Created in Spring 2017 for ENGL 6702

Description

A literature review on the topic of how to encourage online collaboration in virtual teams in the workplace.

Critical Reflection

This assignment was my first exposure to literature reviews. I had likely encountered them before in scholarly journals, but did not recognize them as a type of document called a "literature review."

To say that writing this document was difficult would be an understatement. It took a distressingly long time for me to fix the structure of a literature review in my head. As with my trouble switching from MLA to APA format (which still bedeviled me as I wrote this paper), the memories of every other document I had ever written interfered with my ability to adopt this new format. I kept subconsciously retreating back to more familiar document structures and wandering off track.

I used this document as the basis for another assignment in ENGL 6702, which was an article for an industry magazine that covered the same topic. Dr. Albers encouraged me to send it to the magazine, and to my amazement, they actually published it! (See Publications and Conferences.)

Despite my struggles with this first literature review, I recognize that they are a very valuable type of document and are often a foundational part of research. I expect that I will write more literature reviews, and looking back I am very grateful for this experience.

I maintain a strong interest in this topic - how to get people to work together online. The research I encountered for this assignment has been very helpful since I now work from home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The major points that I am most mindful of are that peoples' motivations can be wildly different and unexpected,¹ and that consciously or not, we interpret physical cues from others as we communicate with them.² We gain information from a person's tone of voice if we are communicating through an audio connection, and gain even more information from a video connection. Discovering the correlation between how easy people consider a piece of software to use and how likely they are to use it has also been beneficial to me in my IT career.^2,3,4

Overall Satisfaction on a Scale of 1 to 7: 6