Good things happen when we work well together!

Working as team to write the report was a good experience. It was very interesting to see the different writing styles and how the report came together.

We started communicating in the forum created for the team report as soon as the forum was opened, and we formed our group even before the course started. We were one of the first teams to be set up, the third one in fact.

Everyone in my team was very up front and clear about their goals for this paper, and about their general abilities. They were up for the challenge, were available for whenever we needed something done for the report, and they opened their homes for our meetings.

We created a Facebook account as soon as the group was formed, so that we could communicate more easily, but we also exchanged emails and text messages. We also had a few Skype sessions and met in person three times. Therefore, communication within our group was excellent!

I don’t believe we played any specific Belbin team roles in our team, but we definitely showed features from some of these roles. We nominated a leader – Nadine – and we identified her as being the “Plant” role. She came up with many ideas for how we should address the objectives for the report and most definitely, when we had an issue with the content of the report at the very end; she came up with a very good solution on how we could fix the issue.

We can say that Nicole was our “Co-ordinator”, she was very good at identifying what had to be done, added it to our minutes for follow ups, and she also helped us to focus in our tasks. Melinda was definitely our “Resource Investigator”, she was the one with really good contacts for the interviews and she organized them very promptly and very efficiently. I believe that I was the “Implementer”, since I am crazy about meeting deadlines and I collected everybody’s ideas and work to put it all together and produce the report.

We worked really well together and we completed all our tasks. The only downside was that we identified, in the very last week before the report was due; that we hadn’t covered the “Ethical” concerns surrounding our topics properly. We realised that we had missed very import points in regards to the ethical questions.

So as a team, we decided that we would change the content of the report slightly to try and address the ethical questions. However, by doing that we disrupted the entire final editing process, and therefore our report was not finished at the highest standard that we planned for. We were all aware there would be a compromise, but we decided to take the risk.

Nonetheless, I believe we achieved a lot in a short period of time, produced a very good report and most of all worked well together…

…just as I was finishing writing this blog, I saw that our grades for the report were already available at the Stream website….We got an “A”!!!!  That is the proof of the good work we did together!!!

Congratulations to my team!! The “A” team!!

 

Measles outbreak in the United States

One of the subjects covered in my team report was the very controversial topic about Immunisation. Our analyses was in favor of the topic and explained all the benefits and the importance about vaccines in New Zealand. Coincidentally enough, not long after we submitted our report, I heard the news on TV about the measles outbreak in the United States.

From January 1 to January 23, 2015, 68 people from 11 states in the U.S. were reported to have measles (CDC). Most of these cases are part of a large, ongoing outbreak that began at Disneyland in Southern California and U.S health officials say that it continues to spread across the nation.

The outbreak was said to have started after an unvaccinated California woman apparently transmitted the virus through airports and the theme park, health officials said.

The CDC calls measles the “most deadly of all childhood rash/fever illnesses” and the virus is highly contagious and is transmitted through an infected person’s coughs or sneezes.

Vaccines are said to be 99% effective. However, a recent anti-vaccination movement in the U.S has falsely and misleadingly linked autism to the vaccines and even though there are no background or scientific evidence to support this claim, parents aren’t vaccinating their children anymore.

This anti-vaccination movement is happening in many other countries around the world and immunizations rates are dropping. This is very concerning because many children are being put at risk of contracting diseases due to the lack of information and ignorance.

Cases like this measles outbreak in the U.S could have been completely avoided since vaccination could have prevented the outbreak.

 

 

http://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/index.html

http://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html