Aloha! I am still enjoying our time in Hawaii and thanks to wireless internet access and local cafes, keeping up with the coursework has been manageable. It is interesting, however, that the time of the blackboard backups definitely effects me out here! From home (on the east coast) I have always seen that message and figured it would never matter to me (2am - 3am). Here, the outage occurs from 10pm - 11pm and very often that is right when the kids are asleep and I have enough energy to continue to work on coursework only to be foiled almost every day. Oh well! I'd still rather be in Hawaii :)

This week our main work revolved around the final paper for our team. As always, communication in the team process is 'interesting'. In the end, I believe we did quite well working together, but there were a few minor bumps in the road. This always begs the question as to whether it is a matter of communication style or personality. In the case of online learning, I often find that communication is the main issue. We met several times in real time via synchronous chat. However, we did not meet in real time this week and I am looking back and wonderinf if it would have helped. One problem that I see is that when people send out emails with attachments and wait for a response, the response does not always come immediately, and there may be a number of reasons for that. On one hand, I believe things are sometimes thrown out there and possibly incomplete in their delivery. Thus, team members might feel that they are not equipped to respond or perhaps there is even some diffusion of responsibility (each member hopes another member will respond). If a real time chat occurred, perhaps we could have ironed out the little issues together and moved forward. Whatever the case may be, I definitely think that matters often get 'lost in translation' in online 'one way' communication. We are dealing with people with different personalities, different learning styles, different communication styles, etc. It is somewhat ironic because our paper deals with the idea of online communities, so perhaps there are elements of our anecdotal experience here that apply beautifully.

I will end with a blurb that I wrote regarding the process for submission with our final paper...

When it came time to create our final project, we began by condensing our midterm articles so that they were reasonable in length and supported the overall topic. When this process began, it became apparant that we needed to make some adjustments to the way that our articles were written. Two of our team member's articles were personal accounts written in the first person. As the final paper combined the ideas of four different team members and four different 'voices' we made the decision to create one common voice and present all of our information in the third person. Once this was accomplished, the paper took form nicely. Our editor combined all of the shortened articles with the exception of one as we were still working to ensure that it fit properly within the overall theme of the paper. In editing the first draft, one team member added the introduction and conclusion as it aided in creating a flow of the paper and tying all pieces together. We were all posed with the task of reviewing and editing the draft and one member really took this on and made some changes that were instrumental in creating the final draft. All in all it was a true team effort. It was especially interesting to see how certain tasks were accomplished without necessarily identifying tasks for each partner. We had created tasks (per se) but some of the best work came naturally despite our defined roles.

All in all, I am a big proponent of the value of team work and believe that the 'bumps' in the road are valuable learning experiences for all involved.

Steve