Week 13 - Collaboration Video

This was my second time doing the collaboration video project. Both times it was quite an experience. There were challenges in both but always ended with success. The first time around my Japanese group members didn't speak english very well so it was difficult to communicate with them. However, using all of the technology we had we were able to get enough through to learn and make a successful video.

This time around our group members spoke english well. One of them spoke english better than the others so he mainly spoke for everyone. The only bad part about this was that it caused the other group members to  be more quiet and rely on him a lot and so we didn't get to the know the others as well. I also felt like the one english speaking group member had a lot of pressure put on him to get all of the information across to everyone.

In both projects we used LINE, Google Hangouts, and Google Docs to communicate and collaborate on our project. LINE was a great way to get immediate responses from all group members and Google Docs was just where we kept all of our documents and wrote all of our ideas. We also used email and Drop Box. The second time around we had some technology problems  with Google hangouts and our video was not getting through. The Japanese students weren't able to see our video and the person who took the video didn't have the original version because their phone broke. So at the last minute we took some more video footage and then sent it through via drop box and were able to finally complete the video. Though both projects brought on some stress with the last minute technology problems and battling the different time zones I did learn a lot about Japan and how it compared to Hawaii with relation to fashion and the life of a college student in Japan.

With this project I would suggest making the groups a little bit smaller. Having six people in a group made it hard to get all the information across and find a time that we could all meet. It also made it hard to collaborate and get to know all the group members with such a big group. In my first group we only had 5 group members and even though that was just one person less it seemed like it was  a lot easier to get to know each other.  I think a group of 4 is a good number and having one person as a facilitator helps too. Getting to know your group members is really important in order to have a good video at the end. When I watched the videos I could tell which groups got to know each other and which ones didn't seem to communicate as well. Working with people from another country is a great learning experience for the work field and dealing with language barriers and time zones makes you really have to plan and be patient. These are all great skills to have. With both projects the best part was despite any technical difficulties we came together and did what we needed to do to get our project done. It's all about team work and working together!