Group+Communication


 * -- Useful Approaches for Solving Group Issues and Achieving Goals**

This topic might be a bit off for the purpose of this wiki portal but I really feel that these principles have served me really well during the course of working with my group throughout the term. I'm really interested in how other groups feel about them.

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The 4Rs Methods
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 * (ideas taken from "Working in Groups" from Isa Engleberg, page 154)
 * This effort is mainly for analyzing the type of conflicts the group's experiencing:
 * **Reasons: What are the reasons for or cause of the conflict?**
 * For my group, I think the toughest decision is to identify that we had a problem. As we're the group of four people who absolutely had no idea about each other before the project, everyone acted too politely that noone wanted to admit that we have a problem.
 * There were many miscommunication within the group and due to the fact that we rarely get to see each other outside classtime and everyone was too passive to pick any issue up.
 * The main issues I summed up was:
 * Low commitment level: I did almost 80% of the project.
 * There's no clear delegation of tasks and responsibilities and deadlines.
 * Limited communication between members.
 * Too much guessing on what each other's doing, instead of knowing exactly what each other's doing and when they're going to do their works.
 * Technological glitches: MSN not loading, members getting disconnected during online meetings.
 * **Reactions: How are group members reacting to one another?**
 * At first, the reaction was quite awkward. When I mentioned the issues to my members, he simply responded to me that he didn't know I was that bothered by the issue. That should be a group facilitator's fact and it should be up to her to make it happen. When it didn't happen, he was hoping that the facilitator would approach him and delegate tasks better.
 * **Results: What are the consequences of the group's current approach to the conflict?**
 * Despite the initial encounter, the rest of the process was quite peaceful. The morale picked up quite well after that.
 * **Resolution: What are the available methods for resolving the conflict?**
 * We all met up as a group and reasigned roles and clarified on more tasks and deadlines. I also talked it out in person with the facilitator and got to see more of her perspective. It's indeed quite hard to coordinate a group when you're absolutely new to the role and also to the persons.
 * From now on, we try to make more in-person meetings so that all can work on the project at the same pace and discuss with each other directly what concerns or ideas we hold.
 * One other interesting effect is that although we had a serious conflict, the process opened up everyone and we're now more willing to share with each other our own ideas and many bits and pieces from everyday life.

Mediation
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 * According to Kimsey in "Mediation and Conflict Management", mediation is a "facilitation negotiaion [that] employs the services of impartial third parties only for the purpose of guiding, coaching, and encouraging the disputants through negotiation to successful resolution and agreement"(Kimsey 21).
 * It's an appropriate approach for groups to solve conflict when members have gone through all efforts to resolve conflicts by themselves and when they're willing to participate in the process and abide by the final settlement.
 * I'm so glad that we didn't have to apply this approach.

Group Cohesion
Group cohesion is the mutual attraction that holds the members of a group together. Group that are cohesive feel committed and unified and members develop a sense of teamwork and pride in the group (Engleberg 159). The following are characteristics of a cohesive group (Shaw 214):
 * High levels of interaction
 * Especially during the requirement and prototype development phase, we almost text message each other everyday to make sure we're all updated on the latest design ideas from each other.
 * Everytime when something's posted on the site, a general group practice is to send msn or text messages to each other.
 * Friendly and supportive communication climate
 * A desire to conform to group expectations
 * The use of creative and productive approaches to achieving goals
 * We're more of a traditional bundle. We worked most effectively when everyone physically present in a place and each works separately on their own terminals.
 * Satisfied members
 * I think we're all quite proud of all the efforts we've put into the project.

Relating to this Course: Collaborating Using Technology
Group with access to every modern technology are not necessarily better than others. We had many powerful technolgies for learning (wiki, email, msn, text messaging) but they didn't help much to help us communicate with each other during the beginning of the project. Technology is but a tool, or as McLuhan has put it, they're just "extensions of man". They can't replace the importance role of creating interpersonal communication between members. It's incredibily hard to believe that all those problems we identified could simply be changed by several simple phone calls and small chats at Tim Hortons.

Linking this back to user centered design, I believe the same principle holds. We can create all kinds of cool online surveys, manipulate numerous data mining software, and perform countless experiments to try to get know what our users want but the real communication comes from really listening to our users. Nothing can replace a simple chat with the users to listen to their concerns (e.g. during participatory design sessions) or an interactive observing session (e.g. TAP) to get to know how users interacting with their technology wihin their contexts.