Past two days have been really busy. I spent the whole of monday afternoon and evening mentally and physically preparing the ppt for tuesday's meeting. As my research work was to focus on Singapore and Germany, i thought i would be able to make my slides in a jiffy. But i guess jiffy meant more than 6hrs for me. I did not know that i2r has achieved so much in so little time. It was hard to dig up their relavent articles written for general audience. Their technical stuff is way beyond my engineering background. So i stuck up to the basics. Regarding Germany, the Tubingen group has achieved tremendous success with their Thought Translation Device. Then why do they have very few articles in English to boast about their success? Beats me. I literally had to scorch for information in the web to prepare slides on the TTD. After some hard search, I retired for the day without completing my slides. The next day, i was preparing the rest of the slides (the Muller's group mainly) while i was doing my TA duties. Thank God, the students were not asking too many questions in the practical.
The meeting started with a few setbacks. We had to switch rooms midway during Lei Yang's introductory presentation. The Swiss duo wanted to leave early (1700hrs) and so were Lei Yang and Zhang Lei (meeting and lecture). So, we had to hasten our presentations. Yixiang was visibly upset at this, but he managed to control his temper durng the meeting. Lei Yang took the initiative to come up with introductory slides (i don't remembering anyone volunteering to prepare the introductory slides in the last meeting). Olivier also prepared some slides, but he was more technical compared to Lei Yang. So, all of us decided that Lei Yang is more suitable to be the first speaker. Olivier was more obscure in his presentation, skimming thru' most of the slides. He failed to present indepth information about the BCI research in Cananda and Europe. He just gave a bird's eye view of the info. I couldn't make out anything of what Zhan Liang presented about U Michi's research work except for the fact that they were using invasive electrodes to obtain ECoG and not EEG to control their BCI.Ludovic was not ready with his final slides yet, so his presentation seemed no better. After the duo left, Ni Jun gave a patchy presentation (although his slides indicated lot of effort put in by him) about the retinal implants. Lei Yang also seemed lost. Funny incident, Lei Yang SMSes me from across the room asking whether i can follow Ni Jun's presentation. She could have asked Ni Jun to stop and explain properly. But neither she did nor me. Is it an indication that "The group is not working as a team." Then i talked about my stuff for more than 20 mts. Later Yixiang suggested that i can reduce the length of my presentation as the slides were comprehensive enough. Yixiang went last(only Ni Jun and myself were in the audience), gave a lot of info on Cochlear implants. Later on, over dinner Yixiang expressed his upset about the Swiss duo's attitude towards the project and the meeting. He said that as they did not do their own work properly, they should not complain about other's work. "Do i see ripples in the group? Such upset demons are not good for a working group." I calmed him down saying that they may not be used to the way Asian's work. We have to adapt to work with others so as to build a cohesive and effective team, and not allow such minor incidents to affect the team's work. It is also my first time to work with non-Asians on a school project. I hope we can work together.
Later in the evening, I came to know that Zhan Liang took the initiative to set up an IVLE community group. I am really glad that my group members are showing active interest to work on the project. So, does it indicate that we can work as a team and not just a group?
Reflections from the past two days -
(a) As i took the initiative to be the group facilitator, is it my responsibility to make sure no ripples arise among the group members? If we can't work as a team, the whole point of working in groups for the PBL is diluted.
(b) Can i do something to improve the presentation skills of some of my group members?
(c) We never got to the point of discussing on the shortcomings of the current research work, problems coming out of it, probable solutions to the issues...Waht are we going to tell Prof Yu? We did not come up with any problem. Why did it happen? Was no one interested to discuss? Was there a time mis-management? How could we have avoided this? Should we have followed a different approach to present our findings to save time?
Tomorrow is the group's first meeting with Prof Yu. I seem overly concerned about the meeting. Let's see what happens tomorrow? Till then, happy blogging!
