Sitearm Madonna presented on the theory of teamwork at today’s class. This was followed by a briefing on the Team Project No One is too Small to Make a Difference by John / Tae.
Posts Tagged ‘Teamwork’
Teamwork and collaboration
March 20, 2023Working together
March 6, 2023Our friends from Çağ University joined us for the first time today and Sitearm Madonna gave us a gentle introduction on how to work together in teams in a virtual environment. The Turkish students and their facilitators joined in seamlessly as if they had been working in Second Life since the beginning of the semester.
After the talk Sitearm gave the class an immersive collaborative experience through music. It was tremendous fun and we were sorry not to have more time to engage with his brilliant instruments.
Team Project – ‘No One…’
March 3, 2023This is the brief for this semester’s Team Project – ‘No One is too Small to Make a Difference’.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a universal call to action in the face of global poverty and the impact of climate change on our planet. Seventeen goals were agreed by all member states in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable Development. We have seven years left to achieve success and secure the future of humanity on Earth.
The United Nations call follows a Warning to Humanity issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists as long ago as 1992. They ‘feared that humanity was pushing Earth’s ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life’. Six years ago the warning was updated as 15,000 scientists from around the world published World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler suggests that the excesses of the consumerist model are responsible for driving the world rapidly towards a dead end. Speaking in London at the Work Marathon event in 2018 he argued that a radically new approach to shaping our society is required. Rather than allowing capital and technology to dictate we need to bring epistemological, technological, artistic, judicial, social and economic questions together in order to shape the future.
This calls for a rethink of our way of life are growing more persistent as evidenced by activists such as Oğuz Ergen from Türkiye and Greta Thunberg from Sweden.
In 2022 the UN selected Ergen as one of the six new ‘Young Leaders’ in the UNDP-Samsung Generation17 programme for his work on the problem of pollution in the Gulf of Izmir.
Thunberg, speaking at Davos in 2019 said ‘our house is on fire’ and implored world leaders to extinguish the fire before it gets out of control. Later that year she published her talks in a little book titled No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. If one small Swedish schoolgirl can make a difference in the world then it follows that we can all do so.
What difference can you make?
The Brief
Meet in your teams and discuss this text. Read the referenced texts and look at the videos to inform and expand your understanding. Find additional sources to deepen your knowledge and share these with your team members.
· Discuss your response to the issues.
· How does this make you feel?
· What might you be able to do about it?
Develop your ideas into a collective response and design an action plan in response to the crisis. Decide what you can do individually in your families, local communities or university. Agree on a joint approach and select a single action or a change that you think will lead to a specific outcome.
Develop a strategy to achieve your goal and an approach to communicating it to others in your community so they will join you in achieving greater success.
Submission
Build an installation in Second Life that explains your project to visitors and devise a guided tour that you will give to residents encouraging them to do something similar. Each team member should have a specific role in the tour.
Write a reflective review of the team project and how it progressed. Refer to team building theory and describe how it played out in your experience of the project. In particular, describe your own contribution to the project and to the team.
Class 5: Teamwork and Collaboration
March 7, 2022
Sitearm Madonna met the class at the landing point in the Çağ University Second Life Campus for his presentation titled Composing for the New Era – Teamwork and Collaboration Online. After ensuring everyone had arrived he led us to the ornamental pool where he had installed a presentation board filled with text and images. He had thoughtfully placed seating around the pool so that everyone had a good view and then seated himself at the top of the board to indicate where we should be focusing our attention. Using his avatar to guide our attention in this manner is a very useful technique that Sitearm has developed in recent years (an interesting example of something that could only really work in a virtual world where you can use the camera to zoom in on the appropriate section of the board).
Last week all the Project Teams were asked to meet in Second Life to complete the task set in the class and discuss the Team Project. After he had introduced some of the basic principles around teamwork, Sitearm asked each team to come to the front and report on their meeting in turn. It didn’t matter whether or not the team had actually managed to meet or not, whether the meeting was considered a success or not, nor whether all the team members were present. The opportunity to give and hear feedback from each team gave us all a sense of how difficult it can be to contact people outside of the virtual world. Teams used email addresses and Instant Messaging (IM) to try and make contact and arrange meetings. Individuals did their best but sometimes received no replies, or were unable to agree to a time that suited everyone. However, some teams were successful and in all cases the conversations have begun and teammates are beginning to get to know each other.
