AAR- After Action Report. If I had a group of people like Danielle we would have completed this assignment in 3 days. She took the initiative as assaulted this assignment like there was no tomorrow. She shot out a Rough Draft day 2 and we started working back and forth on drafts from that point on. What killed us is we had decided to back off a little in order to allow the others to jump in and start writing. Group Collaborations must be coordinated quickly in order to give people time to work. The problem comes when people procrastinate and then try to jump in later.
Our teams ultimate problem was 1. How to tackle the assignment 2. Who was in charge 3. How far should we go before we just work without the others.
1. How to tackle the assignment. Since me and Danielle did not want to step on each others toes we were skeptical about rewording and working on the other persons writtings. I guess we could have divided up the document into different areas for each of us but that is to much like an individual assignment. We finally decided just to pass the draft back and forth sometimes working on it at the same time.(I wish PBworks had a free IM!)
2. Who was in charge. The great thing about how we worked was we both were. After we got over the problem of being skeptical about offending the other person and just working as a team the drafting, re-writing, finding error, then re-writing went a lot smoother. I do not think either of us wanted to be in charge. Not because we were afraid but because both of us had been in charge of collaboration way to many times and were leaving that option open for some of the other students to jump in a participate. By the time we decided that they were not going to do it we both just passed the document back and forth making corrections.
3. Without initiative the project is doomed to fail. With initiative and understanding that your all working as a team and not to take things to personal it all works out great. I am sure we could have done better if we had a plan from day one but that would have required initiative from all the members. Overall I think this collaboration went well and those that participated learned a lot.
LoL. You give me too much credit! I don't remember shooting a rough draft out that fast at all. You were dead on with your points though. I hate stepping on toes so things like who was in charge and what we should do were major issues for me. At least if we ever work together again, we'll know to warn the other members to collaborate from the start or be left behind!
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