X-Culture: Constructive Criticism

Guest Blogger: Gregory Herman, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

I’m glad to know that the X-culture project is finally over. Although it is a good idea when presented, I don’t feel it was effective in aiding in my ability to work with people from different cultures. Most everyone in my group looked at the same way as well, all wanting to reach the end goal successfully without focusing much upon getting to know anyone in the group. This isn’t meant to be a negative blog post but it certainly will be constructive to the topic of X-culture. First off, what disconnects this project the most is that there are no class activities that promote the usage of X-Culture. This means that from the get-go it comes across as your everyday college assignment. In order to promote its effectiveness, there needs to be workshops either in the library or have speakers that are involved in the business world come in to the class and talk about doing business with the specific countries that are involved in the X-Culture project. This will promote the significance of the project and bring the students closer to seeing what the project is actually about. The next thing that needs to be addressed in how we contact each member of the group. The class should be required to make video logs each week that address the group and post them within a centralized location where each group member can access the video log. This will make X-culture more realistic because it will force the students to engage with their emotions and be able to convey their message with more than just words. I believe X-Culture has great potential to be an incredibly valuable learning device in the College of Business, but as of right now it is not much different than your average college assignment.