Immersion -- Week 10

Mid-semester rant, doubts, blues ....

Up until this point, I have kept my posts pretty objective concerning the whole Immersion experience. For this posting I will digress a bit. This week has been a struggle for me. In one class I was included in a group that was on the receiving end of some pretty harsh and unproductive criticism in an activity that was intended to be an open and reasonably positive peer critique of our work.

I have doubted my ability to adequately facilitate the Immersion team and move them forward in the analysis phase of our project. Even though I have tried my best in the role as Project Coordinator to not act as a leader (see post on bioteaming), during client and SME meetings as well as interactions with our instructor I feel that I am responsible for filling that leadership role. I don't mind facilitating - as a matter of fact most of the time I enjoy it. But I'm finding that in this situation I dislike the facilitator role more and more each day. Perhaps it is because I have a vested interest in the outcome of the project and cannot act as an impartial party during this process. Sometimes I feel like I am battling my teammates and imposing my perspective and sense of order on them. I don't want that to happen. So this week I was more passive in my role to see what would happen in the team meeting. A circular, unproductive conversation ensued that had the team stalled on the same topic for about 45 minutes. Not good. I suggested that we all start sharing the role of leading client and SME meetings. They agreed, but didn't jump up and down at the opportunity to take on this task. I was able to convince one team member to handle a portion of the meeting while I stood by as back up.

Then to top it off, we got an interesting perspective from another instructor who filled in briefly for our Immersion advisor this week. From his view, it appears that our whole approach to the needs analysis needs to be completely revamped so we are not considering a virtual collaboration center as an end product. This has been a concern voiced by some team members as we have progressed through analysis. I feel that there are some competing agendas here that have prompted the "do what is wanted" stance where the project is concerned, causing the "do what is actually needed" approach to take a back seat (see my fuchsia post). That doesn't make me very happy.

On a more positive note, I did get to play with Springdoo, a neat Web 2.0 tool that allows you to create quick and easy videos that can be emailed, or posted to websites, blogs, and social networking sites. I posted my quick and dirty first attempt at a Springdoo video. My partner and I hope to use this for our Performance Centered Design project that will support public speaking.

Immersion -- Week 1

Teamwork

Okay, so classes started Monday and we had a kick-off for the Immersion project on Tuesday. We have a relatively small team (group of 5) of students with very diverse experiences. Our project is to bring Web 2.0 and/or mobile Web 2.0 to the users of T/TAC Online in some fashion. T/TAC Online is an online resource for Virginia teachers who work with special needs students. We will be meeting with the SMEs and other people involved in T/TAC on September 10th. Many Immersion teams have tackled T/TAC projects in the past. The current focus is a very different take from the projects that other teams have worked on in the past. As we delve into the Needs Analysis phase, it will be interesting to see exactly who is using the T/TAC site the most, how they are using it, and if these same users are currently using Web 2.0 professionally or personally.

It is no coincidence that we are focusing on Web 2.0 issues as most of the Immersion students are in the Multimedia/Hypermedia Design class. And it helps that both classes have the same instructor. She asked us to start a blog and post weekly reflections for Immersion. Lucky that I started this blog when I did! I will be posting my weekly reflections here along with other interesting tidbits as I see fit.

But until we have some in depth discussions with the SMEs, we will first focus on teamwork. We ran through some exercises from Teamwork from the Inside Out focusing on temperament characteristics using animal metaphors. We discovered that we are a team of dolphins and beavers. No lie. We are of the Idealist temperament (dolphins - driven by the need to have a purpose; relationship focused and empathetic, and the Guardian temperament (beavers - driven by the need to be responsible; builds results and needs to be part of the group). I am firmly a cross between a beaver and dolphin. Visually, that would be an interesting mash-up. But when pressed to fix on one "animal" versus another I just couldn't based on the characteristics prescribed by the author.

In addition, we had some reading on Virtual Team Productivity. In the article, the author focuses on bioteams, an area of research that identifies the characteristics of nature's most successful teams (ants, bees, etc.) and how these characteristics can be applied to our daily team interactions. It is an interesting article (there are no team leaders, orders are not issued, timely information is provided by everyone) but I am curious about how this bioteaming works if you think from a constructivist viewpoint -- looking at the notion of "Vital signs". If the team identifies their Vital Signs so that everyone knows when to respond and how to respond, wouldn't the response depend on how the individual constructs their meaning of a given situation? You can define your vital signs in black and white, but the individual's interpretation of using that vital sign in a situation where they deem it appropriate is the key. I think it may be a bit more complex than what leads up to a bee's waggle dance.