I had joined some fan pages or some special interest groups but in most cases just for entertainment. However, I had never studied with my tutor and classmates by using some online community.
In this semester, I ‘m glad to have a chance to experience several English online community since the units that I choose required all the students should use that to communicate and collaborate with each other. Of course one of these units is IFN 612~it is the first time I experienced google+ community and I think this online group make the interaction among tutor and students become very interesting and convenience. This week I am going to talk about the community of another units, which also have significant impact to improve my ability to engage in the teamwork of programming project.
We have 14 people in our Facebook group and the topic is a programming project. We are going to develop a compiler before the end of this unit. At the start of this project, actually almost all of us confused about what is the compiler and how is worked. Although our tutor always encourage our team try to work together and solve problems within our group, we still feel it is difficult to keep going on our project.
we have already have our Facebook group for our whole unit actually, after week 1 and week 2, the number of the member of our team was fixed, and also we realised our task will be pretty tough, so we decided to create our own Facebook group to engage us work together.
To begin with, our team member would post some material about our topic which will help us make more sense about the concept of compiler. we would share our understanding timely，and if someone absent from lecture, he could seek help from our Facebook group, of course any problems within our team would be posted online and discussed by us. well, actually, it is not enough for a IT project team. Because we need collaborate with each other and work for a real project, not just discuss the topic and ask question. Therefore, after week 3, tutor start to promote us try to divide the large and complex task to some small and simple job and assign the small parts to individual. Our Facebook group is a useful platform for this purpose. Firstly, we will decide our meeting time online ,and after every meeting, one of our team member would post a meeting summary, which about what we have done and what we will do, also include the difficulty we have meet with as well. This would be really helpful, since sometimes not all team member will come to our meeting, this summary will stimulate us to communicate more efficiently. Secondly, we still need other tools to help us manage our task and do some source control. such as Trello and GitHub.
Trello is a free web-based project management application(Pryor,2014)
Image 1
GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM).(Williams,2012)
Image 2:
the team leader would assign our task first and then post the link on our Facebook group.What’s more, when some one committee new code on gitHub, he/she would post what he/she have done so all team member would be noticed this new change. Then every one could learn what’s going on in our project and try to catch up with our team’s work.
Although our final product of this units still not finished, all of us really enjoy working in this Facebook group. For me, this experience make me realized how to communicate and collaborate with my team by using the online community. Before this semester, I always think the online group was just suitable for people who would like to play or chat together.But now, what I deeply felt is that the community that created by technology would improve our work efficiency and make team work together easily, especially for IT project team!
Reference:
Pryor, M. (2014) A Special Announcement: Trello is now part of Trello, Inc. Retrieved July 24, 2014. http://blog.trello.com/trello-is-now-trello-inc/
Williams, A. (2012). GitHub Pours Energies into Enterprise – Raises $100 Million From Power VC Andreessen Horowitz http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/github-pours-energies-into-enterprise-raises-100-million-from-power-vc-andreesen-horowitz/
Image Reference:
Image1: http://imagens.tiespecialistas.com.br/2015/03/trello.png
Image2: http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/github-social-coding.jpg
Cynthia's world 
