Assignment 8: Ashley Vernon

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.

Assignment 8 Steve Swigut

I was working on a project with four other group members. Usually communicating between group members is not difficult. We set up meetings by email and then work together face to face. For our last meeting two group members could attend and decided to talk us through their findings by speaker phone. This could be considered a hybrid configuration as two were in the same place and two were not.

The first issue seen was the the “formation of in-groups.” Naturally I and my group member were collocated and formed one in-group and the other two members on speaker phone formed the other group. This made it difficult to share resources such as our lap top screen information and papers we were looking at. Also I was naturally sharing more with my collocated group member which Dobbs and Crano emphasize “people preferentially collaborate with in-groups, distribute resources to favor in-groups” also “such clusters of people typically enjoy more interaction and share more information with each other than they do with remote partners” This definitely occurred because it took less effort.

Not only this, me and the other individual were AEM majors and the other two were engineers so our communication styles already contrasted, and as these in-groups formed, the differences only became more evident. We were able to create common ground as we could easily see what was being discussed; the other members on speaker phone likewise were building their own common ground as well.

The third issue seen was the fact that there were communication disconnects between both of our in groups. First it was sometimes hard to understand what the speaker phone group was trying to communicate because of sound issues with the phone and the inability for us to actually see what they were referring to when speaking about different documents and notes. They could not see our display and we could not see what they were referring to as well which became problematic.

Although this took work, communication became supported through further explanation of what each individual was referring to. And we built common ground by ensuring both groups had the same documents open in order to be on the same page literally and figuratively.

Although Bos et al states that “There seems to be a tendency for distributed teams to form subgroup identities based on location”.I would improve the experience by working to establish common ground within the group. Also making the communication clear using better devices and thoroughly explaining our thoughts is a clear change for the future.