The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

considered whether current use of IM plays a role. Where IM is successfully supporting project work, it
might still be worthwhile for the team to account for the tool usage, to increase their understanding of
their own work practice and to become aware of potential problems.
Distributed project work can be successfully supported by instant messaging as a communication channel
combined with shared workspace access, as seen in Example 1. The example illustrated how the social
and the task-oriented aspects of working together were both present in the communication taking place
through the tool. Such an arrangement should be considered an option in projects that for some reason
depends on work to be conducted in a distributed way (e.g. when one or more students have to partially
work from home). It should be noted, however, that in our projects, the team members‟ work is partially
collocated. The likelihood of success of IM chat as a substitute for face-to-face interaction may be
different with students who do not know each other from face-to-face interaction, but we cannot draw
conclusions about differences between IM use in virtual and partially collocated teams from our study.
The practice of letting the student teams choose the collaboration technology for their projects is in line
with the independence seen as important in project-based learning. Also, it can be seen as a way of
encouraging students to make use of their existing competence with certain tools, e.g. IM tools, and
consider how they should be applied in a new and challenging context (e.g. that of coordinating complex
work tasks and collaborating with external stakeholders). Being allowed to choose the collaboration
technology for their projects, we assume that most teams will choose to use IM tools for some aspects of
their work, given the ground that these tools has gained as personal communication infrastructure among
the students. However, whereas most students in our study were users of a particular IM service,
individual preferences vary. In the projects, we occasionally saw individual students refusing to use
certain tools on principle (e.g. by being against proprietary software) while the rest of the team wanted to
use those tools. In such cases, the teams might benefit from their supervisor‟s mitigation to find good
solutions.
For the organizing of SE project courses, we see the following implications of students‟ competence with
IM tools:
The student teams should be allowed to choose the collaboration technology for their projects, within
the constraints of availability, the team‟s competence and the customer‟s requirements.
Teams should be required to present their supervisor with an account of their practices of using
instant messaging, and the supervisor should use this information as a basis for providing process
guidance.
In projects heavily depending on distributed work, the use of instant messaging chat to aid such work
should be discussed with the team.
Example 2 illustrated that informal collaboration between the team and the supervisor may be
successfully conducted over IM. We believe that keeping IM open as a communication channel between
team and supervisor can encourage students to get early in touch when they are in need of help, which
makes it possible to solve problems before they escalate and before too much time is spent on being
stuck. The viability of this solution depends on the supervisor‟s willingness to use IM in communication
with the student and to be available for consultation on a fairly short, or at least explicitly agreed-upon,
notice. We see the following general implication for the organizing of SE project courses:
Course staff may use instant messaging as a collaboration tool for providing informal supervision or
otherwise communicate informally with the project students. Expected availability (e.g. response
time) should be explicitly addressed as the use of IM for collaboration is agreed with the team.
Example 3 illustrates the general challenge of stakeholder communication and, in particular,
communication with the customer, in project work. Successful stakeholder communication depends on
project teams‟ ability to share the right information in the right format at the right time. Where there are
language and/or cultural barriers, the challenges of communication increase. As Frode from Example 3
put it in an interview after completion of their project: “We did not know if the customer was joking or if
he was angry with us!”. The choice and use of collaboration technology strongly impacted on the
communication. IM chat with the use of standard functionality (i.e. text only) provided opportunities for
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