Topic 3

In general, the cooperation between my groupmate and I went quite well. For this project we chose the topic greenhouse gas emissions caused by intensive agriculture. We knew quite quickly that we wanted to use this group project to talk about this topic, as we were both curious to learn more about it, especially since it applies to us on a very local scale. This made the decision about the topic particularly easy. I wouldn't say either of us was more in charge in this process of decision making, considering as our thoughts overlapped a lot most of the time and we were on the same page about a lot of things.

For the collective part of the research, we chose to work together on finding as much information as possible. We put all our findings in one word document, so we had all our information in one place. This was an idea from my groupmate which turned out to come in handy later, as we had a lot of general information about our topic in one word document which was very usable when making the PowerPoint.

But this was not the case when it came to the research of the individual part of our presentation; our solutions. For this part of the presentation, we both did our research individually, as we came to the conclusion that this would be the most efficient way to find information that applied to our chosen solutions in the time that we had. Another reason why we chose to do this was because our solutions were quite different from each other and therefore, we couldn't really help each other with researching. While doing this research, I gained a lot of new knowledge about the topic. While I wasn't completely new to this topic, researching it has been eye opening and has made me realise that the problem is more complex than it seems to be, and it could pose a real challenge to solve. But doing this research by myself also made me discover a weakness I have. That is the fact that I tend to research too much, opposed to researching one thing very thoroughly. Doing this research alone, made me realise that I should focus more on researching the depts of issues rather than researching various aspects of it. So perhaps that is something I can work on in the future.

After we had collected enough information, we came back together again and put everything in the PowerPoint. This was the easiest part because at this point, we only needed to put all of the information we had collected beforehand in the PowerPoint, as we had saved it all in one word document. Like I said before, this came in handy and saved us time in the process of making the PowerPoint, which gave us more time to focus on other things as well.

So, in general, I would say that the cooperation between my groupmate and I went very well and that there were no problems or lack in communication between the two of us. Both of us worked seriously according to the goals we set, and we both made sure to finish things on time so we wouldn’t have to do anything in a rush, since we did not want that to reduce the quality of our final product.

Furthermore, even though we did some parts of the research separately, I think we did learn from each other, as we did help each other occasionally, even regarding the separate parts of this presentation. My groupmate had some interesting views and ideas in regard to the solution I chose and vice versa. Naturally, we shared those with each other, which, in my opinion, not only helped with broadening our research, and bettering the presentation, but it also helped me to gain even more knowledge about this topic and essentially broadening my frame of reference, as other peoples’ opinions can be very useful and open one's eyes to different perspectives on the issue. So, while this project definitely brought me more knowledge about the emissions of greenhouse gases caused by intensive agriculture, it also thought the worthiness of the views of other people and how those can be helpful in situations like these. In the end, I am proud of the end result, and I am content about the cooperation between my groupmate and I.