Frustrations and successes

I’ve had a lucky break with this paper’s ‘Team Roulette’. The random chances of ending up with a team of four like-minded mature students who don’t like to leave things to the last minute must have been pretty slim, but here we all are, nearly at the end of assignment two. I haven’t done a group study project before so this has been a first, and although we’re spread all around the country and have never met, I think we’re working in together very well.

I can not imagine how hard this would have been if I was a new student without the advantage of experience, from work and from the understanding I’ve gained over

Not. Slytherin. Photo credit: Warner Bros

the years through having a hundred flatmates.  Thank you, team-finding student forum! (Lest you think it was some kind of sorting-hat procedure, there was an aspect of like gravitating to like. But with hindsight I can see how easy it would have been to become part of a team much younger than myself, who had not yet lived in a hundred flats or had to meet a deadline.) Whew.

Skyping and emailing though is a poor substitute for face-to-face discussion. OneNote and Dropbox have made some aspects of collaboration easier, certainly OneNote helped a lot with the planning. Skype has its advantages; the chat function has been a revelation, great for nights when not everyone is available as it leaves a papertrail of the discussion. OneNote has advantages and disadvantages - I can’t even remember now why we didn’t use it for the final report document, though I recall my frustration. Something went wrong. (Obviously I'm that mature I’ve managed to move on successfully.) Dropbox is great for collaborating on documents, IF changes are tracked, and if everyone uses the in-document commenting function. But if tracking is off, version control becomes impossibly frustrating.

In terms of my role as editor, it’s been strange working with material I haven’t done the research for. In some ways it’s harder to revise and edit unfamiliar topics, but on the other hand it puts me in a good position for seeing, objectively, whether the text makes sense. I can see now, more than ever before, that an efficient editor is a decisive and bossy editor… I suspect my style is a little too collaborative to be truly efficient in this role.

Overall I’ve been impressed by how sensible our team has been about decision-

Credit: James Climer

making. Compromises made, expertise respected, and egos put aside. I think if we were ship-wrecked on a desert island we’d probably do pretty well, as a group.  By the time that rescue ship came by we’d have had ourselves organised well ahead of time and formatted seven different versions of ‘HELP’ in burning driftwood on the beach. (Calibri.)