70-341 Organizational Communication
Haluk Akay
October 8th, 2014
Group Work Assessment
I worked in a two person group whose goal it was to produce a written essay analyzing several videos. The timeframe provided for this assignment was two weeks and the only constraint on our collaboration was the removal of in-person meetings. We used a number of avenues of electronic communication for logistic messaging but primarily used Google documents as the tool for producing our analytical content.
My team member and I communicated with each other with relatively low frequency until two days before the deadline. Through emails, I reached out to offer partnership as I knew him through a previous job. Our relationship was grounded in Student Life capacities we had held during First Year Orientation. Using emailing, we established that our workloads for that week were higher than average, so we planned to write our essay two evenings before the due date. Emails until this point were exchanged on a daily basis with varying response times based upon our availability. When collaboration on generating actual content began, we switched to texting to ensure we were both ready to start the essay, as we both were looking for immediate feedback. We wrote the essay directly on a Google document. By pasting text evidence from the technical paper we were analyzing and developing key points for our essay by typing on the Google doc simultaneously, we were able to view each other’s thought processes in synchrony. During the write-up phase of the project, we inserted comments in the Google doc when our partner made interesting grammar choices or if one of us felt the other was straying from our thesis. These comments would generate 8 to 15 replies before we would “resolve” the issue. When we completed, we texted each other to confirm the project was ready for submission.
Our team coordinated work without explicit directives as the two-member team did not seem to warrant more structured break down of tasks. While writing the essay, we naturally gravitated to individually writing paragraphs which the other member would be able to edit and comment upon. Because we had similar levels of fluency in English and education in essay writing, minimal work was needed to create an argument flow in the paper.
Technology mainly facilitated group work. Although in-person meetings were prohibited, it is quite likely that even given this option we would not have met to write the paper given our busy schedules and familiarity with collaborative online tools. Google documents provided a method of group work where no final compiling of individual work was required and where immediate feedback in the form of comments was available. Emails also allowed us to respond to each other at our convenience, but also led to longer gaps in communication. In this way, we had a slow start because the option to reply to an email at a later time hampered our flow of planning. By permitting in-person meetings, the planning process for collaboration on the paper could have been completed in one sit-down meeting; it dragged on for a week when time between replies ranged from one hour to 2 days.
If we stop to consider the effect of removing technology from our collaboration all together, we can envision a work model where both my partner and I agree to meet for a number of sessions where we plan, find evidence, and write our paper where the communication provided by Google documents and emails is replaced by hand written side notes and oral communication. This demonstrates how our use of technology mainly improved efficiency of collaboration as opposed to quality of generated content.
It should also be noted that while collaborating to write the essay, we were both aware of the fact that we would be writing a subsequent essay reflecting upon our team experience. This led to some degree of a Hawthorne, or Observer effect where we both intentionally diversified our electronic communication in order to generate content for the second part of the assignment. That being said, the collaboration was conducted in a natural fashion and reflected a typical university level project group assignment.
In conclusion, my group executed the task with ease due to our familiarity with online collaborative tools, mutual social grounding between partners, and confidence in our analytical ability to complete the assignment. Our interactions, although not physical, were close and were a mix of professionalism and comradery. Our performance was optimal given the context of the project.