Sukay's ARP

This Blog is specifically for journal entries regarding my Action Research project, conducted in accordance with my studies in the OMET program at Pepperdine University.

Friday, November 19, 2004

Walking and blogging

It occurs to me that I have not blogged as much in the last 2 months as I did before that. I was thinking about why that is... some of it is, of course, that Bb, Lit review notes, Sue's class, etc all seem to consistently get a higher place on the list of my priorities. But - yesterday while walking to work, I realized something else... the real beginning of this sort of slacking off (where the blogging is concerned) started around the same time I moved to the new house and started walking to/from work. Most days I walk the route four times (to in the morning, home for lunch, back after lunch, and then home at the end of the day). In addition to the fresh air, these walks provide a wonderful environment for reflection. So - I 've been doing quite a bit of my reflection while walking. I need to make time to blog about these reflections, especially the ARP related ones.

It was while walking to work a few weeks ago that the idea occurred to me to take some basic personality tests/communication style tests, complete them myself, and then ask my peers to complete them as well.. but the twist is I won't ask them (at first) to complete them from a personal point of view - rather, I want them to answer the questions in terms of how they view my personality and communication style. Then I'll compare their answers with my own. I'm most curious to see how different people perceive me. Today, as I walked, I thought about what I would do with the results. I realized that to make sense of them, I would also need to have some understanding of the personality/communication style of my peers... so, I will probably have to ask them to fill at least one of the questionnaires (for lack of a better term) for themselves as well. Now the big question - What am I going to do with all that information once I have it. Do I intend the change something about the way I communicate? Maybe... (it's a matter of degrees, I suspect)... Maybe closer to the truth would be that I want to know if I should change what I communicate more than how I communicate. I wonder if each of us are in someone missing out on the "what."

Sort of related to this - one of the things we do during some of our general design meetings is cover some basic writing skills (sort of a brush-up). We are fortunate to have several excellent writers on our team, and one in particular who knows just about all there is to know about formal writing. Occasionally, we doe little worksheets together... A la "What is wrong with this sentence..." Generally - these are helpful because they directly relate to some common types of phrases that we use in our instructional materials. But - the other day we did one where about half of the items were indeed common misconceptions (or misuse) of certain words (such as the word "due") - but didn't really apply directly to the work we do (some of the words and rules were more arcane than "due" and not words that we commonly use in our instructional writing). Personally I didn't mind the exercise, but as I watched the rest of the ten, I noticed that several people were somewhat frustrated. I think this frustration was a combination of feeling inadequate (because they didn't know the specific rules being referred to) and of feeling like their time was being wasted (after all, we all have projects due and deadlines to meet... We generally see the value in our design meetings... but this time several people didn't). Yet - no one came right out and asked "Why are we doing this w/ these specific words/rules?" "How does this apply to our current projects?" My suspicion, based on the last couple of excellent courses I've reviewed, is that there were not enough examples from our own work that required attention this time around, so the organizer of this interaction felt it was necessary to go searching for something to include in the exercise. Several months ago, I would not have questioned this at all - especially since I don't really mind such exercises. Now - I have to wonder "Why is this exercise even necessary at this time?" "What is the real goal of it?"

Ok - enough on that for now.

One other quick note, mostly for myself. I still intend to change our office geography - but I have to rethink how, now that we've moved more people into our area. Not everyone in the area would benefit from a more open space. Some of this is already solved because those that need the most "quiet" space have their own offices or have cubes that are set somewhat apart from the double cube quads shared by the design/development team.

That's it for tonight... must get back to reading for the lit review... or perhaps sleep... yes.. sleep would be good too.

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