I have experience of working in a scrum team, using social media to connect with my teammates. At that time, I was participating in a scrum team, using web development tools to debug and add advanced functions for an application called VisualGit. The first two strategies that Todd shares in the book Teaching Online reminded me of that experience.
The strategy #1 states that “social presence is an important concept for developing community” (Johns 247). When I was working in that scrum team, we were developing the app for remote clients. Also, most of our teammates were working remotely. So we spent more time communicating by text messages and video conferencing. It is true that “the medium of communication has an effect on social presence, which is influenced by a person’s location in space and time” (Johns 247). Since we were working remotely, the social presence theoretically created was not as much as the team which spends most of the time in face-to-face communication can create. In this way, in order to build team solidarity, our team implemented agile methodologies to manage our team. We had daily stand-up meetings by video conferencing and everyone had both informal and formal conversations with each other to build team trust as well as increasing our social presence.
The strategy #2 states that “providing opportunities for students to share information is a useful tool in helping to develop community” (Johns 248). During the time I worked in the scrum team, we constantly promoted knowledge sharing and feedback. We used Github and Google Suite to share our codes and documentations, “[creating] opportunities for sharing information and expertise” (Johns 248). We shared our own Google documents with each other to show our researches and progress on the features that we are doing. Also, we exchanged code snippets on Github with each other for teammates to check individuals’ code qualities. Moreover, we wrote documentations on wikis for everyone to search on the parts of the projects that they don’t understand. By sharing our knowledge, our team finished every tasks on time before the end of the sprint. Therefore, knowledge sharing and feedback is very useful in helping to develop community. (376 words)
Reference:
Erik Yu 