Interpersonal

Artifact: EDTEC 795A Love Library Guide Web site

Although I'd done team projects in my EDTEC courses prior to 795A, most of my team projects had actually been partner projects with myself and one other person. In 795A my team was actually a team, comprised of three people in two different time zones with three widely variant backgrounds. One of my team members was in California and in the COMET program; one was a corporate instructional designer from the east coast, and then there was higher-education-focused me in Pittsburgh. I’ll confess to being less than thrilled with distance-based team projects; they seem hard to manage when all involved parties live and study in the same city, much less when you throw in different time zones and work responsibilities.

Our team was tasked with designing a Web site to lead EDTEC students through the virtual resources and services available through SDSU’s Love Library. I will admit to some stumbles – and even outright falls – as we got started. One team member was totally unavailable for a couple of weeks at the start of the semester as she went on a wedding and honeymoon trip. Another was incommunicado at the crucial mid-semester point as she did some extensive work travel.  I tend to be a bit controlling and was probably overbearing as we started out. But somehow we managed to come together and develop what I think was a very targeted survey, acquire some good data from our EDTEC colleagues about their experience with library resources, and collectively decide on a plan of action for our site.

Letting Go

Through all of this, I remained wary of working as a team and skeptical about our ability to actually complete the site. Then completely unexpectedly, one day one of my teammates sent out a note that basically said, “Hey, I’ve created the bones of the site…take a look!” The second responded, “Oh, I like your site but I think page x needs additional work so I’ll get going on it.” And then it hit me. My attempts at providing “leadership” to our team (read: I was being a control freak) had been discouraging my colleagues from stepping up when needed and working creatively. I needed to relax a bit to let my teammates take ownership of parts of the project.

I’m very happy with the way the site turned out. Our clients (Marcie Bober-Michel and Minjuan Wang) were happy with the site. But more importantly, I learned valuable lessons about group dynamics and the importance of letting go when working collaboratively. I’m not sure that a team can work without a leader, but I think our team would have been more successful in the beginning if we’d each taken leadership of a small piece of the project.  I still think that team projects should be used sparingly in a distance-based graduate program, but I now support their use and I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn what I did.