The End of the Collaboration Project

This week saw the hand in of the collaboration project. It was a busy week spent tying up loose ends and trying to present a complete unified project for the team. It was a fascinating experience which introduced me to new tools and a new way of going about a project. As a team, I think we were all satisfied with how it all went in the end.

At the beginning of the week we met on Monday to co-ordinate our final three days of activity. Here we discussed the details of the report such as the use of bullett points and how we could get the whole report looking the same way. We also discussed the logistics of passing the report around so that everyone could put their final contributitions into the report. I was in charge of the appendices and references so this was important for me to know as a lot of my work had to be done on the final version of the report.

We also discussed the structure of the conclsuions and reccomendations section and what Katrina was going to put in here. We gave some of our perpspectives, as the job involved distilling our own individual reports. Podcasts were discussed quite a lot in this regard as it was largely found that they were not the most effective communication tool for collaboration in a project such as this. For example it was mentioned that podcasts were good at giving information from one to lots of people, but that in a small group there were other tools that were more effective in doing this. But it was mentioned that they did help shape the social dynamic in the group and so in this repect they had a positive influence.

We also had a meeting on Tuesday, Most of the work was done by this stage. We confirmed that we were all happy with the sections, and discussed some oustanding issues, such as listing the limitations of the project for inclusion in the report. We discussed the structure of the presentation which John had kindly volunteered to do.

By Wednesday the report was handed in to the team's relief. It was a very enjoyable project and a good experience. Overall, the report definitely impovved my knowledge of the vaious tools that we worked with, and how modern communications would work in the workplace. From a learning perspective, my understanding of these tools is a lot more robust. I am really now looking forward to the next team assignment that has already commenced, where we are designing a website for the UL Practicum Project Hopefully I will learn as mcuh in this as I did in the previous project and it will be interesting to apply the knowledge gained in the collaboration project to this new endeavour. Web design is a subject that I am interesting in, so I am looking forward now to my skills evolving in this area also.

Brian.

Here is an interesting link discussing the collaborative potential of wikis, podcasts and blogs. Hopefully a good way of summing up the collaboration project!:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41