Connecting the dots

Reading through my prior posts, I have written blog posts about transaction costs, opportunism, successful team, and transfer pricing. Blogging helps me to understand the concept much better than other classes that I am just listening to the lectures and taking tests on the concepts that I was taught. Blogging helps us to think about real-world situation and our own experiences regarding the concept and elaborate how that experiences are connected to the concept/theme of the blog and further in our course. And, I believe that applying concept to the real-world is the most important in the learning process, since it is actual purpose of the learning. I realized that I can connect the dots among the blog posts, and also the concepts that we have learned in the class.

In general way of connecting dots among blog posts, transaction costs occur when one tries to make the organization better. And, in order to have the better performing organization, one would need to have a successful team in the organization. There will be individuals in the team. And, those individuals might act as “good citizen” or act opportunistically. I am not saying that acting opportunistically is a bad citizen. I rather think it is a “wise” action to take. However, in organization rationale, having either opportunistic or “good citizen” team member or employee matters. And, transfer pricing is one of many methods or rules when pricing transaction in organization. For our case, the organization is University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. And, method of transfer pricing is implementing “illinibucks” to the system, which can help students move in the head of the line.

I could connect the dots after I carefully read through all prompts and the posts I have written. When I was writing each post, I didn’t directly see the connections between them, but I remember myself thinking “I could elaborate on this with my prior posts, but I would rather write about new experience to make sure I am hitting the point of this blog post.” For example, when I wrote about the transaction costs, I talked about Korean Cultural Center (KCC) which was RSO that I am part of. And, I explained some transaction costs that occurred during my time in KCC. Members are now required to participate in more events that are held by other teams in KCC, which can be considered as transaction costs. For successful team blog, I wrote about ECON 460 group project. But I could also have wrote about my team in KCC, meaning the themes of blog posts are connected. In order to have a successful team, Katzenbach and Smith introduced 6 distinguishable features of high function teams. Among those features, I could have talked about holding themselves collectively accountable. Before individual teams didn’t support each other, which makes different team members not to consider each other as accountable. And, this made each team member not to work hard to know each other, not making a successful and supportive RSO. After the transaction costs occurred, KCC has become successful than before. KCC is more collaborative among team members to promote Korean culture and know each other better, which is one of the many purposes of KCC (socializing).

In addition, the concept of opportunism can be applied to KCC. Each member of KCC could have act as opportunistically or rather choose to act as “good citizen.” The sole purpose of KCC is to promote Korean cultures to campus. However, since it is an RSO, not a professional organization, some members don’t care about the purpose, but socializing. They could take an advantage of RSO circumstance and just socialize with other members, not contributing to promote Korean cultures. While others can work hard to promote Korean cultures by actively participating in not only social events such as bowling night but also actual events promoting Korean culture such as Korean alphabet (Hangul) day event where members held the booth in quad and helped students write their names in Korean alphabet (Hangul) in bookmark.

Through writing several blog posts, I have evolved my process for writing blog posts. Before taking this course, I have never written blogs in my life. So, I didn’t know which tone format I should write in. So, I have read many posts from the former students who took this course and follow their style of writing. And, I also followed Dr. Arvan’s recommendation of process: brainstorming, rough draft, final draft, and publish, not just writing immediately in the blog system and post. In addition, through commenting in other students’ blog posts after reading their posts under the same prompt, and reading the comments from the professor and other students helped me to look back on my blog posts and what I could have elaborate more on. I used to write blogs only in my perspective, but now I try to think and write in different perspectives. And, I became better at coming up with my experiences as I wrote a few posts. In the beginning of writing the blog posts, I have spent so much time on just coming up with my experience that would match the prompt.

I think it is a good idea to present the concept that students are supposed to hit when writing the blog posts in the prompt. If I were in the position assigning prompt, I would keep presenting the concept such as “transaction cost,” “transfer pricing,” “opportunism,” and “successful team.” I also think it was a good idea to have textbook referral to help students to understand the concept better in particularly in “successful team.” But I also enjoyed writing blog posts in creative thinking such as “illinibucks” to better understand on transferring price. So, I would write prompts with right mixture of writing about own experiences and writing creatively given arbitrary situations to make learning process more enjoyable!