MIDS301 9/25 - Groove Experience
Last week, our group ("MIDS Bloggers") formed for the express purpose of using Groove, had the opportunity to work together for the first time. Our task was to choose five restaurants, design a system to evaluate them, and finally rank them.
We primarily used the discussion board built into Groove for concrete advancements in group discussion and setting up the criteria. For more casual discussion and brainstorming, we used the instant-messaging feature. We also used the file co-editing feature for the creation of the final document.
We each nominated two restaurants and with discussion determined the top five from which we would draw our rankings: Mama Santa’s, Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle, Shooter’s, and the hot dog stand on Adelbert. Our results through discussion ranked the restaurants in the following manner: 1. Mama Santa’s, 2. Chipotle, 3. Cheesecake Factory, 4. Shooter’s, and 5. the hot dog stand on Adelbert. The primary determinant was an overall ranking taking into account the combination between price and quality of food, followed by restaurant atmosphere and secondary determinants of proximity to campus.
Overall, this was a positive experience. I have never personally used any online networking or collaboration programs before and I was impressed by what could be done through this program, especially the discussion board and file sharing feature. The instant messaging feature, however, was clumsy and hard to use since every time one clicks "send," the window closes and all the previous correspondence in that particular conversaion is lost until the person on the other end sends a message back. After a while of dealing with this, we solved this problem by using AOL Instant Messenger, which has a much cleaner and easier to use interface.
Hopefully, in the future, I can find another use for Groove, as this program allowed for a very smooth functioning online group.
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