In Rebecca Ingalls article “Writing Eyeball to Eyeball: Building a Successful Collaboration”, she explains this process as a balance of working effectively and efficiently to create and share multiple ideas, so they can turn them into one main idea. She shares with us a number of steps to take in order for a collaborative project to be successful. Some of her methods include: creating a contract that each group member agrees with, building good communication skills, assigning everyone a role, etc. Being in a collaborative situation gives you the opportunity to see yourself and peers as sources of information. Allowing yourselves to learn from each other is valuable.
However, although being able to work well with others is a crucial skill needed for the future, it isn’t something that always goes according to plan. In my personal experience, I would say I’ve been in an equal amount of both efficient and non-efficient groups. Being in a non-efficient group definitely caused me more stress because when you’re working with people who don’t actually want to work, sometimes you have to pick up their slack just to be able to save yourself. It’s not fair but in order to achieve a good grade sometimes it’s easier to just suck it up. It’s also harder to keep everyone on the same page when group members are inactive with each other. Things end up looking messy and if it was something we had to present, the speech would usually come off awkward because no one was prepared enough.
Overall I think that everyone should re-evaluate their views on collaborating because there might be a better way to go about things that you haven’t thought of before. Working together makes everyone’s lives easier, we should be able to take advantage of that.
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