reflection week ten

I liked that this week's discussions related to economics as I am taking macro, so I felt that both made a little more sense.
The fish bowl on Tuesday was ... strained; usually there are an abundance of people who wish to participate in discussions. Those such days would benefit from the separation into smaller groups. However, the reading was difficult to get right away and thus not very controversial. The difficulty discouraged those who are usually quiet from talking for fear of being wrong about their interpretation of the piece. Also, it was not a topic that anyone was versed in beforehand, meaning that those who did not do the reading could not participate at all. With the class already cut in half, these other restrictions on those who could intelligently discuss the topic decreased immensely. Yet I am definitely looking forward to trying the fish bowl again with a more controversial topic; I feel that it will then serve its purpose in allowing more (and different) people to participate.
The discussion did, however, give me a much more solid idea of the differences between embedded and disembedded liberalism than the reading did. Upon blogging and reading others' blogs, I really felt that I knew the basics of each system. Though I felt that many people avoided the question and chose not to take a stance on one side or the other; Obviously a mixture would be best, but the question proposed a hypothetical situation in which only one system could be present. Choosing one forced us to compare and contrast the two and to actually know what we are talking about...

The simulation on Friday was really good. It solidified the differences between each type of liberalism for me and it was fun (though pretty much anything involving candy -and keeping it at the end - is fun). I liked that each group had different requirements and depending on our starting resources, made us represent different countries from the start. Through our actions and our types of candy we established ourselves in the first round, each trading to reach a certain goal. In the second round, much of the trade stopped. I feel that this was because there were few incentives to continue trade; there were only a few new items introduced and those groups with the new types of candy were reluctant to trade them away because they would rather, understandably, keep them. I think that this could have been improved by giving out many new types of candy so that people would actually want to trade for other kinds. I understand though that this is not the most practical of things in our setup, but regardless, it is a suggestion. Overall, I thought that Friday was delicious as well as a great learning experience. Good job group 2 :)