Our institution is merging with a similar institution round the corner. We had a big meeting last week which was a familiarisation and strategy planning meeting. As part of the process of getting to know each other the bosses have started a Moodle in which we were invited to post the results of our small group discussions about the future which we held that day. We had been divided into special interest groups. I was allocated to the project development group and was therefore interested to see what had been discussed in the other groups. Having online discussion fora is a completely new approach in our institution.
One group was the soft skills group and they had decided that there was little place for e-learning tools in their future work. I understood why they had said this since they believe very much in the power of group exercises preferably carried out outdoors but still I can see a role for reflective activities both before and after the practical activities and posted a response to that effect in the Moodle.
Then I went to a project meeting in Germany and while there I got a response from someone in the group telling me that nobody believed there was a place for e-learning tools in soft skills training. When I went to the Moodle to reply, (because I am arrogant enough to think that I am not 'nobody' and that what I do in the inter-cultural field is as soft as you can get) I discovered that the response had been sent to me privately and not in the Moodle. I thought this was kind of ironic and asked the respondant why the reply was not in our shared discussion area in the Moodle. No response. So after a few days I posted a response anyway to the private message I had received and got some encouraging reactions from other colleagues which was good as I was otherwise beginning to get the feeling that I was just talking to myself.
Then a couple of days later I thought I would try another experiment asking for ideas for a new project. I find getting project ideas quite difficult sitting on my own (while my other colleagues are outdoors helping teams build bridges and so on) and wondered if it was worth touting for ideas. To my delight I got four worthwhile replies within the first day which were spot-on and which I will certainly follow up.
We have often complained in the past that we don't know enough about what our colleagues are doing. Perhaps this could be the start of a new era of closer collaboration in spite of our physical distance from each other.
Keywords: collaboration, Moodle, soft skills
