Using the group share tool was a valuable tool for our group work. It acted as a central hub for information for our group, not only on current work, but also contact and member details. Everyone lived in different areas so there was really no way we could get together apart from at our Information services management class. And during week 3 the group learnt that Matthew would not be coming to lectures. This caused a little bit of confusion in case study 4 as Matthew did not have the background knowledge that we had discussed with Barbara in the workshop/lecture.
The group share made communication much easier more specifically it allowed us to communicate at different times of the day, which fit well with team member’s different uni timetables and schedules. However several unsuccessful attempts were made by me and other group members to organise a meeting and discuss the weeks tasks but as it turns out I don’t believe this was necessary as we delegated the work after the lecture and all work was completed on time.
Decisions and discussions that were made in class where able to be documented in a space that was available and accessible to all team members, usually by uploading several word documents and comments could be added if there were any disputes, there was always a record of what was decided (Decisions on what the superficial issues where etc). This made it easy to see if any group member wasn’t contributing. On several occasions this occurred it was evident that the group member had downloaded the document but since there was no comments its difficult to say if they had read it, maybe in future versions of groupshare when uploading a document you should be given a tick box of which group members you want to review the document.
However when comparing it to alternate methods of communication and group work, group share is superior, it saves on communication hassles such as emailing everyone with a new updated version every time a slight spelling edit was made, or the formatting changed.
I remember working on a document and just before I uploaded it, I noticed that a team member had already changed and uploaded their version. If email was the medium used there would have been trouble, because people may not thoroughly exam new emails, and missed the fact that a new version of a document had been sent out. Meaning there would be 2 documents, each with different changes from 1 document being circulated, which could cause quiet a lot of confusion especially when others start changing and modifying these as well.
Overall it helped to centralise all the important information for our group. At any time a member could go and retrieve the most currant version of a document and edit it. However there are several ways that you can get around not contributing in the group and still get a good Participation Awareness