Collaborative Connections

The Ability to Work Within Teams

Each week in this class you will be working with others. When doing so, you are to offer quality feedback to help team members improve their assignments . You will not only learn to recognize good writing, quality design, unique ideas and offer help and suggestions on how to improve your classmates' work, but you will learn something about your peers and what makes quality. This creates a community of peers in our "classroom" where you can learn that written communication is to be read, not just stuffed away in a drawer or to be given to an instructor to be marked up with red ink . This is also done so you can learn that each member of this class can offer you something to enrich your professional life. The rule for responding to the work of others is to do so with respect and courtesy. We are here to help each other improve as professionals not to laugh at or judge each other.

Team assignments will be established shortly after the first week of class.

The goals of collaboration are to help you:

  • become familiar with the issues of constructivist principles of active learning for the 21st century.
  • enhance your research and documentation skills.
  • differentiate between proposals that work and those that should be shuffled off to the sidelines.
  • develop your critical thinking skills and enable you to back up your conclusions with evidence.
  • discover ways to share your work in a user-friendly, well organized, Web presentation.
  • play well together in the same sandbox

Be creative in the design and content of your site. Try to incorporate each member’s input and design a format that reflects them in a fluid and exploratory form. Exploit hypertext forms and aesthetics to link to a diversity of topics and viewpoints, while collecting them under a common critical objective. Don’t work in complete isolation from the team. Strive to achieve site unity (textually and graphically) and avoid purely mechanical linking conventions (a repeated "table of contents" on each page, for example.) Since "linking" is one of the defining features of hypertext, you should work to find creative ways to link related information through key words, graphical cues, and critical concepts.

You will also be expected to meet out-of-class using e-mail and the Blackboard bulletin boards to complete the assignment.

But what if you have a team member who doesn't play well with others? What if a team member doesn't respond or supply work in a timely matter? Read Barbara Oakley's article Coping With Hitchhikers and Couch Potatoes on Teams.

Self and Team Evaluation:

  • the currency and relevance of your information, including the References
  • the thoroughness of your project
  • the clarity of your writing
  • your knowledge about the subject gained through your research
  • the organization of your material
  • the adherence to correct English
  • your ability to share the material to the class on a user-friendly Web presentation

Responsibilities

You will need to sufficiently narrow down your poposal and do the appropriate research (Web and print). Provide sufficient detail to support your findings. Include links to all relevant Web sites which can illuminate the topic for your audience. Include a Works Cited page, with links to the relevant Web sites.

Information from sources needs to be documented in MLA style. Observe copyright rules for content and graphics.