Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Library school is very big on the presentations and the group projects. I understand why; after all, during an interview for a position as a librarian (especially in the academic context), you will be expected to do a presentation for about an hour (including Q&A) to show that a) you can successfully research something and b) you can convey the results of your research, which is something you’ll be expected to do frequently on the job.

The value of group projects I’m less sure about. Sure, you can show that you work well with others, but I’m going to guess that most of the time, when you have a group project on the job, it will involve someone assigning work to various people, who will then have clear goals.

The group project I’m currently working on isn’t quite like that. We have 10 people — the entire class — working on the same project. We will all get the same grade. We’ve had to decide how to split things up ourselves, and nobody’s in charge (though, thankfully, someone has taken the reins by setting up the wiki and doing the kind of administrative stuff that will shape the project).

These things *can* work, if you have clear areas of responsibility so that one person isn’t stuck doing all the work and everyone else free-rides. Or if you don’t have any problem children who don’t work well with others.

We’ve already had a problem child emerge.

The project is to create a wiki in which we answer a number of reference questions using government information sources. There will be one question for each member of the class, and since the professor wants us to work in groups, she really wants us to have more than one person working per question. So the way we’ve worked it out amongst ourselves is that one person will be the main one and another will be the backup, and suggest other sources. It’s early in the semester, and we haven’t quite finished setting up the wiki, nor have we quite worked out what exactly what the backup person does.

Well. Our Problem Child has already decided that the backup person “literally” steals questions. At least that’s what he accused the backup person on his question of doing, since she’d put a lot of sources on the part of the wiki for “his” question. On the class forum. Which the prof can see.

The funny thing is, he seems to think that everyone else would back him up in his accusation that the dirty thieving wench STOLE HIS QUESTION while he was at work, because he asked everyone else what they thought of her dirty thieving wench ways.

He didn’t get the response he wanted. DTW responded that it was all a misunderstanding, and she hadn’t been clear on what her role should be. Group-reins-taker settled ruffled feathers.

Then, of course, I put my two cents in:

Since you asked, what I think is that you should have approached [DTW] before bringing this to the group and given her a chance to respond.

Accusing her of bad faith in front of the whole group without first attempting to clarify with [DTW] what was going on and working it out between yourselves is not a very productive way to handle this kind of situation. And, really, it reflects poorly on you.

As I told the classmate who emailed me to tell me that was great, THIS IS WHY I HATE GROUP PROJECTS. Though, I suppose every library’s going to have a passive-aggressive whiner on staff, so maybe learning to deal with them is part of the professional-training experience.