The students engaged fully and shared their experiences, frustrations and successes and it was clear that they did very well for the first attempt. Their enthusiasm for meeting each other and figuring out how to proceed is impressive.
Unfortunately, the TU Dublin campus wifi network would not allow connection to Second Life so only those students who had access via a phone hotspot, or those working off campus, were able to join the class. The IT Support Team are currently reviewing the situation to find out what happened and hope it will be resolved for next week.
John shared a notecard with everyone listing the team leaders from TU Dublin so now each team has a Turkish and an Irish leader to facilitate meetings and progress.
Following the presentation on teamwork Sitearm guided us to an open platform in the sky with an elegant garden populated with blue butterflies. Here he gave a brief introduction to, and explanation of, the metaverse. Not Mr Zukerberg’s Metaverse with a capital M, but the multifarious digital spaces that make up what used to be known as cyberspace (after William Gibson introduced the term in his 1984 novel Neuromancer) but is now more commonly referred to as the metaverse (after Neal Stephenson popularised it in his 1992 novel Snow Crash).
Sitearm concluded with a live demonstration of teamwork. He brought us to a lower platform on which he had placed pianos and drum kits that played when touched. After we had fun making plenty of noise he explained the colour coding and gently led us to a more musical output, leaving us all with an example of a team moving from chaos to harmony.
Class 4: Getting to know teammates
February 28, 2022This week we all met at Whole Brain Health where Tooyaa summarised last week’s lesson to ensure everyone has been ‘friended’, joined the ISP group, and is up to date on our progress so far.
John introduced the Project Brief and shared a notecard with full details. We reviewed the details briefly so that everyone had a sense of what they will be working on for the remainder of the semester. He asked everyone to read the brief in detail after the class and to meet in their Project Teams during the week to discuss it. Sitearm Madonna reminded us that his talk on Teamwork next week will outline an approach to working together. He will ask some students to share the experience of the first team meeting to help identify issues around working together virtually – so ensure you arrange your team meetings!
Lissena Wisdomseeker then introduced the Project Teams. The team at WBH had kindly prepared sign boards listing all the team members and made more t-shirts. Each team member could take one from the boxes and each shirt was in the team colour with either Çağ or TU Dublin logos on back. Once everyone had put on their new shirts we teleported to the area where students will be working on their projects and presenting them at the end of the semester. Each team has a large working space sufficiently separated so you can talk without disturbing each other. Lissena explained that each team would produce a Share Board today, to get used to working in SL. She shared a notecard with details of how to carry out the task. But, first, each team was asked to select a Team Leader, one from each university. This will make it easier for the WBH team to communicate with you over the next weeks.
It soon became clear that everyone would finish the task during class time so you were asked to complete before next week.
Teamwork and Collaboration
October 20, 2021Sitearm Madonna joined the class to make a presentation called Composing for the New Era – Teamwork and Collaboration Online. The version of the talk in the following video is from a later presentation of the same talk to the Nonprofit Commons this year.
Class 12: Team Project presentations
May 6, 2021
Sitearm Madonna recorded the students’ presentations and also completed the post production work to shape the result, for which we are most grateful.
Thanks are also due to Andrew Sullivan at Montana State University Billings, who provided the Heavy Industry student presentation region for the evening.
Finally, in addition to welcoming our module guest speakers and friends, it was a great pleasure to have members of the Virtual Worlds Education Round Table join us.
Congratulations are due to the students for the excellent quality of their projects, both in terms of content, research and presentation.
Class 4: Team Project – Tomorrow’s Office
February 25, 2021
We finally managed to get almost everyone together for a class photo.
We started class this week by having close look at the module details in Brightspace, particularly the Assessment unit and the Team Project. John guided you through these sections and emphasised the importance of reading carefully the project details, the brief, the assessment criteria and the submission details. There is specific information on the Website Blog and the Team Project with which you should familiarise yourselves to ensure your independent work is accurate and contributes towards your mark and final grade. (These details are not contained in this website as they are relevant only to you.) There is no point in working hard if you are not doing what is required for the assignments, so work smart!
John referred to the assessment for the Team Project and explained the difference between the group mark and the individual mark. Remember that the aim of the project is to give you the opportunity to experience working on a collaborative project in an online environment. Whether the end result, or your presentation, is a success or a failure doesn’t matter. It is your experience and learning that is being assessed. You demonstrate this through your reflective and critical writing in your blogs.
