Week Three: Communication through Social Networking

This past week, our group has once again worked on their separate times and shared their ideas and work through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. We are an interesting group as four of our group members are commuters and only one lives on campus. Scheduling an appropriate time where everyone can meet and work on the assignments was simply impossible so since the very start we had created a Facebook message thread with everyone in our group receiving the same messages from one another.

This usage of Social Networking had become very beneficial to the group as Facebook does not limit the amount of characters we are allowed to have nor does it limit us to any length of our message, as Twitter does. Also, many of us are very new to Twitter and Facebook has been a Social Network most of us check numerous times during the day. It was great to see the way that our group has remained to be very connected to each other, although we do not meet face to face, we are always aware of what we are working on and what needs to be done.

This week, we have also become very comfortable with using Google Docs to submit our Rough Draft, Reviews, and our Final Paper. After each of us had created a Google Account we were able to upload Word documents and share them with our group members and our classmates. We found this to be very efficient and useful as the entire Document could clearly be viewed and easily edited. For some of us this was again the first time we have ever used Google Docs so in the beginning there were a few submitted documents that were set to private and could not be seen by anyone else other than the other. However, the problem was quickly solved as we notified one another through the Facebook thread that either the document wasn’t shared to the public or that it did not allow editing of any sort.

Twitter was the final Social Networking our group has come to utilize. However, it is one Social Networking site that we rely on the least. It is merely used for sharing documents with our classmates since that is where we are all under the same list. Our group has used twitter to post our links to our Midterms and Reviews for other groups to see. Through Twitter, it was easy to find each group’s midterms for reviews.

To say the least, Social Networking sites have become a huge part in the way our group communicates with one another and extremely beneficial. I can’t help but to think of other ways our group could have communicated and I realized that Facebook has become a social networking site that is most suitable one for our group. AIM or Skype, for example, are great for communicating but the issue with both is that many times conversations are not saved and many times it is hard to get everyone on the same chat. Our group may not meet in person during the week expect for class time, but social networking sites have made it possible for us to be on the same page and work cohesively together on our assignment.

Lucija M.