Competency M

Demonstrate oral and written communication skills necessary for group work, collaborations and professional level presentations

Communication is an important skill for any job. This is especially true for information professionals, since the presentation and communication of information is a central part of the field. In addition to communicating in one way or another with the public, information professionals often have to work on committees and in other groups. For example, each department in a library must coordinate with the other departments so that the library is run smoothly. Different branches must also work together, especially when planning and scheduling events. Often this means negotiations and compromises as time and budgets are finite resources. In addition, committees are often formed to take care of projects and events. Being able to work well in groups is an important asset.

Collaborations can also be frustrating. Working in a group means giving up some amount of control over the work. People often have different ways of looking at the same thing, and reconciling these different views can be difficult. Learning to compromise is important.

The first piece of evidence is the Power Point presentation my group used while presenting the metadata we had created in my vocabulary design class. We had created a metadata schema to describe antique furniture for sale through an online auction house. We decided on the different controlled vocabularies we would need, and then divided them up among the three of us. We met online frequently to review and critique each other's work and figure out what we needed to do next, using first Blackboard's chat room and then AIM. We created the final paper by dividing up the sections that needed to be written, and then editing the document with Word's "track changes" option turned on.

During the presentation we each talked about the portion of the metadata we had been responsible for. I had been in charge of creating the "materials" and "status" vocabularies. I described the process I went through to find and organize the terms, and some of the revisions the vocabularies went through. We gave the presentation without much of a plan or a script, but aside from a few awkward transitions the presentation went well.

One of the things we discovered while working on this assignment and the one before it is that the instant messaging environment is not ideal for collaboration. Communication is slower than it would be face-to-face or over the phone. Clarity is not always easy when there are multiple conversation threads on the screen at once and replies come out of sequence. It's also harder to gauge someone's reaction or mood when all you have to go by is the words they type. It is easy to get irritated or frustrated when you can't tell whether or not the other members of the team have the same understanding of something that you do. This is true of all interactions, but tends to be more pronounced without the cues of body language or tone of voice. Nevertheless, we managed to work through the limitations and came up with a product we were all happy with.

The second piece of evidence is one of the discussion notes from my group in database design. We met every week or two over Skype to discuss our progress and plan for the next part of the project. Being able to talk with the group instead of communicating just over instant message and email made group work much easier. As with any group, we all had our own ideas about how things should be done, which weren't always compatible. Still, compromises were reached fairly quickly and with little confusion. A person working on their own doesn't always see every problem or solution, and one of the advantages of group work is that there are other people to check the work and make suggestions.