Dreamweaver and home pages

For the website assignment for Majella’s module, I was generally pleased with how my website turned out. However, there are two major issues I will need to address in future projects and assignments.

Firstly, I need to learn Dreamweaver properly and thoroughly. My knowledge of Dreamweaver includes only what we have learned in the labs, bits and pieces picked up from online tutorials, and help and advice given to me by Brian Carrigan. I still need to learn how to use it properly and extensively if I am to complete the summer development project. For this, I hope to complete the tutorials kindly given to me by Melanie Corr in a CD called ‘The Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 Classroom in a Book’. I also intend on looking at further online tutorials, which some of you have recommended on your own sites. I am concerned about my limited knowledge but I suppose it is just something you need to ‘play around with’. When I wonder if I will ever need to use Dreamweaver again, I am reminded that we are on this course to develop the ability to learn new tools, and not necessarily the new tools themselves.

The second issue concerns my homepage. I realise now (having written the homepage for the team website) that I treat the homepage like the introduction of a help manual. I have been including all of the top level information and all of the links to other pages, on the homepage. However, I have been told by my team that the navigation bar is supposed to suffice for the links to other pages, and that images are supposed to portray some of the information. I must admit, I had to relinquish my usual way of organising information, which can only be a step forward on the learning curve. 

To comment on my blog

Some classmates told me they had problems posting comments on my blog. I think it helps if you preview the message before you post it. Let me know if this helps.

Online communication

In light of the recent discussions, it occurs to me how much more careful I need to be in my online communication with other people. More often than not, my online presence is informal – I usually use the Internet to talk with my friends or with a close work colleague (who know my casual style of writing). In fact, I have enjoyed rather a liberal and impulsive way of writing on the Internet for quite some time. I always considered it as a way of relaxing from the formal writing I did at work. However, in online discussions, that style of writing does not necessarily translate well. Carefully thought-out and well-written sentences must be upheld throughout the discussion to reduce the chances of causing offence.

In fairness to myself, my initial posts were well thought and carefully planned. It was only after a few posts that I began to relax a little into the discussion and started to write more liberally, perhaps to the detriment of my message.

Senge (1994:245) suggests three ways to improve personal communication:

·         reflection: becoming more aware of one's own thinking and reasoning;

·         advocacy: making one's thinking and reasoning more visible to others; and

·         inquiry: inquiring into others' thinking and reasoning.

I am capable of all these skills, especially of reflection and inquiry. I perhaps then have to improve my skills of advocacy, i.e. by making my thinking and reasoning more visible to others. I would also add another aspect to Senge's list (or perhaps it is a part of advocacy): Cushioning (for want of a better word). I can be rather direct. So just like small talk aids the flow of a conversation in real-life, softening the email for the reader can also aid online discussions. For this, I wonder, can one change their personality? ;-)

This also reminds me of a recent discussion I had with a classmate. We talked about the early days of communicating online and how we would have occasionally ignored normal etiquette, mainly because we saw the technology as cold and did not think of the person on the other side as a real person necessarily. It was only after time and after making occasional mistakes that we started to realise that the person on the other side is a real person with feelings and that we should respect him/her. We can learn the rules but sometimes we also learn the hard way.

For more information on netiquette (online etiquette) and articles used in this blog see:

Good Online Conversation - Building on Research To Inform Practice. Sherry et al. Available as a PDF if you search Google Scholar.

http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~davidt/email_etiquette.htm

http://www.thejournal.com/the/printarticle/?id=23225

http://isp-lists.isp-planet.com/email-list-netiquette/.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

http://onlinestudylist.com/etiquette.html.

Self interest v Common interest

In a recent late night work session in the lab, me and a couple of classmates talked about the heightened levels of interactivity in this semester, compared with the last. We each expressed our interest in the discussion forums and team projects, and wondered why there weren’t more of these types of projects in the first semester. One suggestion was that we were not perhaps ready for teamwork at that stage.

In the EL6052 lecture this week, the Five-Stage Model of Teaching and Learning Online was taught which addressed the motivations for participants to work together. It stated that in the beginning, individuals are motivated by ‘self-interest’ and they require extrinsic factors to motivate them. After these factors have been fulfilled, they then seek the ‘common interest’ and they require respect and trust. This is an interesting theory because it is perhaps true that our class were only really in a position to interact with the class, after we had received our results (extrinsic factors) over the Christmas holidays. It is one theory however. Another is, of course, that interactive elements could be introduced on the course sooner.

I am the bullet point queen

One question that both my teams have had in common so far is ‘do we use bullet points or paragraphs in our reports?’.

I am perhaps not the best person to ask – I will opt for bullet points every time. Whenever there is a list of points to be made, I immediately think bullets. But is this lazy (because one is not forming full sentences)? If it is, I don’t mean to be lazy. My justification for using them is to aid with scannability – if there is a point per bullet, the reader can easily see the point. And when I hear ‘report’, I think in terms of highlighting important information (especially if a manager is reading it).

So when is it inappropriate to use bullet points in a report? Are they solely for short lists?

