Confessions From a College Student

Movie: Cool Runnings  Image by Disney  For the past few weeks we have been discussing  Tuckman's five stages of group development . We broke into small groups during this time to work on our very first collaborative project. My group, the Cinco Gatos created our very own website analysing Tuckman's five stages on the movie Cool Runnings.  During this time I really got to know my group members. I learned how everyone works in a group. I feel like our group went through the five stages as well. Here's how:  Forming: We formed the group not knowing anything about each other.  Storming: Since we didn't know eachother that we were kind of awkward at first and it took us a while to figure out what we wanted to base our project on.  Norming: After we chose our topic, this was when we really got to know each other. We broke the project into different parts Like Emma worked on the homepage, Isabella creates the timeline, Leah creates the ...

Photo by shutterstock "Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances." -  copyright.gov Discussing this topic in class got me really thinking. I was so curious to know how serious people are about sampling different things from the internet... and let me tell you it's serious!! But why? I understand that it's fair use when it's used for educational purposes, but what if I were to create this awesome assignment for school that is open for the public to see and I get quite a bit of recognition for it. But once you use that for your own advantage it is illegal.  In my opinion I think this whole thing is stupid. I do believe in giving credit to it's rightful owner but what ever was created does not belong to them. Going back to originality, people today are very unoriginal everything we use and do is a newer version of something that was done in the...

Photo from Pexels In my opinion, nothing today is really original. We all feed of of everyone and everything for ideas. We pretty much have "newer versions" of almost anything. With the progression of technology and social media it is so easy to "steal" each other's content,  but is it really stealing though? People accuse and file lawsuits over so many things. I've seen cases where people would make their own version of an old song and change up the beat and call it their own, but when one person decides to make a newer version of their remake they will sue them for copyright. They are just contradicting themselves. How can it be okay for them to do it to people but when other do it to them it's wrong? A really popular case that happened years ago was Jay Z being sued for copyright infringement over his hit single "Big Pimpin'." He was sued for sampling a piece from an Egyptian song called "Khosara Khosara" by an egyptia...

Photo from  Max Pixel In class we’ve been discussing the definition of “groups” and collaboration. On Tuesday we finalized our groups for a group project that will be coming up shortly. In this  article  we read for class, talks about how successful teams collaborate.  During our discussion we talked about group roles and the steps to establishing group norms and how they work.  I found this topic to be pretty interesting. A point was brought up about how usually one person in a group well naturally become the group “leader.” I’ve always wondered how that happened. Now I know that some people put more effort into group work more than others, but how does that one person really get picked as the group leader? Usually in class we group with people sitting around us and most of the time we have no idea who these people are so when we start working on the assignment someone naturally just gets the spot and leads the group, but what happens when yo...

Photo by  Pixabay This week in class we touched on the topic of "groups" and then transitioned into the topic of "improvisation or improv."  Tina Fey, a well know actress, comedian, writer and producer. She is most known for her roles on Saturday Night Live "SNL." Tina Fey says, "The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created." With what Tina Fey explained in her rules of improv is that you always agree and from there you improvise and branch off of what the other person says.  You can find the whole set of rules Tina Fey has for Improv  here .  Today in class we were asked to form groups and in our groups two members would have go up in class and try out an improv exercise. I was one of those "lucky" group members. Getting up in front of the class was already hard enough but having to act in fro...

Photo by pixabay During class on Tuesday the term "group" was brought up in our class discussion. A group is usually defined as 3 or more people and they are generally grouped together by a commonality or social relations. There are many different types of groups. One in particular that I am a part of is a group of people I work and collaborate with a few times a month. I am a part of a youth group at my church and we meet a few times a month to discuss our growing fellowship and we plan activities to make the youth at our church be more comfortable and be more active at church and church related activities. We also work together to fundraise to help all the refugees that attended our fellowship. We all gather donations to help families in need all the time. Our church consists of Iraqi's, Jordanian's, Syrian's, and Lebanese. This is our church  website . You should check it out! We all generally share the same interests and we enjoy spending the few times ...

Photo by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0  Collaboration, what is it?  Collaboration can be defined in various ways. Collaboration all begins with a common interest. It can be vastly spread through various social media platforms, classrooms, workplace and it's used on a day to day basis. Let's use social media as an example. Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate with others. Social media is a great tool for collaboration that's why so many of us use it. Various platforms like Reddit, Twitter, youtube, Instagram, etc. are used by many people to collaborate. Personally, I like reddit, youtube, and twitter. Those are the three platforms I gravitate towards to collaborate with others who share the same interests as me. Reddit is probably one of the easiest platforms used to collaborate. It's so simple to use that a toddler could probably figure it out. There is a search bar type in any word and you will be directed to different p...