1/30 Post

Hello again! This past week’s lectures we spoke about communities of practice, group development, and what really makes a team work. All of the information we learned about how to cultivate teamwork correctly were different ways of how knowledge is managed. Community of Practice is people who chose to come together with special knowledge. Everyone has a common sense of identity. After looking at the YouTube video Cultivating Communities of Practice: Making them Grow it really explained how a group of people interact with each other individually and as a team all resulting in better work than one person working on a project. It is very important for people to want to work together sharing ideas. Also the need for everyone’s own identity defines how strong a group can be. An excerpt from Geoff Colvin explaining What Really Makes Teams Work, more contributions from others will result in best outcome which is shown through the three effective ways for a group is a majority of ideas, dense interactions, and contribution. In his article he explained how the best ideas come from face to face interaction. Digital media can sustain, but not create powerful relationships. That is why Steve Jobs promoted great teamwork interaction in his company Pixar making people work together in big spaces. Another reading we spoke about was Tuckman’s explanation on group development. This was my favorite part of the week because we learned about the basic explanation of how many movies are thought of before hitting the big screens. Forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning are the five stages of group development. We used the example of the movie Finding Nemo to explain each stage. Till next time !!

First Post 1/22

Hello all !! My name is Amanda Delgado. I am a freshmen here at University of Arizona studying Communications and most likely Esociety! In the beginning of our course, we spoke about "What is Collaboration Anyways." The pdf I read for class mostly spoke about how collaboration is shown through "sharing, openness, and/or participation." I believe those terms are explained perfectly. We dissected three different ways of collaboration through ideas of a social network, online communities, and a political social talk about Ferguson. In Levy's article, it was a little harder to grasp the concept well, but I think overall understandable. His idea on collective intelligence is that no one knows everything, but everyone knows something. Meaning if people all work together, their knowledge will be far more useful than only one person thinking of ideas. In Tina Fey's Bossypants, she explained that improvisation is the best way to explain collective intelligence. People rely on others if you keep going with improvisation, there is never a mistake. Aggregation, technical coordination mechanics, and social coordination mechanics all require intentional shared goals. The Continum explains the three major points of collaboration. The weaker, stronger, and intense. This was the hardest concept to understand this week, but after learning more information about each, I think it will make more sense. Some examples we learned about each point are captchas, music sharing, and Wikipedia. When we had to explain our own type of weak, strong, or intense collaboration, that is when I found it hard to understand the concept. I'm very excited to learn more on how people collaborate through social networks and online communities impacting how we interact with each other on a daily basis.