On the project group formation process

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As I'm reading your essays about your relationships to radio and to the course, many interesting issues are raised. I will raise some of them here at the blog.

One (international) student writes (slightly edited):

"I would prefer for everyone to be assigned to random groups rather than people just asking their friends. In real life, you can't choose your teammates, and, it's more fair to foreign students as they would like to join and work with local students, but sometimes can't since these students already have their pre-configured native groups ready."

Up until this year, all students who took this course already knew each other a little or a lot, having (usually) started the same educational program together some years earlier. This is the first year when the group of students taking this course is more mixed. As those of you who studied my course on Social Media last autumn know, it's better to be a central member of a network than a peripheral member, and students who already have well-developed social networks have an advantage and much larger choice than those who know fewer people when it comes to finding teammates and forming project groups.

It might be the case that we will have to alter the group selection process some in comparison to how it has been done before so as to take this into account. We will however on the other hand not form random project groups.

On a practical level, the project groups will be formed as soon as possible after the final (fourth) seminar at the end of this month. Up until then, there are a few things that can be done so as to facilitate formation of new relationships between students, and for you to all get to know new people who take the course a little better:

1. All groups at the first two seminars are put together randomly (I hope Åke also did this for seminar 1).
2. I took photos of the students in my seminar group yesterday, and I want to catch the rest of you next week. The result can be seen in a document that is accessible in Bilda (Documents/Administrative/110909 FoM-photos.pdf). This will help you (and us teachers) to connect names and faces so as to have a better grasp of who-is-who in the course. I will replace the current document with a better version after I have more photos of you.
3. Write something on the companion blog! Comment on each other's blog posts! Don't forget to sign with your name if you have a "strange" (non-intuitive) signature/user name so that other people can identify who you are. Use the who-is-who document to identify who wrote that great blog post and take the opportunity to strike up a conversation (with that oh-so-attractive fellow student :-) during a break!
4. I want to urge you to choose seminar groups at seminar 3 and 4 according to your interest in the exciting project ideas that will present - rather than just based on who you already know. Perhaps something "magic" happens, and a project group forms around an exciting topic, rather than just around pre-existing relationships? If you don't know that many people in class and would like to know more, choose seminar group according to your interests, perhaps going as far as actively avoiding people you already know!

That what I can think of at the moment, perhaps you can think of something else? If so, write a comment to this blog post for everyone to read.

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