Shannon O'Neill

My group (Marie, Ryan, and Jacob) and I are creating a Wiki Page on Lovell’s Island and we just wrapped up our first meeting.  We haven’t experienced any extreme challenges, perhaps the only one being that we were unable to come up with a meeting time at which all four members could participate.  We decided to go on with a meeting time that 3/4 members could virtually attend, and things went well.  We met via Google Hangout; Marie and I used both the chat and webcam feature of Hangout while Ryan, who had unfortunately experienced a computer virus earlier in the day, was able to listen to the conversation and participate using the chat feature of Hangout.

We began the meeting by discussing team roles.  I am the Team Lead, Ryan is the Wiki Designer, Jacob is the Map Mashup Creator, and Marie is the Widgetizer.  We will all participate in the Editor/Writer/Researcher Role.  After determining roles, we moved on to discussion about the Visitor Guide.  We broke the guide up into parts. We are going to colloborate the information and put it together on the Wiki immediately following Spring Break (Monday, March 25).  For the Visitor Page, Marie is going to write an Overview that will include basic information about the island, its history, its activities, etc.  Ryan, who has visited the island on his boat before, is going to write about Transportation (both public and private).  I am going to look into the island’s hours, whether it is open year-round or seasonally, and look up rates (for camping, activities, transportation, etc).  I am also going to look up images.

Other than Google Hangout, we have been communicating via our Gmail accounts and have an ongoing thread for the Lovell’s Island project.  Additionally, we utilized Doodle to create a poll to decide on the date and time of the first meeting.  All forms of communication that we have utilized thus far have been successful, though I wouldn’t say any one was more successful than the others.  The majority of our communication has been via Gmail, and our Gmail conversations led to any easy and effective Google Hangout Session that was facilitated with the help of Doodle – something necessary, in my opinion, for deciding meeting times.

I think that all of the communication tools we’ve used have been successful thus far and I feel that everyone is “in the loop.”  In my opinion, Google Hangout works much better than other video chat programs, like Skype, and I was pleased with the fact that members could join the “hangout” even if they were not using a webcam.  The webcam/audio/chat feature made communication easy, especially for a group project in which not everyone has the same technology.  With that said, I don’t feel that any “new technology” needs to be created to make virtual team collaboration any better.  We have not reached the point of file-sharing yet, but I am confident that for the nature of this project email attachments will suffice…if not, other file sharing websites/FTPs exist and can easily be utilized (but, again, I don’t predict any of our files being that large).

Without a doubt, the first group meeting was productive and successful and I look forward to continuing this great work with my group members.

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