Group work

Although was only able to go to half of them (because I was not in Perth for most of this semester) I found the seminars to be, for the most part, very interesting and useful. Whilst I may not have retained a great deal of information from them, they at least gave an introduction to each area, and the resource list will be invaluable should we end up working in, or coming across one of the areas or topics covered.
Because we are on prac nearly full-time on top of all other commitments such as work, sport, family etc, I believe it was very difficult for many groups to find a time to meet up to organize their presentation, so most communication and organization was done via email. This works well, however it means that the content of each members ‘part’ is not able to be thoroughly checked by other group members, which may result in a less-than-professional presentation.
One way of overcoming this problem is to allow students to decide their own groups, so that students can choose to be part of a group that will work well together to produce a quality presentation. I made this suggestion, however it was explained to me that this would result in all the ‘left over’ people being grouped together. There is a reason why these people get left out of groups – people have had bad experiences with them in the past not ‘pulling their weight’ or producing sub-standard material.
I am now meant to come up with a solution, but think that this is just one of those things that we have to put down to ‘the experienced gained’.
(PS Bronwyn you did a fantastic job, I am sure you know what I am talking about)