I’ll Be Back!

Posted on June 21st, 2008 in Uncategorized by psalter

My Dear Blog,

Please don’t feel neglected but with this semester of uni finishing and a month in Europe approaching I am afraid you will just have to wait till August and I get back in the swing of things again.

I will bring you a treat back from Germany.

Prue

So long Anne and thanks for all the fish

Posted on June 5th, 2008 in elearning musings by psalter  Tagged

As this semester and this subject comes to a close, it will be interesting to see how this blog develops as I will then be totally free to find my own ‘voice’ - I am looking forward to seeing how this develops and how my interests in technology and learning develop. I remember reading in someone’s blog where they thought their blog was about ‘X’ but when they went back and had a good look at all their posts they were about ‘Y’.

 

So Anne these flowers are for you (the perils of a digital age, it is all online cards and online flowers!) as a thanks for opening my eyes to so many new and exciting learning technologies.

It has been an intense time, this subject has had a greater workload than any others I have done in this Masters but this has been compensated for by the fact that what I was learning was really relevant and useful to my life and business.

So thanks again Anne, good luck with all your endeavours, I look forward to citing many of your works and writings as I start my PhD next year and you get ever closer to the end of yours.

 

 

And ok, I may have to have a week or so break from the blog just to catch my breath again….

Reflection on ‘Building a Collaborative Workplace’

Posted on June 4th, 2008 in Readings by psalter  Tagged , ,
“Collaboration is a process through which people who see different aspets of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond theoir own limited vision of what is possible.”
Building a collaborative workplace, AnecdoteCollaborativeWorkplace_v1s.pdf (541.552 Kb)
Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenk and Nancy White from the Full Circle Associates website: http://www.fullcirc.com

Callahan, Schenk and White state that ” today we all need to be collaboration superstars”.  The article discusses how a new environment for getting things done is evolving. Technology has made it easier to communicate, to share ideas and to work collaboratively without the need to occupy the same physical space and now with the pace of change we need to be link up with people with complementary skill sets to meet increasingly complex outcomes.

The article discusses that fact that collaboration skills do not tend to be taught. Having just completed a collaborative project using a wiki with my uni colleagues, I began to reflect. What collaboration skills did we use and how could we teach these?

Some of the skills that we needed were to be open and honest about our ideas and those of others in the group, to be receptive to other people’s point of views, to have the ability to take and give constructive criticism in a supportive and accepting way, to accept that it is a joint piece of work and you will not always agree with everything that is done, to not take over and to encourage others to share their ideas as well.

I have always thought that good team skills in really an extension of being a good human being and now I am starting to think collaboration is just taking good teamwork skills to the next level.

I think the big difference is that in team work often the work is parceled out and worked on individually whereas in a collaborative experience that notion of proprietary ownership is dismissed.

Perhaps it is best summed up by a statement in our group standards for our collaborative wiki project:
“Edit the entry as though it was your own, but with consideration and respect for differing viewpoints.”

 Thanks JuJu Members - it was a stimulating experience to work with you all. Truly the whole ended up being greater than a sum of the parts!