As a teacher, besides spending time teaching students, one other thing I enjoyed most was to be a "designer". Just like a fashion or interior designer, a lesson designer needs to plan and draw the designs, and eventually turn them into reality while teaching students. As I feel that we lesson design skills are rusting, I thought this opprotunity to develop a unit had refreshed my knowledge (and fond memories) about curriculum, pedagogy, etc.
Thus, though it is sad to be working alone, I am very happy to be preacticing the skills of designing a unit.
How did you and your partner divided the work? Did that work out? What were the pros and cons of working with a partner at a distance?
Though I didnt get to work with any partner from this class, I do often work with counterparts from the 12 Asia Pacific countries and from around the world via virtual means.
Dividing work load and how to work things out
Doing this virtually can be quite challenging as it is different from the day-to-day communication, where there is often clarification and negotiation going on. As like daily communication, it is often challenging when
- different colleagues have different accents and competency in communicating in English
- participants in the communication are more of a tactile and visual person than audio (thus, imprtant messages often get missed out)
- misinterpretation of tone thus missing the meaning of messages (especially during negotiation)
This often lead to misunderstandning or unhappiness when work gets divided. As such it is always good to enter a conference call with a visual aid like a word or powerpoint document, and make references to it as we proceed in the discussion. And, after the meeting, by sending out the notes of meeting to capture key facts discussed and getting everyone acknowldege it is very important.
I feel privileged that in my company, we have all the necessary tools to facilitate distant collaboration. With a Office Communicator, as long as there is internet connection, I can have call any of my colleague up and have a long discussion without having to worry about cost.
Or when group discussion is needed, we can just get into a conference call using the Communicator, where everyone can dial in a local number and get into a conference room for a synchronous discussion. Again, this helps save cost greatly. Furthermore, if we need to share visual tool, with a click of button to share documents, a team can have very guided discussion, that can be highly productive.
Using Outlook, we can use the "scheduling assistant" to find common free time and work out the differences in time zone at a blink of the eyes :) Though it is difficult to collaborate with people from very extreme time zone, soft skills such as being accomodative, understanding, etc. are important in making distant collaboration work.
Pros and Cons of working with someone at a distance
From an economics standpoint, working virtually is very cost effective. Besides cutting down on travel and related expenses, it helps save time too. I often jump from conference calls to calls, with people from different countries. Hence, this also helps save time and make a person more productive.
As for the disadvanatges, some are already shared above - misinterpretation of messages, misunderstood the tone of the speaker, etc. Generally, there are more pros than cons for people to work collaboratively using diff ICT tools in today's globalised world.
