Collaboration
Descriptor - Group leadership within complex organizational settings
In my position as sole computer support in my department, I rarely have the opportunity to collaborate. The examples below include the few occasions I have encountered recently at work as well as some team environments I have worked in as a grad student at NJIT.
The department media specialist, Marilyn, and I work together many times each week in classrooms as we help the faculty project images using laptop computers and projection equipment. As technology changes, so does the needs of the professors. As wonderful as technology is, each piece needs to work in order for the whole system to be successful. Marilyn and I constantly troubleshoot until we figure out whether the problem is on her end or mine. It would be very difficult to troubleshoot independently.
PTC 601 was all about team work. While I did not assume a leadership role, I was very vocal and worked hard for my team. The assignment was to create a diagram using Microsoft Visio, and to create a document that instructed another team to reconstruct our document. My Visio diagram was chosen to represent our group effort, as was my document design for the instruction document. In addition, I often pushed the group to look harder at the assignments and make stronger decisions. The challenge in this particular setting is that we are collaborating completely online. There is no face-to-face, only online chat and discussion.