Post in response to H817 Learning Design Studio Activity 2: Virtual teamwork
Participating in the Learning Design Studio activity gives us (as groups of students) the chance to work much more collaboratively on a single venture - the development of an online course. This represents a considerable 'ramping up' of the nature of our online interactions, beyond what has up until now been a mix of debate and supportive behaviours - 'geeing' each other along if you will.
To help us reflect on the nature of the teamwork that we will need to enact, we can consider the 'Big Five' (Kay et. al. 2006) and coordinating mechanisms for teamwork.
Figure from Salas et. al. (2005)
Firstly, all of these would appear to be very closely linked (if not the same as) critical digital literacies that we have come across in considering participation in MOOCs; McAuley et. al. (2010)
Thinking about our upcoming Learning Design Studio activity, the ones that immediately stand out to me are:
Shared Mental Models - I see this as being a mix of Vision and Strategy - the 'what' and 'how' of the project. It will be interesting to see how we create this in our small project team on the Learning Design course, since we've only had limited contact with each other, and never met face-to-face. I've witnessed a lack of vision and strategy in teams many times, but I've never undertaken a project in this virtual environment: I imagine it will be even more critical to our success.
Back up behaviour - I've been known on occasion to cut myself off a bit, which would potentially pose a risk here: we need to all be in-the-loop to spot when potential back-up behaviour might be needed.
Looking at the diagram is perhaps a more interesting activity than reflecting on each of the Big 5 and the coordinating mechanisms. While they are all important, I can see that we won't have them all in equal measure. But if we look at the diagram, we can perhaps assess which components we have in place at the moment, and see how critical they are (to do this, I'm making a judgement that they increase in criticality for the success of the project with an increasing number of connections to other components).
By this (very one-dimensional) measure, Shared Mental Models, Back up Behaviour, Leadership and Team Orientation appear to have more critical interdependencies than the rest. Superficially then we could consider these the most important to get right from the word go.
References:
Kay, J., Maisonneuve, N., Yacef, K. and Reimann, P. (2006) ‘The big five and visualisations of team work activity’ in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Berlin/Heidelberg, Springer, pp. 197–206.
Salas, E., Sims, D. and Burke, C. (2005) ‘Is there a “Big Five” in teamwork?’, Small Group Research, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 555–99.