Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?

The discussion started with students reporting back on the Team meetings you held during the week. Most teams had been able to make contact and commence communicating using a variety of tools. It soon became clear that the different parts of team work demand the use of different sets of tools.

Brief for Team Project – Future Work

Forming and Storming: Finding your team mates and commencing a dialogue is the first hurdle. Second Life’s use of avatars with different names from your real selves resulted in some confusion as you tried to identify each other! Some of you asked me for email addresses to facilitate the first connection. You searched Facebook and other social media platforms for your classmates and, for the most part, did not resort to real world encounters.

The first meetings were arranged and this presented the next challenge. Some of you met in SL, some chatted on Facebook, Skype was mentioned as a useful platform but I am not sure if any team actually used it. The ‘forming’ stage of team work, developing the team and getting to know each other, is actually a social activity and therefore social media apps can be useful for virtual teams. They allow you to find out something about your colleagues and open conversations. As your teams coalesce and working together becomes normal tools such as SL and Skype will support the interaction needed to brainstorm ideas for your project and make progress.

Performing: Although this aspect of team work did not emerge until later in the discussion John asked you to consider how ensure your presentation will be completed in time for delivery. Managing your individual commitments on the project and the overall team success is a very specific activity. You need to ensure that the work is divided fairly among the team members and then ensure that everyone does what is expected. There are many productivity and management apps available to support this. For example, trello.com provides a simple yet effective platform that everyone can access without cost to monitor your commitment and progress.

Production: When it comes to producing your project you will need to create and/or source images, movies, sound recordings and so on. We will review these in later classes. In addition, creating the script is so much easier with online collaborative tools that work in real time. Google Docs allows many people to write and edit simultaneously.

Presentation: Finally, when it comes to the presentation of your project there is a wide range of tools from which to select. YouTube and SlideShare are just two of the most common and we will also look at them in more detail in a later class.

+ + +

Finally, we spoke about the project. Everyone had read the brief and was aware of the context. John referred specifically to the assessment criteria for the project noting that of the six, two were for the team and the other four were individual. He asked that you also read the assessment rubric very carefully and review it regularly to ensure you keep on the right track and don’t waste time doing unnecessary work.