E-Learning Week 42

The first study period is coming to an end and it's time for the hectic last weeks for assignments and group work. Our teams group work has been progressing very well and I'm happy with the participation from all individuals in the group. We have divided the work equally and everybody has kept the planned deadlines so far. The contributions from each individual have been of good quality. I was a bit worried about this part of the course before hand, but luckily my worst nightmares didn't come true.

We have used Adobe Contact for group meetings and created collaboration page in Google sites. Adobe Connect works fine technically, but getting used to collaborate with it takes some time. We only meet and discuss via Adobe Connect, but don't use any of document or screen sharing functions in the program. We've tried screen sharing a couple of times, but the results have not been encouraging. Google sites can be used for this kind of activity, but I feel that it's a bit too complicated for our purposes.  It works, but it is not as flexible in the hands of multiple writers as one could have hoped for.

Good progress with the assignment is based more on individual effort from everyone than real team work. I believe that if we would have met each other physically and discussed about the assignment more freely in the beginning, the content and purpose of the document would have been different. Maybe even better :-) This time not much tought was put on the purpose of the text. Basically all the ideas presented in the assignment description were used in our article. We didn't do any brain storming around the topic to decide what area of distance studies we would like to dig deeper. I believe that would have taken place if we would be studying on Campus. From this experience I would think that group work in distance can decrease the level of creativity in a team. At least when people don't know each other or the tools used for collaboration very well.

I've used a lot of time and effort to the group work and during the next weekend it's time to do the final assignments for the Computer Use course. After the assignments are finished all focus is put to linear algebra :-)