Final Assignment: Individual Paper

It was the first time for three of us to work on the same project even though three of us are from the same program. In this case, we did not know each other very well before we form into a team. We have different schedule for the classes, we have different jobs at daytime, we come from different part of China with different background and languages. 

Conflict is defined as a disagreement through which the parties involved perceive a threat to their needs, interests or concerns. With a more and more globalized social environment, we all learned that conflicts are normal in our daily life and work place. But how to reach an agreement is the most difficult part. 

In my individual paper, I'd like to talk about the technology that is playing a more and more important role on helping us dealing with conflicts.

 


Since our team members are having a totally different schedule everyday which made us nearly impossible to meet in person and talk about the group projects. In this case, we decided to use Wechat as the primary communication tool in our group, there are several benefits of using this tool:

1. We can speak out the ideas anytime anywhere whenever we came up with something interesting; whoever agree or not on it can just reply freely anytime she is free. 

2. Our discussion details and the ideas are stored as archives automatically, which make sure that we can easily be access to the histories that we may not write down.

Besides Wechat, we also used Skype as a online meeting tool so that we can discuss as a group even though three of are in different places and hard to meet up in person. I think it's even more effective than the traditional meetings.

After discussion and brainstorming online, we also looked for help on tools that support writing from different location simultaneously. Having a group blog was a very good approach for this kind of multi-party writing. Same like what we did discussions, we wrote our own parts as aligned during the meetings and finally there is one person do the consolidation work at last. By doing this, nobody need to wait for the other to start her own work.

These work effectiveness tools are good for team job and reduced conflicts on a certain level. But this is not enough, in order to eliminate the conflicts and build a high efficiency collaborative team, we also used social media to connect to each other, more importantly, to know each other in their own life. Three of us are now friends on Facebooks, Wechat and even LinkedIn.  After the group work and communicating online and offline, we are more closer to each other and of course have no more conflicts comparing to the status at the beginning.