you are close to submission and don’t have time to rewrite large segments identified, remove them. You will loose marks or be given zero if it is the whole answer, but no academic misconduct will be initialised (which could result in 0 for the whole assessment).
• Don’t wait until the last minute to submit. Turnitin can take up to 24 hours to process a similarity index and submitting too late for the report is not an excuse for academic misconduct
• Even small parts identified by Turnitin can be paraphrased
discussed above.
Professional Development (300578)
Lecture 2 – How to succeed in this unit
Questions