How was it for you?

Overview

Collaboration is not easy. We often merely cooperate, distributing sections of a task rather than working together on the whole. It needs practice and as we will be doing more collaborative activities during the course it is important to reflect on the success of the process this time, so that we can improve it next time. 

Objectives

To reflect on the dynamics of the collaboration process 

Christmas and a few distractions later, I’m re-focusing on MUVEnations before the course re-starts next week.   I need to do some catching up, including reflecting on the dynamics of the collaboration involved in our most recent activity – producing a travel guide to a Second Life educational site or resource.  

Collaborating with blue group colleagues turned out to be complicated.  To start with, only one or two other group members seemed to be actively following-up the original blue group thread.  We all seemed unsure how to proceed; put into a group with several seemingly absent colleagues.  On reflection it might have been easier to let groups emerge naturally, allowing the different participants an opportunity to progress at their own pace together with likeminded colleagues. There was an uncomfortable wait to see who else would surface before we reached a decision to push on…  

Was it easy to define objectives and criteria? 

Having decided to make a start, a few of us got together at MUVEnation Island to discuss our plans.  Meeting in-world was interesting, my first real experience of how purposeful activity might be planned and acted on.  I wrote about this at the time in some earlier blog posts, and the logs of these conversations have been posted by Teresa Almeida d'Eça (Tere Short) at http://mvn08.edublogs.org/.   I certainly found it more engaging and immersive than simply participating in IM chat, even though in the end, IM chat was what it was…   By the second conversation protocols for our discussions were already emerging.  I found myself more consciously leaving space for others to speak, confirming my understanding and summarising regularly.  I’m pretty sure the same sorts of patterns were emerging in the behaviour of the others.  I also noticed that I became a little more ‘direct’ in making suggestions for moving forward.  This is probably one consequence of reduced social cues in computer mediated communication (Researchers have been writing about this for a long while… I’m not going to get all academic, but a search on ‘reduced social cues’ and CMC will turn stuff up if your interested.  What I couldn’t turn up is useful guidelines on how to manage purposeful interaction through IM.  I’m sure hey must be out there, and they’d be useful to teachers working in this medium for the first time.

How did you distribute the work? 

Our attempts to work collaboratively were mugged by the intrusion of RL events, first a family emergency that took Sally and I away from home unexpectedly, then Christmas and the aftermath… by the time we got back to SL the group had moved on.  Sally and I continued to collaborate on collecting our information and constructing our guidebook.  It’s funny how the frustrations of CMC collaboration melt away when you’re both in the same room…

How did you feel about your own participation? 

Pretty good actually, apart from the Christmas hiatus.   I feel I got my act together, contributed to the group aspects of the work, and put my guidebook together reasonably successfully.  In constructing our ‘Info Booth’ we went further than we needed to with building and presentation, but I guess that’s the dramaturg  in both of us…   

Where there any problems, or misunderstandings? 

I’d plan things a bit more systematically if doing this again, ensuring that I collect together all my images, text, artefacts, scripts, etc before starting building – but that’s learning.  I’m also left with a lot more questions about building, though I appreciate this was not essentially a building task, just an area I dragged myself off into. The main problem with the task itself was actually getting started – identifying the active group members and arranging a first meeting.  A little more assertiveness early on would have helped, although I also feel that a less directive approach to the organisation of the groups would have allowed the more active students to band together and move ahead more quickly.  Once we actually got going things seemed pretty straight forward, until RL events intervened.  Of course, it’s not clear how our early plans for collaboration would have worked out in practice.