Burnett, Anderson, and Selfe

Collaborative Rules of the Road

July 30, 2009
Blog entry

In Burnett’s article it was setting the ground rules for collaborative work. It expressed ways o the correct ways of doing collaborative groups and what one might expect. Three types of conflict were listed and how to use them constructively. He wrote about the problems of premature consensus and its pitfalls. He also writes about competition versus cooperation. Too much competition is detrimental to productive collaboration. This gives people the wrong idea. They feel that they can win if the others fail in reaching their goal of a successful collaborative effort.

Burnett writes, “Substantive conflicts in a cooperative setting could lead collaborators to reexamine opinions, share diverse ideas, and discover creative solutions typically regarded as essential to effective decisions.” This is all part of workplace collaborative improvement.
Planning collaborative work is essential for successful end product. From my experiences in the working world, just about anything you do need a plan to be successful. I work over twenty years in sales and if you didn’t have a plan you would not be very successful.

Disagreement is good if you understand the dynamics of proper disagreement. Letting others know that you disagree, it allows for discussion and new ideas to surface. It gives an opportunity for others to think, to develop new ways of solving the problem at hand, and opens the door for others to voice their idea or opinions.

What I got from Anderson’s article was the importance of scheduling and assigning the different jobs to certain people, due at a certain time, and having progress meetings to understand where the project is at any particular time. I was working in a group designing a web page for new students, actually to make the current web page easier to use for everyone. Each person was assigned work related to their personal skills. All five of us in the group met several times outside of the classroom to work on the project and interacted with each other away from our project. It was the most successful project that I have done in college.

Selfe’s article was a contrast in face to face discourse versus computer e-mail sent between group members. In face to face there is a chance that one or two members will dominate the group because of being more assertive than the rest of the group. In the computer e-mail form of collaboration, each person has equal standing. It is less intimidating and is easier to express themselves in writing rather than verbally.

The three articles are a guide to doing good collaborative work in groups. I learned a great deal about what are good practices for working in groups. Having done several group tasks, there were no basic guide lines for most of them. The three authors articles fall in place starting with Burnett, Anderson, and Selfe.

They did not like how collaboration was taught in school because it leads to preconceived ideas and the wrong conclusions by the students. These ideas lead to poor communication and collaborative work.