The Collaborators: Week 2

The activities in the second week were geared towards making us collaborate online.

There are about 30 of us on this course, some from Brookes, but many from much further afield, and now this cohort has been divided into three teams.

In the previous week we needed to study 'icebreakers' - these are activities that are designed to get a group of students who study online to participate in various activities that allow them to get to know each other, and ensure that they are familiar with using the software.

The group task that we've been set this week is quite complicated to understand.

We're told about a task - a task that asked students to compile an annotated list of their 4 favourite, definitive, Web-based, resources that are about good practice in online tutoring.

We then needed to change this task so as to make it suitable for

- a group of students to work on together

- this group to work on together exclusively online

How on earth did we manage?

And did it go better for us as a group, than if we simply worked on this task as individuals?

Though I was initially a little cynical about whether working online as a group would be highly effective, I think it actually worked better for us as a group that had we tackled the task as individuals. 

Initially there was a little discussion about team roles, for which we were provided references, such as Belbin. I was soon concerned that this would take our efforts from the actual task, but rapidly we fell into a few key roles.

Things got going rapidly when a group member divided up the task into bit-sized sub-tasks. In my Week 3 exercise, which I'll blog next, we were required to digest just what went on in Week 2, so I can repeat some of my observations in my reflective blog here.

Thus this first step represented a division of the whole task into a 2-D set of tasks: On the X-axis a timeline, which recognised primary, secondary and tertiary tasks, and on the Y-Axis, these groups of tasks drawn out (like a chromatogram) into discrete, easily-accomplished sub-tasks. Jenny from our team defined the list of primary sub-tasks, enabling us to bite.

Aware that my profession is a learning technologist at Brookes, where the course was run, and that I had some experience of being an online tutor, I thought I'd better step in and allocate these tasks to specific members of the group, so that we all could have a much clearer idea of what we should be doing.

The results started pouring in rapidly, and after couple of days we had literally hundreds of postings. We were then faced with what appeared a mammoth task - to distill this lake of information, the result of a huge amount of labour - into a flask that could be passed to the course tutors.

Again, Jenny, and another prolific poster, Fabrizio, were very practical here, in producing a spine document that could be linked to the contributions of others. 

It was then a matter of putting this document, and various others contributed by different team members through courseGenie. We're fortunate enough to have a site licence here at Brookes for CG - it's a Word template with a numbers of unique styles and some complex macros. One applies the styles,  then the macros render each style - via XML - into HTML.

CG was a little temperamental with the tables, and I had to return to the task whenever I had time throughout the final day when we could submit to the tutors. Eventually I had success and was able to get CG to produce an index which linked the spine document, produced by Jenny and Fabrizio (with the help of others) to the various contributions, such as Anthony's context document (detailing the scenario in which the brief was to be used), and Nigel's detailed critical path.