Scenario: Introducing group management

Lisa is starting a new course on rhetoric, it's a evening course intended for people studying another subject in parallel. The course includes written homework to be done in groups with an optional short presentation. Though initially there is some seminars on rhetoric from a historic and practice perspective. Lisa find them inspiring and soon she finds some other people she likes and they decide to do the group work together, unfortunately they have rather messy schedules, common free time is hard to find. They start their first meeting with spawning ideas from their given subject 'The ethical dimension in Quintilian rhetoric'. Soon, having some leads they divide the work between them and agree on working through their university portfolios, Lisa volunteers to set up group and work space. They also agree on a conclusive meeting before turning it in.

Well at the task in her portfolio Lisa forms a group of four and creates a catalog where all in the group have write/modification rights. She also sends a invitation to the others to share ownership of this catalog and a brief welcoming message.

After a couple of days Lisa starts working on her part and discovers that two of the others already have started on their parts. She reads their documents and have some comments, she modifies one of them and stores it as another version. On the other document she only leaves some general remarks in the meta-data section in the portfolio. First then she starts on her own part, inspired and with a clearer view of what her part should be about. They continue like this, writing mainly on their own parts but with some constructive criticism of the others work. After a week of work when their separate documents have moved from draft state to finished state Lisa collects them into a common document. Some work on the transitions they remain before they have their decided conclusive meeting. At the meeting they discuss a small introduction and how it should be presented. Afterwards Lisa takes the final step and gives permissions to the entire course to read their document, luckily that group is already provided centrally by the university (the course registration system is connected to the portfolio group management). The teacher is granted permissions to modify and add versions.

Examplified features

• Resource management
• Group management
• Meta-data usage
• Version control
• Document cycles