I would have to agree with my groupmate Sarah.  When group projects are announced, my first instinct is to run screaming in the opposite direction.  It isn’t because I hate working with others– quite the contrary.  My two main reasons for disliking group projects:  1)Due to Dominican’s diverse student population, my groupmates usually end up being from the four corners of the globe- specifically, the west side, south side, north side, and downtown Chicago and 2) As a grad student juggling a full-course load, job, and attempting a social life, I rarely have time to meet outside of class, especially if the meeting place is one of the corners of Chicagoland I am nowhere near.

So obviously for me, this group project was a breath of fresh air.  As another groupmate said, we completed this project without one single phone call.  Or additional face-to-face meetings.  E-mail and GoogleDocs was a huge part of our communication, but we also used Twitter and the occasional blog entry to keep on track and announce our project’s presence.  I really liked using social networking tools for our project– it’s amazing to think of the possibilities for businesses when incorporating social networking tools for communication.

We created a book review site for our group project.  Our group all had the same initial vision, so it was easy to get excited about the project.  We decided that we would each contribute as many reviews as possible and also be responsible for specific widgets and their utilization.  We decided that we really wanted to incorporate a search bar for our blog, so I reached out and e-mailed an area librarian who had a similar widget on her library’s blog.  I also compiled a list of similar blogs to share on our sidebar for teens looking for more reviewable materials and wrote a lot of reviews.

Our site took a lot of planning and work, but I’m extremely proud of the finished project.  I love how it can be incorporated into any library.  Thanks for a great experience!