Week 7: Collaborative Work

Throughout my educational journey, all the way from middle school and up until university, I've been assigned group projects... My thoughts on group projects? Probably the same as everyone else: Endless amounts of stress.

Calvin. (2013, November 26). 'Group Projects' [Cartoon]. Retrieved from http://allmyroads.com/

There's always the problem of not everyone putting in the same amount of effort into the project, but the whole process of collaborating with others and the messiness that comes with it is a much bigger problem. Back in the day, working on a group project could sometimes be a bit of a hassle:

•  In middle school, it meant getting your parents to drive you to someone's house so that everyone could work on the project together <-- Takes a bit of planning 
• In high school, MSN Messenger was useful to chat with your group and brainstorm on how to go about completing the project. But completing the project was still a hassle since it involved numerous document attachments being sent over email - creating copies and copies of the same file <-- Can be somewhat confusing if you lose track of which version is the edited version
• Later on, MSN messenger got replaced with Skype, which allowed you to share your screen with others, but it still required everyone to split the work and have someone who was in charge of editing and bringing all the 'sections' together <-- Still annoying
• In university, I was introduced to Google Drive <-- Totally changed how school work is done

Technology has now made it easy to collaborate online: Google Drive is a FREE service provided by Google, which enables user cloud storage, file sharing and collaborative editing. It features word processing, as well as spreadsheet and presentation programs, but its best feature is the comment option - a chat tool that allows you to work on the document simultaneously while discussing the work with your partners.

Another useful tool for collaborating on group projects is TodaysMeet - a no-registration temporary chat site. This is great for brainstorming if members in the group do not have accounts for other social networking sites, such as Facebook or Twitter. Similar to Twitter, however, TodaysMeet limits messages to 140 characters, which means that you may have to edit your messages sometimes before sending (or just send multiple messages if you have a long comment). TodaysMeet also features an option to transcribe the chat for submission and review later.

Being a Google user and having used Google Drive for a number of years now, this tool was already included in the 'sharing' section of my PLE. Now I can add TodaysMeet to the 'socializing' section of my PLE: 

Krahn, A. (CC) 2014

As my PLE keeps growing, my need for productivity is increasing as well. Because there isn't time to read everything in depth, I'm starting to develop skills for skimming/scanning and selecting a few articles for reading. Which brings me to an article I came across on my Feedly from Scientific American: Speed-Reading Reborn for Smartphones. Samsung recently integrated the new Spritz speed-reading app into their Galaxy S5 smartphone, allowing users to speed read e-mails, text messages, social media feeds, maps and other digital content. More time to absorb more information now thanks to this cool app!