Collaboration, Communication and Teamwork

These guys look like they're having fun, don't they? It's good to do things with a friend!

This semester I have a group work assignment. I wasn't feeling too enthusiastic, to be honest. It isn't that I don't like working with other people...nothing like that! It's just that I know how hard it is for me to fit in my uni study with all my other responsibilities. I know it is exactly the same for my fellow group workers. So I guess I worried that we would find it hard to coordinate our free time, and I also hated the thought of holding up other people's work by being too slow.

Another issue is the fact that we instinctively prioritise the group work above our other work so that we don't inconvenience the others, and then end up falling behind in other areas. It's hard to find the correct balance. Also, we tend to bend over backwards to be helpful and 'make it work', so to speak, rather than being able to just selfishly plow ahead on our own agenda.

So, anyway, how is it going so far? I'm glad you asked...

We have settled on a topic! Hooray! Greg is going to run it by our lecturer to get the go-ahead, but we're pretty happy with it. "Improving Student Learning by Aligning Information Services with the School's Mission Statement." Sounds impressive, huh?

Our skype conference call was a bit of a dud. We just couldn't seem to have all of us talking together and being able to all hear each other, and we weren't exactly sure what the problem was. Since we had all set aside the time to talk, and we really needed to settle on a topic, we used the chat room on our group work site instead. Linda and Greg helpfully updated our wiki so that we had a record of everything we discussed.

So now we're moving ahead on getting some resources together before our next chat on Wednesday night. It's great that we're making progress, but I must admit that because I'll want to make a good showing on Wed with the others, it will put pressure on my ability to do any other uni work. My other subject's first assigment will be suffering. There just aren't enough hours in the day, and I'm so talented at wasting time!

Anyway, onward and upward...