Interact effectively with others as peers, subordinates and leaders to accomplish goals.
Artifact:
Reflection:
This artifact is a group presentation from ED 690 Methods of Inquiry that summarizes our content analysis of selected educational blogs to determine the amount and types of learning they contain. This was the culmination of a series of individual tasks leading to the formation of our group and continuing through the content analysis project outlined in the presentation.
The success of most group projects is usually based on how well those involved communicate with each other. Effective interpersonal relationships and communication facilitate group success by providing a common understanding of the team expectations and goals, improving coordination and cooperation, and eliminating the need for assumptions or guess work.
Group projects are challenging. They are even more challenging when the participants are geographically dispersed and have little, if any, familiarity with each other. Fortunately, we were able to use our collective interpersonal skills in conjunction with technology to help us overcome these obstacles and make our project a success.
The first hurdle our group needed to clear was how to minimize the barriers of distance and multiple time zones while maintaining clear communications to keep everyone in sync with their project responsibilities. To this end we used a combination of email, instant messaging (IM), phone calls, a wiki for asynchronous brainstorming and collaboration, web conferencing and an online file sharing service to distribute large files too large to send via email.
All of these processes and tools helped us maintain clear and frequent project communications as well as made us familiar with each other more quickly than if we hadn’t had these options available.
This was a great opportunity to be a part of a successful, high performing team. During the course of this project, we experienced several members taking leadership roles at certain times, while easily transitioning into a more subordinate role at other times depending on the area of focus.
This work demonstrates the ability to effectively participate and contribute to the success of a project team. As the team member responsible for generating the final deliverable from the collection of everyone’s efforts , I’ve shown the ability to clearly communicate and manage project requirements to successfully complete a group project.
This experience taught me that clear, commonly acknowledged goals and effective, timely communications are key factors of success for any team projects. Involving everyone in the planning and decision making process was definitely a key to our success. This involvement was especially helpful by enabling us to plan around a vacation by a group member in the middle of the project and still meet our deadline.
