Group work

If you thought that communication in you own language was difficult, communication in another language really put things in to perspective!
Groupwork is always a challenge cause you need individuals to work together for a common goal and everyone needs to be heard and agree on what to do.
This requires a very clear and understandable communication so no misunderstandings occurs. Clear and direct Communication in it self is also very difficult to obtain, cause we All have different ways of communicating. Sometimes we communicate via sarcasm and maybe you say something between the lines and so on.
All these challenges are magnified when the groupmembers have different nationalities.
First of all you do group work differently in each country and in some countries you don't do group work at all. Doing group work requires a lot of self-discipline cause sometimes you do individual pieces on the assignment and all the pieces needs to fit together in the end of the project. So everyone in the group has a responsibility to do their part and no one else to blame then them self if it's not done. This is of cause hard to do if you haven't tried it before.
Second of all there is the academic level which is very different in each country. Of cause the educations in each country aren't similar but the way we do assignments are very different. In Denmark we learn to be very critical and every time we come up with a allegation we need to have evidence. This evidence needs to be empirical or academic and we need to put a footnote, with a reference to the specific book or homepage, each time we come up with an allegation. And this doesn't seem to be the case in all countries. Furthermore there is a very strict policy about copy paste of others work, you can fail your assignment by doing this and again this doesn't seem to be the case in all countries.
Third of all there is the language barrier which really causes some problems and misunderstandings now and then. It's very hard to have academic discussions if you can't express your self or can't understand what the other one says. Furthermore it can really complicate things when you think you agree on something and the other one does the total opposite or something else then you thought you had agreed on:-)
And the last thing is the culture. In Denmark we use sarcasm a lot and in some countries you don't use sarcasm at all or as much as we do here. So this can cause problems as well cause you say something and you mean the total opposite and if this is not understood things can turn really bad. Furthermore it's very difficult to do a comparative study when you take things for granted. If you think they do it the same way in Spain as they do in Denmark for example. You need to keep an open mind and ask open or objective questions that are not coloured by your subjectivity. This is very hard to do and that's one of the greatest things I learned from this project.