Reflection on Group Work: ISIS Blog

 This semester our group covered some topics on the terrorist group ISIS. We started with our generally summary of the group and the kinds of things they were doing/what they hoped to achieve in the Middle East and globally. Then we covered the women of ISIS including how ISIS recruits them and what the women are used for. Next was how the group raises money in order to fund their jihad. These included kidnapping and taking over of oil reserves to sell that oil. Lastly we covered tactics that ISIS uses in general to recruit and carry out their jihad like kidnappings, Internet propaganda, and video propaganda.

When I did my research I simply googled the topic that I was going to cover. I always looked at what sources I had found in order to determine if it was a reliable source. Being in a group influenced my methods because the work was usually split amongst us. I would be researching a specific part of the topic we were writing about. For example, I researched video propaganda when my blog group was writing on ISIS tactics. Then I wrote a paragraph summarizing this tactic. However, it was not always this way. Sometimes the writing portion of the blog was split unevenly because it's hard to coordinate something like that in a group. Everyone has different writing styles so it was hard to try and mesh them all together if each person write a separate part of the blog. We used a google doc in order to try and put it all together seamlessly. Using the doc made it so that anyone one of us could read/ edit the blog.

Now I give a lot more attention to news about ISIS than I have before. I had seen news on tv about them but now that I've done so much research I have a much better idea on what they're all about. I'm more interested in learning more because of that. Working in a group was difficult at times. It's hard to split the work evenly among everyone because someone is always doing something else that takes up their time. Also, members of the group having different writing styles made it hard to split the work because it sounds awkward when multiple people are writing the same blog without being in the same room while doing it. Sometimes one person would be doing most of the writing while the others edited, added pictures, did the works cited, or formatted the final post. I've learned that it's important to meet in person and to make sure everyone does SOMETHING even if it's something small.