Last week in retrospect...

I feel as if I am on a steep learning curve as far as all this new interactive technology is concerned! As part of the group assignment,we initially used the wiki, group email and announcements to communicate, however the chat line was too slow and frustrating. Then we chose to use skype to chat to one another and goole docs to view and edit the outline that I created as a starting point.
At first I felt it difficult to get my head around the topic and unsure about how we could exchange and clarify our ideas to formulate a unified response. I was also worrying that I was spending too much time learning these new programs,and getting behind with all those readings! It reminded me of Tuckman's team development model
(1965 p.75)-formimg, storming,norming,performing,adjourning.
To relieve my "storming" emotions,I chose to just write down my ideas and send them to the others for discussion at our skype conference. This worked well, Tareena is a speed typist so she was happy to type our responses and edit as we worked through the draft and the conversation seemed to flow naturally from there. We were able to formulate some structure and headings for the article that we could all add to as we read and gathered information independently(mid week).
This experience of working collaboratively correlates well with the readings regarding 'groups' and 'teams' which Law and Glover refer to as 'terms...to describe individuals cooperating to achieve a given task." They state a "team is predominantly used when a group is deliberatly constructed and there is a clear focus on its processes and level of performance". This article stimulates reflection on leading teams and the tables 5.1 -5.4 could provide self evaluation criteria.