Sulis

I find Sulis to be very beneficial in the day to day learning process. It makes things quite easy in terms of keeping all information relating to our modules in one place as opposed to having to retrieve information from various different sources. Prior to this year I rarely, if ever, used discussion forums. The discussion forum facility on Sulis is extremely helpful in creating links between class mates and using your own initiative to learn as opposed to going straight to the tutor for information.

The discussion forum posts that we were required to participate in over the past week or so were quite interesting. It afforded us all the opportunity to propose our views on certain topics, learn more about our classmates’ views and take all points of view into consideration. A certain amount of diplomacy is always involved in these situations and I think we all interacted quite well, given that some topics were quite controversial and provoked strong opinions in some cases.

Editing Process

We are currently going through the process of editing our report to ensure we have a unified document with consistent language and grammar. We have chosen to complete the report in American English to ensure uniformity. The process has gone smoothly so far. We plan to have a skype meeting tonight to make suggestions on how we can improve our individual reports. Despite the technical issues we have experienced with skype, it has proven to be very useful during the course of the project.

Just in terms of the collaborative tool I assessed (e-mail) I found the following white paper very helpful in assessing e-mail in a business environment. Here is the link for anyone who wants to have a look or would like to use it in another project or something.

http://www.hyperoffice.com/files/pdf/email_bankruptcy.pdf

Nearing the finish line in the Virtual Team Assignment

We have pretty much completed our individual assessments of our collaborative tools. Now all that’s left to do is compile the report as a group....easier said than done! We are in the midst of delegating tasks as we try to complete our own individual reports. We are hoping to finish our individual parts in plenty of time to read and edit each other’s reports to ensure a cohesive piece of writing. 

Over the next week I expect I will be communicating a lot with my team members. We are hoping to conduct another meeting over Skype but I expect most of our dealings will be through Sulis.  I think mutual encouragement and assurance are important factors in this assignment to ensure that we are all on the same page throughout the writing process.  Hopefully the whole thing will go smoothly enough!

What's gone on so far..

Hi everyone...

For my first blog entry I think I should document what has occurred up until this point in the EL6082 module and how our team has collaborated in the virtual team assignment. This blog will document my thoughts and observations on the virtual team assignment and the collaborative technological tools we are in the process of assessing. 

As an introduction to the virtual team assignment our class held a video conference with our peers in Florida. We were introduced to our team members and informed of exactly what the assignment would entail. I found that the video conference was an effective way of communicating with the students in Florida. Sound and video quality was good and it was in effect, a showcase of how a successful collaborative meeting should be held. Given that the meeting was hosted by our respective course leaders the meeting was organised well and gave everyone was a chance to have an image of who we would be collaborating with. 

I am part of a team of two other Irish students (Shane and Sherona) and two American students (Tyler and Rebecca). We have regular meetings with each other on the chat forum in Sulis and also on the discussion forum on sulis. We have also conducted a conference via Skype.

Chat Forum

So far I have found the chat forum on sulis quite ineffective as a means of communicating with my team mates. The chat forum is helpful in organising (for example) times for meetings, however we also attempted to conduct meetings over chat but inevitably it tends to descend into chaos as everyone tries to communicate different opinions without taking into account what the previous user has contributed.

Discussion Forum

The discussion forum is, in my opinion, more effective as a means of conducting a meeting between five people that usually lasts up to an hour. It gives each team member the opportunity to consider previous posts and address other team members' opinions. The discussion forums are helpful in solving long term issues as team members can post outside of meeting times and other team members can reply in their own time.

Skype Conference

We conducted a skype conference yesterday evening which I thought would have run much smoother. We encountered various technical issues beforehand. However the end result was positive as we managed to discuss everything we wanted to with our American counterparts.

E-mail

I am in the process of assessing e-mail as a collaborative tool. As a means of doing this I circulated an e-mail through g-mail with a journal article relating to technological collaborative tools attached. Each team member has replied with their opinion on the journal article and my plan now is to address the points each team member has made in their e-mails and compile a conclusion e-mail. So far we have not encountered many problems with e-mail as a collaborative tool.  

Thanks for reading my reflective learning blog. I plan to post again in a few days to let you know how our research is going!

Susan