Collaborative Documentation Project for Translation

February 24, 2019 It is the day before our final draft is due to the translators and sadly I feel as if I have contributed nothing. Our group's means of communication is still through different email chains and has not become any more organized or easier to follow along with. I am questioning why we even decided to add the resource of Google Hangouts, as it has hardly been used. However, I think our group could have benefited in using this resource more instead of relying on long email chains. A new concern has come about in reviewing our project. I hope our instructions are seen as sufficient enough. It feels as though the steps and guide were just copied and pasted from the Flickr guide. They may have been tweaked here or there but all in all, there is not much depth to the document. This goes back to the idea that our group should have picked something a bit more informative and useful. In my opinion, our document is not a document. It is simply a line by line guide on how t...

February 21, 2019 I believe we are almost to the midway point in our project and things still seem unorganized. Thankfully, I was given the task to write the introduction and conclusion for our instructions. I was very happy to oblige, however, short my work may be, at least I have some contribution thus far. I am still finding it difficult to follow along with group communication. The long emails are hard to follow and there to seem to be new chains added every couple of days. This method of communication, in my opinion, is extremely scattered and disheveled. Yet another issue is the lack of delegation with the workload. I believe there is some effort in divvying up the work but nowhere near what it should be. So far, this has been a learning experience for me. Being new to international communication within a group has certainly brought its challenges. This new dynamic is teaching me how to deal with the challenges of international, multicultural communication. It seems there...

February 15, 2019 Another week is coming to an end and sadly our group seems to be moving ahead without better delegation. There has been yet another draft completed and submitted for the group to review that only one person composed. I am part of the writing team but was not included in any aspect of this. Work was not sectioned off and distributed to the writing team and the drafts are virtually complete only left open to minor comments here or there. I am extremely frustrated and astounded that this is the way my other team members are working. There is no delegation, there is no sharing in the workload of writing the instructions. I cannot simply understand what went wrong and where it was decided for one person to write the whole document without consulting the other writers. Since the drafts have been completed it seems the other members chosen as writers can only comment on what they would change. Certainly not a large contribution to the project. As the project moves to...

February 13, 2019 This week has presented some challenges yet again with this group project. One of the members submitted a draft for the project which is seemingly finished other than editing and some tweaking. There is little to no communication about what work should be divided where and to whom. It seems as though whoever wishes to take a part of the project does so without consulting the group. I reached out to one of my fellow UCF group members and we share similar frustrations in this area. We wish we were more involved instead of simpling answering an email chain. And the email chain is yet another source of frustration. There are several different email chains going on at once, it is confusing and makes little sense, to say the least. The frustrations I am voicing are ones that would typically spur me to action in contacting my professor to find a remedy for. However, the fact that this group consists largely of international students makes, makes this situation a little m...

February 9. 2019 We have finished up the week in our group by picking a final topic. Communication still seems odd being held mainly in an email chain. However, I believe this to be a part of the intercultural and international collaboration that I just need to accept. I do wish our group relied more on the Google Hangouts resource as a main means of communication. In my opinion, that method may be simpler to follow and keep track of. Although I am pleased my group chose a topic, I will be anxious to see how this topic provides enough pertinent information to accomplish a successful project. One of our choices was to write instructions for working with and adding documents to Google Drive. I felt this topic would be extremely helpful for students such as myself who could use some guidance with this platform. However, our topic will be how to use Flickr, an app I'm not familiar with and in my opinion, does not provide any helpful information to students. I wish we would have cho...

February 7, 2019 We are still in the beginning stages of this collaboration process but I am already overwhelmed. One of the first aspects of this intercultural dynamic I noticed is the difference in the 'tech saviness' of myself and my international group members. Their ability to formulate documents and post them to Google drive as quickly as they did shows their tech skills. Skills that are not matched by my own, which causes quite a bit of anxiousness and stress on my end. I feel as though I was not able to contribute anything thus far to our project as everything was done without delegation. The documents were prepared so quickly and without discussion I was unaware they were even being composed. Another element that makes me nervous, is the amount of people that are in our one group. So far, communication has been sporadic and it is hard to keep track of everyone. I hope we can move towards a smoother means of communication instead of trailing email chains.  However, ...