Compare your individual and team experiences this semester. What did you gain or lose from collaboration?
Honestly there has not been too much in the way of collaboration with my group this semester. I am really having trouble having never met my group members face to face. Only knowing them in an "online" sense has been difficult to me for some reason. Maybe from the beginning we should have utilized Skype so we at least would have had one synchronous discussion. We used our AUM e-mail (which truthfully, I am terrible at checking) and communication was rare. I felt more alone in my learning for this class especially since we did not use Voicethread at all. In our last class I would listen to all of the responses of the class and could gauge where I was at in my understanding.
With all of that being said, I prefer to work alone. Typically in a group setting (not in this particular one) I end up doing the bulk of the work just so I make sure it gets done. Maybe that is a flaw on my own end but I have had one too many projects go wrong because someone did not pull their own weight.
Due to the lack of collaboration I lost the gauge of understanding that I mentioned previously. I really only have my grades to go on. I also feel as though we cheated ourselves by not making an effort to truly discuss the assignments. By talking things out with our peers, we learn from one another and are better able to organize our assignments. We would have been able to make sure that we were not missing anything and that we had covered all of our bases. Collaboration would have been very helpful during the ALICE 2.2 project. If nothing else to show one another the little tricks we had learned about the programming software. Luckily I was able to e-mail one of my group members with a problem. He had the same issue and already knew the fix. That was super helpful. I will definitely be more diligent in my next course to collaborate more effectively with my group members. We would all benefit.
