This is the post for the week of Tuesday, February 21, 2017.

Notes for This Week

• Collaborative work: This week we begin the super-projects that will be your focus for the rest of the term.

• Overlapping activities: Since the grace period for the Analysis project does not end until 11:59 on Thursday, you may find yourself working on projects for two different weeks.

Readings for This Week

• Succeeding in This Online Course
• 10 Rules of Professional Etiquette for the Digital Workplace (text)
• 10 Rules of Professional Etiquette for the Digital Workplace (infographic)
• Is Poor Collaboration Killing Your Company?
• Why Teamwork Is So Painful
• Conflict Resolution Steps: CALM

Writing Group Work and the Remaining Projects

This week we begin the super-projects that will be your focus for the rest of the term. Your writing group will collaborate to create three projects:

Major Projects	Due Date
a proposal for your group’s writing guide	11:59 PM on March 17
the writing guide itself (which can take several forms)	11:59 PM on April 14
a presentation of primary information from your report	11:59 PM on May 1

The assignments for these remaining projects will be available next week. This week you will do some preliminary work on your proposal.

Your group will create these three projects collaboratively. These group projects will each be graded for completion, content, format and design, and accuracy and correctness. Each project will earn a base grade according to those criteria. That base grade will be adjusted up or down for each individual writing group member, taking into account the member’s effort, input, and performance.

Activities for This Week

1. Review the tips for Succeeding in This Online Course. Set a schedule for the rest of the term to ensure that you take time to complete work on time and collaborate with your writing group.

2. Review the information on collaboration. The four infographics for this week address some of the challenges of teamwork and suggest ways to deal with them. Read through the information, and find at least one idea that you think would strengthen your writing group. Share the idea and your feelings about it in a post in your #team______ channel in Slack. If appropriate, revise your group guidelines to reflect this new information.

3. Create a single analysis document for your group. This work is the first step for work on your proposal. Follow this process:

   1. Create a single document in Google Docs that is shared with all your group members and with me (tengrrl@vt.edu). Only one of you needs to do this.
   2. Add your analysis table to the group document.
   3. Organize the document to make it more usable. In particular, group similar kinds of writing together. For instance, if several of you included email, arrange the information so that all the entries for email are together.
   4. Don’t worry about differences in columns for now. This is just a working document.

4. Update your participation log. You will do your midterm participation reflection next week, so spend some time this week making sure that your log is up to date.

5. Complete a Self-Assessment next week. Because of Presidents Day, we have a short week this week, and next Friday (or earlier), you will all head off for Spring Break. To keep the workload reasonable, you will report on your work to date before break starts.

 

[Credits: Infographic was created on canva.com. Icons are all from The Noun Project, used under a CC-BY 3.0 license: : book laptop by unlimicon, Coffee by Vladislava Barzin, schedule by Chameleon Design, group chat by Gregor Cresnar, and group brainstrom by cathy moser.]

 

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