Group dynamics

After a night's sleep, my mind wandered to the group meeting last night and I thought I would pause before the events of the day to record a few of my observations about our team. This is how the dynamics played out. I took the lead in getting everyone notified and establishing a location in teleplace to meet. I offered willingness to work in a different forum if others were more familiar with Active Worlds but no one spoke up (in connectyard or emails) so we went with my lead in Teleplace. So I set up a workspace in the Cross Program Collaboration Room, tucked in the corner of the room, with a bookshelf, a couple display panels, some signs to lead the way, and some resources already on the shelf. It looked as if that room had been used by a previous group of classes but it was much like a ghost town, with fragments remaining of activities from days gone by. But it seemed like the obvious location that others would recognize. My concern with having the forum here is that we do not have a separate sound region so the entire expanse of the room fills with our conversations when we meet. If other groups happen to meet at the same time as ours, that will cause problems, so I may ask Lori for help setting up a sound region in our little corner of the forum.

Back to the group dynamics. I set up the scene, then the first to show up was Julie, the administrator, who was having a bit of difficulty at first with getting into Teleplace. She worked earlier in the day, finally getting in touch with Lori to help her with the passwords and login and she went through the Orientation Station, at my suggestion. When it came time for the meeting, she was ready and had been through orientation, so she was better prepared. Our curriculum representative came next, and needed a little help getting her avatar set up, but I helped her and we talked while waiting for everyone else. She was interested from the start with the information we needed. What was the assignment and what were we going to be looking for. When the time came to meet, there were just 3 of us, but we began. I showed them some of the features of teleplace, like how we could create a new document together and how to import documents and web pages to the display panel. That was all we needed to get going. Later in the meeting, our IT group member showed up and immediately started discussing different options for the presentation. At the time, we were looking at a prezi. She gave us some good suggestions for a brainstorming site we could all contribute to and some ideas for our final product. We ended up taking a document and splitting up the research and planning another meeting time. Everyone seemed to fit right into their roles of specialty. Cool.