IT and Management

These blogs are designed to reflect our experiences of using technologies during the MA course. Already I have identified a reoccurring theme in mine, which mirrors my interests and background – it is my curiousness into group dynamics when using technologies (see Technology Use and Communication Strategies of Irish and US Students in Virtual Teams  for an example article). This week, we are back to using good old email to communicate with our new teams on the website design project. We have already met face-to-face several times, so really, the emails are reinforcing what we’ve agreed on in the meetings. But there is one element which is different in this project, which we did not have in our last. We have assigned a Project Manager.

In this semester, this course has felt very ‘hands on’. It reflects, to some extent, team projects in the real world. We will have to engage with others using technologies and we will be using technologies in our own work. However, we will also be working with people, and being aware of people issues in a team and learning how to overcome these issues will be extremely useful skills to know as well. Certainly having a Project Manager is a good start.

Writing and editing the same document in a virtual team

The virtual team project may be over, but I am left pondering some of the intricacies of the project. The two main ones that interest me the most are the team dynamics and the editing of one document. There is much literature written on team dynamics, some of which has been posted by Darina. However, for this post, I’d like to discuss the editing of one document.

For our team assignment, each member of our team submitted sections of his/her report to the Resources area of Sulis. Then I, as Editor collated the information into one Word document. Each time a new draft was created, I gave the document a new version number – 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and so on, and then submitted it to the Resources area. This is the traditional way that I have worked on documents. However, I am interested in exploring a better method.

The teams in the class used a variety of editing tools such as wikis, Google docs, and Adobe Communicate to work on the same document. Our team decided to use wikis. My initial reaction to the wiki was one of dislike. It looked like each member had to use the wiki to format and write sections of the document, perhaps synchronously, while signed into Sulis (an application that signs one out after a while perhaps without saving work). Although curious, I left it in the hands of one team member who volunteered to study it. But unfortunately, she was absent from the project so we never really got to explore its use, beyond using it to submit Word documents to the Resources area.

It was clear from the presentation on Wednesday that no team liked to use the wiki for collaboration. So, I’m unsure about exploring it further. I researched some articles and have discovered some interesting alternatives. The following is taken from The user-centered iterative design of collaborative writing software:

·        Aspect – is a collaborative conferencing system that runs on networked computers and provides writing, drawing, and painting tools.

·        GROVE – is an outlining tool designed for users at remote sites working on networked computers.

·        PREP – is a writing tool that provides asynchronous access to documents and can be thought of as a “spreadsheet for documents,” because it provides a column based interface where text is presented in columns of visually linked chunks.

·        Quilt – is a multi-user hypermedia communications and coordination tool which combines computer conferencing with multi-media email.

·        ShrEdit – is intended for simultaneous writing by several users working on networked computers in a conference room.     

If anyone in the class has used any of these tools, please let me know what you think of them.

In the past week, my business partner has purchased Network Attached Storage (NAS) and informs me that one can use this to work on the same document. Some interesting articles on NAS include:

Network attached storage architecture

Storage systems for national information assets

With NAS, one can access another's entire filing system over the Internet, by signing in with a username and password. They can also work on the same document at the same time. Although, it is perhaps not a cost-effective tool to use for small groups (according to the literature).

The concept of working on the same document synchronously interests me (I have only ever been required to work on a document independently). If, in the future, one has to work with a team of technical writers, this is certainly a skill that is desired, and therefore worth knowing.

If anyone has any other experience in this area, please let me know. Thanks.

A little issue

Our team had quite a sensitive issue to deal with. One member of the team was significantly absent throughout the project – a girl on the American side. She failed to submit a draft of her work to the team, she didn’t post or reply to any messages in the discussion forum, and she stopped attending the meetings. We tried, earnestly, to get her involved, but to no avail. We heard, fleetingly at one stage, that she may have been attending a funeral in another state, but we were not sure. We waited for her to contribute her work but when we didn’t hear anything by Sunday, we had to take final action.  

Can we blame the limitations of collaborative technologies on this issue or would this have happened if we were all on the same side of the Atlantic?

I’m inclined to blame it almost entirely on the technologies because we felt powerless to engage her on the project because of their limitations. It sometimes felt like she did not feel accountable to us because she could neither see nor hear us directly. Of course, she may have been attending a funeral in another state (this is entirely possible) but why wasn’t the work submitted then by the weekend or why was she not excused? If we were in the same classroom, it would have been so easy to just go up and say ‘hey, where’s your work girl?’, but of course, we could not do this. Is this an issue we could be facing in the world of work?

In my experience, I have never had this issue in a virtual team in the workplace (and I’ve worked in many virtual teams). So perhaps I am wrong to blame it all on the technologies. In the workplace, you have a well-defined structure of responsibility. If someone is not pulling their weight, management is down upon him or her like a ton of bricks. So, is this soley an issue with a student (and not the technologies), period? It's difficult to tell - the technologies did not help matters but I suspect it was a student issue.

I think, to be fair, it is important to separate the findings of our projects from the workplace. We are studying the use of communicative and collaborative technologies in an educational virtual team. There definitely seems to be a difference (in my opinion anyway).

The following is an interesting related article - 'Managing a Virtual Workplace' by Wayne F. Cascio.