Summary - The Assignment

Throughout this assignment, we have been working through different information management systems and assessing this knowledge in relevance to our future careers and ambitions.
Over the exercises over the last six weeks, we have worked through many different forms of information management such as blogs, RSS feeds and social networking sites. Personally, this task has been beneficial in providing hands on access to many of the resources that we are likely to be required to be familiar with in the future. There has been a lot of new information that we have been required to familiarise ourselves with and for myself, every week there was a new challenge as the only week that I could say that I was already familiar with the topic was the social networking site, but even then I was still able to attempt new functions such as adding a new group on facebook for my buddy group and I to interact on.
I found Week 4 (Social Bookmarking) and Week 2 (RSS, podcasts and Wikis) to be the most beneficial and relevant topics for this course and was able to put the systems that we had heard about in the lectures and touched on in our labs into practise. Furthermore, the convenience of being able to access the assignment regularly online was helpful considering the amount of interaction that was required within the buddy groups.
As to incorporating buddy groups into the assignment, I think it is useful to be able to discuss the assignment with a group of people who have a vested interest in your blog being as best as it can be. Another advantage of the buddy groups is that there is a lot to learn from people from their own backgrounds and what they take out of the course each week; everyone has their specialities and I think the buddy group system is helpful in allowing people to introduce their individuality into the assignment and within their own buddy group.
One thing that I did find that in a group with five members, it is hard to keep track of commenting on each other's blogs each week and following up on these comments as there are a lot of conversations happening in a number of different areas and it is sometimes hard to do right by your fellow group members and follow up on their blogs each week. In a big group, there is a lot of additional work for each member as their is more to review and discuss. For our group, we did spend a lot of time communicating around classes (though not on each other's blogs), discussing our assignment and our goals for the next week, though this is not always reflective on our blogs.
The concept of having tasks to work on week to week was an advantage for this assignment as it not only provided a timeline for students to adhere to or at least be aware of, as well as being able to break down the assignment into each section and focus your attentions on that topic.