Collaboration, Communication, Goals and Outcomes

Article Reflection
Article: Collaboration! Communication Processes, Goals, and Outcomes for Successful Team Activities.

I know I am going backwards with my blogs....I should have written my reflection on this article a couple weeks back but I didn't. I have been trying to see each article that I have read in the frame of our group assigned for the final Web2.0 project. Each article has made me think more clearly and motivates me to be a team player.

This article especially was insightful on how communication is important in any kind of group, small or large. The free flow of information through various chanels, it's reciprocal and it's content is what makes the information valuable.

In our team efforts to collaborate for our Disaster Relief & Coordination, we have been through various issues. We haven't had much problems with redundancy since our team has done an exceptional job of communicating with clear tasks. But we have encountered issues of noise and channel capacity when exploring various collaborative tools. For example, when we tried to chat over Skype, since we all didn't have the same version of the tool, we had trouble sharing our data. With Second Life, we had issues of enabling voice chat. We also had cross platform issues with ichat which works only with Mac's and not PCs. These various problems actually helped us in identifying which tool was better to accomplish a certain goal. In that sense we did learn about being efficient with the appropriate tools and that is very important when you are trying to collaborate with people residing in different time zones.

In our experiments with the various collaborative tools, interactivity and feedback played an important role as well. Each team member was assigned a specific aspect of the project to research. We then had to find ways to send our research to each other and then provide feedback. We used email to send our research to each other and then we used Skype, Ichat and Second Life to discuss our research. The part that actually made all this a richer experience was the links and sources from where we got all our research. There are real world examples working today that we all derived our information from. Now the challenge in the next part of our project lies in pulling all of that together! I am sure we will come across new hurdles but thanks to our teams effective communicative methods, we will figure it out.