English 420Y - Business Writing Online

I first found out my team members through an email sent from the professor. I responded to all providing them with my cell phone, and screen name. I later reviewed some of their material on the website. I was excited because it seemed as though they had been keeping up with their work so far. Wednesday night I was contacted by Megan on AIM. We discussed our thoughts on the project and made plans to speak Thursday night.

This week I tried to start communicating with my group via the wiki page, but unfortunately none of my group members replied back. That same day I received an email from one of my teammembers who suggested that we meet through AIM in order to get together as a group. This method did not work well since many of us had internships or other courses, so we had trouble on setting a specific time to meet. Yesterday, I checked my email and saw that there was going to be a group meeting at 8pm Central Time through the chat page the course has designed for us.

I can tell from what has been going on this week that this is going to be quite an experience. It's really obvious that my group will have a lot of difficulties since 2 of my group members are working full time and the other two are in South America. We have been trying all week to communicate in an effective way but it’s been hard. For the Gantt chart that we have to submit today, it has been really hard to do together, but I am sure that organization will improve after this.

I believe that i managed to do the best I could to get the assignments accomplished this week. I sent an email out when we were assigned groups and introduced myself. I then began sending out a few email this week to try to get things moving and start dividing up duties. I did not get much response from my group so began to work on the gantt chart by myself. Luckily i heard from Roy and got a rough draft from him . I combined the both or ours and posted our groups gantt chart.

I accomplished all the goals of the group for Week 5. I designed and created the Gantt Chart and initiated all the group discussion. The day that I received the names of my group members, I immediately sent out an email to introduce myself and get the project started. I provided everyone with my contact information (cell phone, email, and AIM screename) so that I can be contacted at any time. I asked everyone else to provide the same information when they replied, but only received some contact information from one other member.

Considering this was our groups first week together, it took us a while to get going. We started off emailing each other about who we were and really trying to give each person in our 4 person group a feel for who we are and how we work. It was very neat to see the diversity we have in our group and how far away our message are traveling just to get this project done. Matt seemed to be a very outgoing senior and wanted to be the leader, which turns out to be great because our first step, the Gnatt Chart, is due today.

This week has been a learning experience on how to work in groups online. It has been difficult to stay in touch with everyone on a consistent basis. This is mainly due to conflicting schedules and group members communicating from different time zones. I started the week by writing an email to introduce myself and throw out a few ideas on splitting up the work load. As the week has progressed we have gotten better at communicating through email and have made good use of the wiki page. The only problem I have seen is, we have not set up any exact times for group meetings.

This week I contributed to my group significantly. I was the first person to send out an e-mail to the group to get the details on the best time for them to meet online in the provided chat space, or on Instant Messenger. In my e-mail, I asked that each member provide their AOL Instant Messenger screen name, the time they could most conveniently work on things, and their time zone so we could figure out the specific time frame for each person. I also assigned partners for different parts of the project.

I think that the work has been good till now. I guess i will have to rearrange my schedule as I am presently in India, and I am way behind in the time zone. But il try to work according to the american time so that there is no communication problems and the matters could be deiscussed and sorted immidiately. Alex created a gantt chat which I compared with other examples and think it looks good. I think that the task of reading response, for which we had to find a brochure will help in the next week in figuring out the pattern and various other related details.

This week has been a struggle for our group. We are finding it hard to coordinate everyone’s schedules. In addition, we haven’t come to a decision on when or how we will have our group meetings. Part of the problems have been a result of two of the members from our group going on holiday this weekend, myself being one of them. I have tried to jumpstart our project by creating part of our Gannt chart for the other members to finish.