Assignment #8- Jordan Meltzer

Last weekend, I had a group meeting for a design course to meet and discuss project plans. Although three of our group members were able to attend, one group member had other club obligations and thus could help edit our document on Google Docs for about twenty minutes before his club meeting.

One resulting issue of this hybrid configuration was the formation of in-groups based on location of group members. During our meeting, we tended to more readily discuss goals and objectives among members who were collocated. This supports Bos et al.’s (2004) finding that the in-group of collocated members may “enjoy more interaction and share more information with each other than they do with remote partners.” While we tried to include the remote group member in our discussion by typing ideas onto the shared document, we did the majority of brainstorming by verbally discussing ideas and only wrote them down after agreed upon by collocated members.

Our means of conducting the group meeting resulted in the issue of individual member performance discussed by Bos et al’s study. Since we tended to discuss ideas between collocated members and write ideas down after agreement, we felt that we inadvertently did not account for the remote member’s opinions. Thus, his individual input was perceived as less than that of other members. However, when asked if he was included enough in our group meeting, the remote member stated that he understood and agreed with mostly all of our ideas when they were written. He mentioned that he was able to freely provide his opinions towards ideas without anyone interrupting his thought process or pressuring him into agreement. This finding that individual input was equally significant may relate to Bos et al.’s (2004) finding that, in terms of effectiveness, “there was no difference between average score of collocators and telecommuters."

Another resulting issue of the hybrid configuration was workspace awareness and individual understanding of group ideas. For example, Scott et al. (2003) states that when members have a copy of a digital object, gestures made to particular versions forces others “to perform spatial translation to determine specified location” of a certain edit. This was observed whenever we asked the remote member to look over what we had just changed. Often, he would ask us where on the document to look for the edit, which required grounding the conversation to reach mutual understanding. By having a shared document, we could “maintain group focus and facilitate awareness” by allowing all members to look at particular edits (Scott et al. 2003, 169). In addition, an existing common ground due to previous group projects allowed for increased individual understanding of group ideas. This common ground allowed collocated and remote members to be familiar with individual approaches to certain goals and objectives. Thus, we were able to better understand one another’s reasoning for particular ideas and less grounding in group discussion was necessary. The addition of verbal cues, such as tone of voice, may have helped to improve communication of ideas with the remote member.