Group Collaboration and Literacy

I had an interesting experience with my group members this week. Whereas last week they seemed eager to participate in the building of a wiki for our office group, this week I sensed a definite cooling about the idea, and especially the idea of collaborating, or perhaps the idea of having another task added to their already large list of responsibilities, which to me that’s understandable.

As I read this week’s chapter I gained a little insight as to why my coworkers may not want to collaborate, and to put it bluntly, they may not be media literate, or literate in terms of engaging in collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge, which is to say they are not required to express their own ideas. This may in part contribute to what I perceived to be their reservation about contributing their own content to the group wiki. One group members may have told me as much when we discussed his concern that his writing didn’t match up to mine. I’m guessing that the idea of collaborating may be so foreign to my group members that the only way they can get on board with this concept is to see an example of an active collaboration. I am changing my tack with the group and focusing more on collaborating with one member at a time vs. collaborating with a group.