Four subjects – three group projects. A nightmare for most of the students, including me. Countless meetings, even more mails and a million different documents containing the work of several people. As a Business and IT student I am lucky to have some insight into solutions that make life easier, but unfortunately most of my fellow students (especially the business ones) use a laptop and Office 2003. That’s it. Versioning is a nightmare and real IT enabled collaboration is just not existing. I tried to foster the use of Office Live where groups and work together online – the perfect solution and it’s free (for now). But most people say we don’t need that and that it’s too complicated. Bull*?$!. It’s so easy and it safes time because you don’t have to meet every other day and follow up with countless emails. Especially as a student no matter what your major is, you should know and use the new solutions for collaboration. Everyone’s using Facebook, hardly anyone uses Google Docs or Microsoft’s Office Live.
Johannes, I absolutely 100% agree. Office Live, Zoho Docs and Google Docs are excellent, and extremely simple, shared document repositories that can save groups huge amounts of time.
You may be interested in my new subject INFT72-215 next semester, if granted the use of the new pod room, all group work will use Google Notebook and Google Docs amongst other Web 2.0 shared information sites.
Michael
[...] to one of my students, Johannes Keim, who vents his justifiable frustration in his post entitled ‘IT (un-)enabled Group Projects’. Like many Bond students he has lots of group work with all the multiple email sharing problems: [...]
This is not the first rant I’ve heard about group projects. Usually it is more about people not showing up to meetings, but using shared document repositories and wikis might reduce the number of times students have to meet in person. And making use of online meetings is another option. It seems there is a need to introduce these tools to students before they start a group project.