Week 2 Monday

As we begin the second week, your workload once again concentrates primarily on developing your skills before the real writing begins.

 

What's on tap this week

Reading: You will also need to start reading for the Faux Pas Case project this week.

Minor assignments: You also need to complete exercises 5-7 and quizzes 4-8.  So far, people seem to be doing rather well on the quizzes overall. Keep up the good work. You can pick up some extra credit/participation points by posting on the discussion boards.

The Big Deal This Week: The International Project should take a majority of your intellectual time this week. I'm making some adjustments to the project to make it just a little bit easier for you to negotiate. 

• First, I'm going to give you the option to SIGN UP for groups today (Monday). I'll assign everyone who has not signed up for a group by 11:59 pm Monday to groups as spaces are available. Check the group sign-up sheet on our course homepage in WebCampus. The sign up sheets give you the option to join/form a group with anyone else in class you've already found to be compatible.
• Second, to limit the amount of time teams spend debating about the best city to choose, I'm limiting your city options to just two: 1) London, England, or 2) Sydney, Australia.

By mid-day Tuesday, each group will have a discussion space and a chat room; group members will be listed on their discussion space. I’ve had groups with people in Hong Kong, France, Nevada, and California do this project quite successfully without ever having a face-to-face meeting. One of the keys to success is to appoint someone with good organization and people skills to be your project manager; the project manager's contribution to the project can/should be almost entirely managing the project (not writing or researching but keeping project goals in focus, distributing assignments, keeping track of the people actually doing the writing/researching.)

Pep Talk

To get everyone started, I'd like to offer some words of encouragement and some tips for this initial stage. You CAN manage this project without meeting face-toface, but that means you have to work smart right from the beginning. A good place to start is by reviewing the readings on Collaboration and applying those principles to your work group.

One of the most important things you can do is to establish some clear roles and responsbilities for team members early on; find out who the best project manager in your group is (not the best writer, not the hardest worker, the best manager) and make them your manager.

I want to emphasize that it is to your individual advantage to have your team do the bulk of your communication about this project through Web Campus because that establishes a clear record of your individual contributions. However, I've had teams that have done most of their communication via conference calls, texting, tweeting, Google Groups, whatever. While this is a team project, every person receives an individual grade. By “meeting” in your chat room or discussion space, or at least by posting meeting minutes consistently in your chat room or discussion space, your team creates a record of the work done. That helps me assess the quality of your work process and of each individual’s contributions.

It also helps keep your team moving forward: I cannot stress enough how very much keeping actual meeting minutes – time/date/location of th meeting, who was there, who was late, what topics were discussed, what action items were assigned to which individuals, what deadlines were set – will help you keep this project on course.

Helpful goal for this week: By the end of the day on Wednesday, you should know:

• Who every member of your team is, what their strengths/weaknesses are on this type of a project, what roles they are comfortable playing, and how each member plans to contribute to the project 
• How to contact every member of your group by email and telephone, and when during the week they are available by phone, email, or chat. 
• When during the week each team member usually has time to work on this class and how those availabilities match up with the work that needs to be done. 
• How and when you will hold team meetings – in the chat room? email only? conference calling? meeting on campus? 
• What each team members’ assignments are for the first part of this project – the Research Design Plan – and what the schedule is for completing the work. 

I’ll have more tomorrow.

Have a great day!

Dr. Staggers