Refer back to the assessment criteria regularly throughout the semester to ensure you don’t wander off course.
Team Project – Tomorrow’s Office
February 19, 2021
What kind of office do you think you might be working from in the future?
As you prepare to leave college with your degree the prospect of seeking a fulfilling career will become increasingly important. Much is being written now about the changing nature of work. As long ago as 2012 Forbes suggested that Job Hopping is the New Normal for Millennials. opens in new window But, the Guardian newspaper reported that the trade unions in Britain are concerned about the abuses of the gig economy suggesting it results in lower wages. An article in The Guardian, TUC wants clampdown on ‘poverty pay’ in gig economy jobs opens in new window, revealed that almost half of adults aged 25 or over were earning less than the minimum wage.
The World Economic Forum report on The Future of Jobs 2018 opens in new window provides a comprehensive analysis of trends on an industry-specific and country-specific basis. In the section on Strategic Drivers of New Business Models opens in new window it concludes that the unfolding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is resulting in a variety of new and emerging jobs while the more traditional job roles are declining. But, there is some good news for you as the Economist reported in 2016 that people working in creative fields are less susceptible to automation in Automation and Anxiety. opens in new window
Taking a more holistic perspective raises deeper concerns for the future of not just work, but the entire ecosystem of society. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler suggests that the world is heading rapidly towards a dead end thanks to the consumerist model. Speaking in London opens in new window in 2018 he argued that a radically new approach to shaping our society is required. Rather than allowing capital and technology to dictate we need to bring epistemological, technological, artistic, judicial, social and economic questions together in order to shape the future.
In 1992 the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a Warning to Humanity suggesting that vast human misery would ensue if we did not change how we are impacting the planet. They ‘feared that humanity was pushing Earth’s ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life.’ Last year the warning was updated when 15,000 scientists from around the world published World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice opens in new window.
As if all that was not enough, we are now living through a global pandemic that seems likely to impact all our futures in ways we cannot predict. Working from home has already become a commonplace experience that is unlikely to change even when the pandemic eases. Online activity is becoming increasingly acceptable and people have adapted quickly out of necessity but more thought needs to be given to the principles of working between home and an office. Organisations like McKinsey & Company are already giving advice like that in the article Reimagining the office and work life after COVID-19 opens in new windowfrom June of this year.
This is a real challenge to you, individually and collectively, as you consider your emergence into society from college. For this project you are asked to consider how you might address the problems facing society while earning a living and living your lives. Do you accept the premise of the World Scientists? Can you see ways in which it is possible to work for a more sustainable engagement with our planet? Do you think the current situation might offer society an opportunity to re-think what we do and how we do it?
The Brief
You team is tasked with proposing how the workplace of the future might operate, taking into account the issues raised above, particularly sustainability. Consider issues such as the design of office/studio/workshop spaces, flexible working arrangements, presence, virtual and online engagement, new social norms for the workplace and so on. Clearly, you will need to address specific requirements for different disciplines and professions.
You will work on this project in your groups to make your presentation in an entertaining, informative and lively manner using whatever medium and format you wish as long as it can be stored for later review (e.g. a talk, short film, dramatic presentation, narration+visuals). Each team will present live in Second Life. The presentation should be no shorter than five minutes and no longer than ten minutes. You are encouraged to use visual, audio or any other aids to support the presentation during which each member of the team must take part.
Each participant must also describe the progress of the project in a weekly blog post with particular emphasis on your own contribution to the project. (What are you bringing to the group and how does it fit into the team’s work?) Discuss the details of the project and also the issues that arise in working collaboratively online. How easy is it meet up virtually and plan the project? What difficulties arise in development? How easy or difficult is communication? What particular problems arise and how do you deal with them? Focus on the experience rather than writing a ‘correct’ post or having an answer for every difficulty.
Important note: If you use images or sound be mindful of copyright, particularly as presentations will be posted to the module blog.
Presentations should be no less than 5 minutes and no more than 10 minutes in duration.
Your presentation can be made in the TU Dublin campus or any appropriate venue in Second Life selected by the group. Presentations will be delivered in the last class at the end of the semester.For full details on the Team Project specifications and the assessment criteria see the Assessment Unit.
Virtual Environments: Is one life enough? 