Group think

My online PGCert group (for which I am a facilitator)  is currently studying a module on the emotional intelligence of teams. Had I not worked on the connectivism course in 2008, I might not have even thought to question whether working in teams/groups is a good idea and also whether working in teams/groups leads to group think [...]

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Collaboration online

Many online courses now require students to collaborate, but we know that just putting people together in the same space isn’t enough? What should a tutor do to prepare students for collaborative tasks?
Gilly Salmon’s 5-stage model provides very good guidelines on how to prepare for collaborative tasks online. These are usually designed into Stage 4 of [...]

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The unforseen affordances of technology

I logged in to the Ustream session this evening and what an event that turned out to be. The ‘leaders’, i.e. Stephen, George and Dave, did not appear for quite some time and even then the video streaming did not work, so we all had to decamp to Elluminate.
But what was so fascinating was how [...]

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Groups, networks, collectives. What matters?

I thought the distinction between groups and networks would be important, but now I’m not so sure. I have enjoyed the readings this week (Week 5), but I think I have now decided that whilst it’s an interesting academic exercise to try and distinguish between groups and networks, the outcome will not be that important.
There is [...]

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Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism

Here is the abstract of an interesting article by Barry Wellman
Much thinking about digital cities is in terms of community groups. Yet, the world is composed of social networks and not of groups. This papertraces how communities have changed from densely-knit “Little Boxes” (densely-knit, linking people door-to-door) to “Glocalized” networks (sparselyknitbut with clusters, linking households [...]

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