Marijke's+Response

This was a unique experience for me. I am often involved with team projects for work and in volunteering. I have used wikis as part of class assignments, for projects, and recently started one for our school Board. I have not, however, been involved with a 100% virtual team. I found it interesting that some of the same problems occur as in face-to-face teams. People are so busy it is extremely difficult to find a time when everyone can meet. This held true for our virtual team although I had thought, "Oh we'll do it online. It'll be easier..." I think our team handled this problem well by being flexible and supportive.

We used oncourse forums and messages to make initial contact and float some general thoughts around. I felt less sure of myself coming up with a topic with the virtual group than I think I would have in a face-to-face meeting. I think I depend on body language a lot during meetings and project work. I think one reason why we settled on the topic we did was merely because of time constraints. Had we had more time to hash out suggestions, we might have come up with something else. I do feel confident that we were able to find an angle for everyone to be able to contribute something interesting.

I had not chatted with a group before this project and the first chat felt a little scattered although I think we got a lot of ideas and information across to each other. It was just a little cumbersome as to who would say what when. I think if our team was ongoing, we would get better at chatting. I think we accomplished quite a bit on the wiki and although we divided the topic up into sections, I appreciated my team members giving me comments and suggestions. That made the project feel more like a group effort. I think it does take people time to feel comfortable editing other people's work (myself included). I am curious about that step of the project.

I think our wiki is unique in that it combines several topics/ideas potentially interesting to teens in a wiki format. I like the idea about getting teens to contribute to the wiki. If they would "buy into" the idea, I think teens would have fun while inadvertantly learning to work together as well as how to be effective using technology. Wikis are very forgiving and support a trial and error approach to learning. The work is immediately rewarding which would provide good feedback to any teen participating. If I were going to add to if, I would try to find ways our rural teens could netowrk with other rural teens (maybe internationally too). I am curious how the response would be to the ning network. One thing I like about having teens contribute to the wiki is that it will grow in its appeal and usefulness the more they do. I would hope the teens would feel ownership of the process and thereby build community skills that could be carried into other situations.

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