This semester I am doing an independent study with a senior. We work very closely with a grad student that acts as our advisor. We usually have a meeting every week. But last week the grad student sprained her ankle and couldn't physically come to the office. We decided that the senior and I would meet in the office, and we would talk to the grad student through Skype. This made our group partially distributed; some of us were in the same place, but one of us was not. Looking back, I think that the previous meetings, when we were all together, ran much more efficiently than this distributed meeting.
The first issue that came up in my experience was communication disconnects. The Skype application was not working properly. At first it kept disconnecting us, and then the video didn't work, so we only had audio. This definitely caused the senior and me to form an in-group. This situation supports Bos’s first hypothesis, “Individuals collocated together will interact more with fellow collocators, and form an in group” (430). This was probably because the senior and I had co-presence and visibility.
Our meetings include us coding transcripts. Since this task is tightly coupled, I think having distributed groups put us at a disadvantage. As in the Shape Factory game, our task was also complex and fairly fast paced. Bos says this will cause the people in the same room to ignore or marginalize the people in different locations (432). This was well-supported in my situation. Usually we ask the grad student a lot of questions, but in this meeting we did not say much to her. The senior and I were able to ask each other quick questions and physically point things out.
It was hard to reference things in a distributed group. If there was a discrepancy in the coding of the transcript, the senior and I could just point to where we disagreed. But it was much harder to notify the grad student where the discrepancy was. We winded up just reading pieces of the transcript to her, and listening to her input. To improve the experience, it would have been nice if the video worked. If we all had visibility, maybe we would have more communication with our distributed group member.
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That's an interesting task to try to do remotely... did you consider these difficulties when your group first suggested meeting through Skype? Also, what factors do you think would have been less of a problem if the technology had been working properly (what problems were purely social?) Good post.
ReplyDeleteIt's so sad that Skype failed on you guys, at first I didn't really think this was a legitimate issue because it seems like something that doesn't really happen very often, but then I realized that in fact it's very important because it probably does happen more than you'd expect, and when it does happen it's very significant for the people using the tool. I think it's interesting that Skype was able to still send the audio - that's very important to keeping the collaboration going in some way, but I think that Skype and similar technologies should try to plan for these kinds of disconnects and provide ways for the parties to keep in touch in any way possible so that in-groups are not as likely to form.
ReplyDeleteI also find it very surprising that Skype's video was not functional. I am a big user of skype and have never had that problem. Usually all the problems that I encounter with skype have to do with my or my friend's web cam. Although you said it was difficult to reference things through skype's audio, do you think it would have been much easier to establish that common ground with the video? I think that it may be somewhat easier to establish the common ground with the video, but it still might be difficult.
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