Collaboration, I seem to be doing a
lot of it lately. You could say this is
normal for a college student but I didn’t really understand what I was doing
until learning about the workings of collaboration in class. For this post I will be discussing two
different ways in which I have collaborated this semester. To make it more interesting I am going to
compare offline and online collaboration which I have recently done both of.
So let’s start with online, this
class after all is “Collaborating in Online Communities”. I just recently have started taking online
classes so this is a rather new concept to me.
I can remember when I took my first online class, just last semester actually,
how surprised I was that the instructor wanted us to work together. I thought to myself how am I going to do this
and how can this be collaborating if I never meet the person. So here I am in an assigned group of 5 people
that I have never met and don’t even know how to get in contact with, to
complete an assignment due later in the week.
Well first thing that came to my mind was let’s find a day that everyone
can meet up at the University library.
That was quickly rejected and I came to the realization that people are
taking online classes for a reason, they can’t get to campus easily.
So I find myself scratching my head
again wondering how I am going to get this done. There is one reading in particular that
struck me this semester that I wish I had come across about 5 months ago. The article is provided by Harvard Business Review and it is titled “How Successful
Virtual Teams Collaborate”.
Image provided by Flickr
One major
thing I took away from this reading was “Don’t be afraid of social media”. The article talks about how people are more
prone to collaborate with others who are similar to them. Well what is a better way to get to know
someone, chat on social media and see what they are interested in. This will get the ball rolling and get your
team members to feel more comfortable but what social media is really useful,
as the article points out, is communication.
One example is chipmaker Xilinx who has reported an increase in engineer
productivity by 25%. This company has
used social media for co-workers engage in collaborative projects purely
through social media.
I think of how this could work for
my example of the class I took last semester.
What does just about every college student have and actively use? Social
media of course, Harvard Business review even points out how effective a group
can be if the members were to maintain a wiki or some other online forum. I know personally that I would have been more
likely to have better communication with my group if we would have chatted on
social media. I could have quickly seen
my other group members work progress and questions and give them feedback. Social media used in the right way can be a
good thing, this is something that society is starting to learn.
Image provided by Flickr
So now I am going to dive into
offline collaboration, something I actually do more often. I am a more offline type person I like the
face to face aspect of collaboration and find it more comfortable to me. Just a few hours ago I presented a project in
class that required offline collaboration.
Our goal was to come up with a film we were going to analyze and look
into how the group in the film is following Tuckman's 5 Stages of Group
Development. The five stages that Tuckman talks about are
Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and adjourning. They are all described in detail in the
article so I will not bore you with the definitions, rather I will explain how
my group managed to advance through these phases.
Our forming stage began in class
when the instructor wanted us to group and find people whom we thought we would
work well with. There are three out of
the six that are in our group that already knew each other and had good
chemistry to begin. So we decided to
choose three other people who shared our same goal which was to get an A on the
project. We based it firstly on who
shows up to class, hoping that these are the type of people that will be
reliable. Once we established that we
talked to the potential members and made sure they shared the same goal of
getting a good grade. We have now
progressed through the forming phase and begin into storming.
Image provided by Pixabay
We began figuring out our class schedules and any conflicts
the group might have meeting up. This
series of conflicts our group faced puts us into the storming phase. We decided to delegate tasks and set
deadlines for when things need to be done for the rest of the group to
review. We established a clear group
leader who will lead discussion and ensure the group stays in contact throughout
the process. Our group began to see the
norming phase when we all began to get along and realize what everyone’s talent
was. There was one person in our group
who was great at website design so we allowed him to lead the way with the
site. Everyone seemed to fit in and our
group moved smoothly. Performing came
when it was time to present our project.
We rehearsed it several days in advance and made sure everyone knew
exactly what they were going to say.
Things went smoothly and our group was voted best presentation of the
day. We came to the adjourning phase
where our group went from talking weekly about the project, to moving on with
other assignments and facing our individual next challenges.
There are many ways to collaborate and many different groups
that may be classified as collaborative groups.
I as well as you the reader have probably been a part of more
collaborative groups than you know. Success
is found in a group or team and knowing how to effectively collaborative is
imperative!
Interesting post. Who wrote it?
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