Working in a group has been an interesting
experience. I have been a lecturer in DE for the past 12 years and the growth
of technology that enables group work is staggering. At this time my own
subjects that I teach do not lend themselves to employing a group approach. However
I will revisit the idea of group work should I ever teach a subject that will benefit
from group work.
Group work
Working as a group in the DE environment is completely different from any previous group experience that I have had in my academic career. Most of the time when I was working on the grid no other team members was online. If I had any questions for the team, I had to use the discussion area and wait until one of the team answered the query. This made the writing and editing of the grid a very drawn out affair. As with group work at any level, not all of the team members put in the same amount of time to the work. One team member never joined the group in any of the work and one team member withdrew from the course after the first submission. The other team members (James, Dwayn, LaWanda and myself), tried to pick up the slack and deliver a complete grid with each deadline. The main contributors of the group were myself and James. I set up the grid for the group using Google docs and did a lot of the editing and comment resolving for the grid. I also set up the reference list and edited it to make sure that it was uniform throughout.
Grid Topic
The way the topic and the columns were given to us for the grid made it virtually certain that there was at least one column that each of the group members were interested in. Being an engineer the column that I found the most interesting was the predominant technology column. From the second wave on I also did the theories column and from the third wave on I did the key authors column aswell.
Use of the Grid
The information in the grid is a very good summation of what we did in the course. The way that I used the grid while we were doing it, was to read all of the required material and then summarize it for myself in my own copy of the grid. This gave me a good overview of what was going on in a particular week. At the end when a part of the grid was submitted, I read through the contributions of the other team members and made sure that I had all of the information of a particular wave in my copy of the grid. If I had missed some information, I would go back to the reading and reread the sections that I missed.
Conclusion
This has been a very worthwhile exercise and I would like to thank my team members for their contributions and hard work to make out group grid the best of those in the class (in my opinion).
Group work
Working as a group in the DE environment is completely different from any previous group experience that I have had in my academic career. Most of the time when I was working on the grid no other team members was online. If I had any questions for the team, I had to use the discussion area and wait until one of the team answered the query. This made the writing and editing of the grid a very drawn out affair. As with group work at any level, not all of the team members put in the same amount of time to the work. One team member never joined the group in any of the work and one team member withdrew from the course after the first submission. The other team members (James, Dwayn, LaWanda and myself), tried to pick up the slack and deliver a complete grid with each deadline. The main contributors of the group were myself and James. I set up the grid for the group using Google docs and did a lot of the editing and comment resolving for the grid. I also set up the reference list and edited it to make sure that it was uniform throughout.
Grid Topic
The way the topic and the columns were given to us for the grid made it virtually certain that there was at least one column that each of the group members were interested in. Being an engineer the column that I found the most interesting was the predominant technology column. From the second wave on I also did the theories column and from the third wave on I did the key authors column aswell.
Use of the Grid
The information in the grid is a very good summation of what we did in the course. The way that I used the grid while we were doing it, was to read all of the required material and then summarize it for myself in my own copy of the grid. This gave me a good overview of what was going on in a particular week. At the end when a part of the grid was submitted, I read through the contributions of the other team members and made sure that I had all of the information of a particular wave in my copy of the grid. If I had missed some information, I would go back to the reading and reread the sections that I missed.
Conclusion
This has been a very worthwhile exercise and I would like to thank my team members for their contributions and hard work to make out group grid the best of those in the class (in my opinion).