Collaboration makes a better understanding

In the lecture 5&6, we had a topic of Communication and Social Behaviours on the Internet. We talk much about group, like ‘What is Group?’, the Types of Group, the Group Structure, etc. Because group is a very important concept when we study ‘Communication and Social Behaviours’.

‘A communication network is formed within a group.’ This is the relationship between communication and group. Then Prof. Chan introduced the five-person communication network (Circle, concom, wheel, Y, and chain) that reminds me of major types of computer networks.

More interesting things came in the Lecture 6 in which we got a case study, Social Cloud Computing: A Vision for Socially Motivated Resource Sharing. When finishing reading the case material, we were asked to answer two questions as an individual work. After the individual work, we are required to go through the same questions within our own group on Google Doc. The answers for both activities are illustrated in Figure 1&2. We can easily find that there is a more complete and well-done answers in the group work.

                                                                            Figure 1. Answers in Individual Work

                                                                            Figure 2. Answers in Group Work

Now, let me state the definition of Epistemic Aims here. They are goals related to finding things out, understanding them, and forming beliefs. In individual work, I could only rely on myself to work out the answers and the first task for me was to find answers out and form the knowledge that I thought it right. However, in group work, explanation and understanding became epistemic aims as well because I needed to sell my ideas to my teammates and decide whether to adopt other people’s opinions or not.

In terms of epistemic cognition, it differs in the two different types of activities. First, the epistemic aims are not the same as I explained in the last paragraph. Second, sources and justification of knowledge are much stronger in the group work than that in the individual work. In another word, we have higher reliability of processes for achieving epistemic aims. For example, in the group work, every teammate wrote down questions that they couldn’t solve in individual work and we surprisingly found something important and interesting that we ignored before. We tried to give best answers by working together. One of the group members used his personal experience to help the whole group understand a relatively new concept in the case material. This is so called “Knowledge Externalization (Form Tacit Knowledge to Explicit Knowledge)” in the theory of Spiral of Knowledge Creation.

In all, social networking facilitates interpersonal processes as well as community and institutional processes. And we truly achieve more through collaboration.