In the last week of the externship experience, peeking under the hood in terms of information was enlightening. I was asked to weigh in on documents for a variety of teams and projects that I didn't have access to. Those documents included spreadsheet project management content, learning objective lists, tutorial documentation, skills alignment for workplace certification prioritization, visioning documents, scope and sequence curricular documents, graphs, charts, lists, communication channels on different communication tools, and a variety of additional types of information. The data itself was reorganized in different ways for different projects and different teams. The tools were similar, but even the same tools were used in different ways and different types of information was prioritized based on team, project, and audience preferences. This reinforced some ideas about the value of teaching kids how to access and analyze information.

One of the biggest communication tools used in the externship for sharing, accessing, and analyzing information included channel based conversations aligned to different project teams. While Unity uses Slack for their internal communications, in the Work Based Learning courses at William J. Palmer High School a similar product called Microsoft Teams is used. In both tools different channels can be created to allow for conversations on specific topics. This channel feature has been implemented in the courses at Palmer as a way to keep internal and external communication structures organized, and the feature was used in the same way in the professional workspace for Unity. On Slack, access to different teams was granted by different project managers depending on the need for participants to be included in specific conversations, and I was invited to be a part of three main channels but also added into a variety of other direct conversations on the platform. This direct messaging feature is not enabled in Microsoft Teams by default, but the capability does exist and might be something to explore in future iterations fo the WBL courses. The messaging features of Slack "reduces the number of emails by 32% and meetings by 23%" (Jovan, 2022), and this is something that was evident in the general discourse over the externship. While checking emails daily was still required, it was far quicker and often more engaging to communicate with colleagues over Slack. From a classroom perspective, using Microsoft Teams as an equivalent platform is supported as, "Microsoft Teams has overtaken Slack, reaching 13 million daily users" (Jovan, 2022). A lot of the reporting about analyses of information and access to information was provided through these channels.

Much of the analyzing information I was a part of through the externship occurred in team meetings and daily standup, collaboration meetings. While everyone on our teams had individual tasks to complete on their own, a lot of time was devoted to daily check ins and collaborative coding sessions. Through conversation about different coding implementations everyone was able to see other approaches to problem solving and adjust the final solution based on that feedback. This process led to pretty substantial simplification and alignment of solutions based on both user feedback and designer feedback. Everyone on the team had the ability to push projects to a software versioning repository and then pull down others' changes in real time; the only exception to this was the interns on the team, including me. A different sharing solution had to be arranged for those of us who weren't fully internal to the company, and it was enlightening to see that the best solution for this was the one that has been adopted in the IT courses at Palmer where individual packages of files are uploaded, shared, downloaded, and imported by others. This entire process for arranging access and sharing out the results of collaboratively built solutions was awesome to see happening in real time in the same kinds of ways that I have observed this happening in my classes.

Works Cited

Jovan. (2022, March 29). Slack statistics to annoy your colleagues with. KommandoTech. Retrieved August 3, 2022, from https://kommandotech.com/statistics/slack-statistics/