Managing the Team to Manage the Project

Poster presentation given at Computers and Writing Conference 2019

Link to Program: http://www.digitalwriting.org/CWCON_FINAL_PROGRAM.pdf

Effective collaboration is a key skill that both industry and educators want students to develop from their planned classroom group work. Professional work is increasingly dominated by team development (and increasingly distributed and distance team development) whether they are large open source projects, like Red Hat, GitHub, Wikipedia—or massive science projects, for example, CERN laboratory, the International space station, Human Genome Project—crowdsourced science projects, for example, Fold it, Polymath, Galaxy Zoo, Setilive (Franzoni & Sauermann, 2014)—or business and industry collaborative initiatives, for example Microsoft + Toyota: smart energy consumption, Coca-Cola and Heinz: sustainable containers (Turiera & Cros, 2013), Bitcoin: cryptocurrency (“Satoshi Nakamoto,” 2018), or USB Type-C development (Weintrop & Wilensky, 2017) to name a few. While team projects have become a standard offering in many writing courses (especially in technical and professional writing), we do not often question how we teach team projects. Instead, we think of collaboration as an experiential skill, one students should just pick up as they work together. As instructors, we have the opportunity to create an intervention by spending time teaching students to manage the team as well as the project. Our poster tackles the question, How do we teach teaming?