The majority of our virtual team would probably say no. Members were practically forced to use it at times. Our blogging specialist was frustrated at continuously writing up minutes of meetings and posting them in the blog, and then finding that no one really had anything to say. She tried, laboriously, to encourage the team to use it as an interactive tool by posting issues and discussions on the blog, but to no avail.
It was never going to be any good for issues and discussions. The purpose of a blog is to reflect on learning (from what I can see). Issues and discussions are for the discussion forums and the meetings, blogs are for reflecting.
Personally, I found the blogs useful. I read all of the posts, and commented on most of them. If I identified an issue, I took it to the discussion forum. It definitely made me think! I also found it interesting to see how others interpreted the meetings. It helped me gage their attitudes to them, which is yet another socio-emotional clue in a covert and virtual team environment.
So, in my opinion, yes they are good for teamwork. However, the issue lies in finding ways to encourage everyone to use it.
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ReplyDeleteI'm starting to think that the trick with blogs is to make them controversial by posing a question at the end. I think that might elicit more responses and generate discussion. I'm new to blogs, and my first three blog posts were sort of just exercises in navel-gazing I think. Similarly, in posts where people just describe what happened there day consisted of, it can tend to read like the minutes of a meeting. So I reckon, spice it up a bit. I just tried a new approach with my own reflective learning blog by writing an uncharacteristically short post and closing with a question for everyone. I'll see if it works...
ReplyDelete@sclearyodonell - is anybody reading your blog? How do bloggers develop a following?
ReplyDeleteHi Maresa,
ReplyDeleteI had a similar experience to your teammate. I'm covering blogs for our group. At the start I had no idea how to get everyone to contribute. I was just posting meeting summaries. Unless somebody disagreed with my summary there was no need for them to post.
As Shane mentioned, posting a question at the end helped to get some conversation going. Eventually we established a main blog where we posted questions, useful links etc. Some team members started separate blogs about their section of the report. It is a useful tool for collaboration I think, but having so many tools available in Sulis (blog, forums, chat room) confuses things a bit.
@ Maureen: I'm not sure how many people are reading my blog. I've received a few comments though. I'll put it this way: If I were someone else, I probably wouldn't have read my first two or three blog posts. That's why I'm going to change tack slightly, to experiment. BTW: I posted a link today which contained tips on how to make your blog more popular and, er, 'googlable'.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments.
ReplyDeleteBryan, perhaps if the project had a longer duration, people may use blogs to keep track of the project? They can, sometimes, seem quite superfluous in team collaboration for a short term project.
Shane, I checked out your blog, thanks. It may help in getting the right balance between writing blogs for education and for our peers.