Last week, three members of my INFO 3650 group wrote our progress report together. We all sat at one desktop computer, using Microsoft Word to type the report. The most obvious flaw in this setup was that only one person could type at once. In Scott's article, this relates to the "support simultaneous user actions" guideline. Desktops are really only designed to have one user inputting data at a time. Thus, one group member typed most of our report and the other two of us revised it afterwards. There was also a minor issue involving "transitions between tabletop collaboration and external work," namely that we made sure to save the document as .doc and not .docx so that everyone could open it later on their own computers. This was not a problem with our choice of display technology, but it is something we took into consideration when transitioning from a group to an individual context.
One aspect that did work well was that all three of us could see the display clearly. There was enough room for three people to sit at the computer and see what was being typed (although more than three might have been awkward). There were no orientation issues, as there are when many people gather around tabletop displays.
An alternative to my group's method would be to use Google Docs so that everyone could write simultaneously. There are some drawbacks to that solution, though. It would be harder to coordinate what part of the report each person was working on, and communication would be more cumbersome if we were not co-located. Personally, I think having multiple people sit at one computer was more effective for such a short assignment.
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I am a huge fan of Google Docs. I try to use it whenever I do any group work. As you mentioned, not being collocated is a problem for coordination of tasks, but if you are collocated while you're on three separate computers, having instant audio communication while sharing the doc is extremely efficient.
ReplyDeleteAs another option for being in different places, I once worked with someone over a Skype audio chat while we both worked on the same google doc. That was very effective.
Google docs allowed for references to shared artifacts while audio chat allowed for instant communication and feedback. In a way, we sort of simulated two major components of face to face communication through the use of two different media channels.
Another advantage of having multiple people sit at one computer is that this orientation fosters interpersonal communication. Had you done your assignment on Google Docs, you would not have been able to communicate as personally. After all, Professor Birnholtz claims that groups who spend a lot of time communicating in person, sometimes descussing things not relevant to work, work better than groups who do not communicate face-to-face. We saw the benefits of communicating in person when the best computer engineers were the ones who had breakfast together.
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