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).
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.
Rather than being an issue relating to the limitations of technology and virtual collaboration, it may have been more down to the fact that this was all college work. Some people are just bad students or unreliable. I'm not saying that this is the explanation in your scenario, but it's quite possible all the same.
ReplyDeleteYes, I have considered this. However, it is perhaps easier to motivate someone when they are with you in the real world. As a team, we would have spoken to her and discovered what her problems were, face-to-face. The fact that we were communicating using virtual technologies meant that we could not contact her directly or encourage her to read posts and emails (which of course are huge limitations).
ReplyDeleteYes indeed, I am aware of 'bad students', hence why I agree that it is important to stipulate that this is a study in an educational setting. In the real world, one could pick up the phone and enquire about the nature of the problem. In an educational setting, this is way too intrusive.
That's true. One of the tools we looked at was email, which meant we had each others' personal email addresses. Failing to check Sulis is one thing, but very few people nowadays fail to check their email on a daily basis. On one occasion when I needed a prompt reply to a post on the Sulis discussion forum, I nudged one team member by sending an email to him, in the hope that he'd read it and then visit Sulis. That was about as personal as it got actually (well, apart from late night chat with one of them on Skype about non course-related matters).
ReplyDeleteYour comment about most people checking their emails every day was certainly true a couple of years ago. Dr Gabriela Avram, in the 'Using Online Portfolios and Social Media channels for building a professional profile' presentation, highlighted to us that it is becoming less certain that people will check their emails on a daily basis. This is yet another difficulty in using collaborative technologies - it is difficult to know how each person uses the internet. There are so many access points.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I stress this is in an educational setting. In the workplace, you would be told which medium to use, and that would be it.