Rudai 12: Online Collaborations

In the rural north east of Scotland working with school library colleagues is a delight, a great chance to meet, discuss, share ideas etc. But the rural nature itself can make the physical act of meeting up a bit of a trial – even arranging a meeting can be lengthy process. Our next meeting – now set for 19^th March, was the result of at over 27 emails over two days which got mixed up with a training day date too. Perhaps there are simpler ways of doing things and Doodle has stood out as a potentially useful tool to aid in the arrangement of meetings, and one I shall be looking to trial to arrange the next meeting!

When reflecting on recent group meeting a and collaborative working, one in particular jumps out at me, an application for school library improvement funding which a group of us had volunteered/ been volunteered to undertake. Time was limited with only 4 weeks to get this completed – two of which covered the October break. After exchanges ideas, suggestions and comments by email it became clear we would need to meet up over the holidays to progress this work to the application form level. This we did in a café with no internet access (!) so were unable to contact folks who didn’t show. Thank goodness for print copies of work. We spoke, argued, discussed and decided another meeting was needed which duly took place a week later in one of our libraries. Application form completion was then delegated to one of our group members, who during completion process sent out copies for comments on drafts. The whole process was a very time heavy affair with a lot of face to face meetings which I’m not sure provided for me a most positive experience.  Email and occasionally messenger were about as advanced as our networking got, and partly due to events taking place during part of my annual leave I did get frustrated about giving up my time for lengthy meetings which didn’t always achieve as much as hoped for. Having investigated some of these online collaborative tools I think I would have looked at using a few of these to have a virtual meeting. As part of our physical meeting was to collate and discuss ideas, there is no reason why this could not have been completed on a platform like Slack, especially with its ability to share files. That it creates an archive of the meeting means others can look at the discussion and you’ve able to go back and extract missed ideas and links.  Also for seeking peoples comments and feedback on the application form, this could have been an online google document, where everyone could pop on look and comment, make changes etc.  A recent need to collate evidence would have befitted from this form of tool too rather than endless emails. I personally am quite taken by Trello being a list kind of person. I like the idea of a visual to do list so it clearly shows how people are getting on with tasks – though some may object to their lack progress being evident! These collaborative tools have made me think about including one or two as part of my repertoire of meeting tools, but I will need to check with IT if they will allow use of them on our network, are those involved happy to use that home if needs be (meeting during holidays) and will people use them. You can have all the fantastic collaborative tools at your disposal, but if people choose not to use them or not to do the work for a meeting in the first place then they are of little help.