Post 3: Group Behavior

In lecture 5 and 6, we talked about psychology in group behaviors and collaboration.

In the class, we had an activity to see the difference of working on our own and collaborating in a group. We were first required to read an article about social cloud computing, and answer two questions. At the same time, we need to highlight words or sentences that seemed to be important. Subsequently, we need to combine it in our group and see how our answers varied. The combined file can be reached here: [1].

1. What is the definition of Social Cloud?
A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network.
More comment: Social Cloud can provide some kinds of services and these services are actually provided and maintained by a social network instead of centralized servers. The type of the services does not matter, it can be computational work, storage, collaborative… therefore there are lots of applications listed in this article. As long as the services are provided by a social network and it utilizes the relationships established in a social network, it is considered as a Social Cloud.
2. What are the possible applications of a Social Cloud?
Ø A Social Computation Cloud
Ø A Social Storage Cloud
Ø A Social Collaborative Cloud
Ø A Social Cloud for Public Science
Ø An Enterprise Social Cloud

Our answers were all the same except Guan Hao, who gave some further more explanations. In addition, the bold parts in the document were the parts which we all highlighted, and the underlined parts were those just one of us highlighted.

Epistemic aim & epistemic cognition

When doing individual work, my epistemic aim was more of acquiring a “true” answer. However in group work, we tended to find out more different opinions and wanted to justify our belief. When people are getting together, their epistemic aim & cognition changes since different people may come up with different ideas, and we tend to exchange them.

Approach

In individual work, we usually form knowledge based on our own understanding of the resource. In contrast, during group work, we tend to exchange ideas, as written above. Thus interpersonal process acts as an important role. By exchanging ideas, we may make some justifications or corrections on our original answers, and tend to integrate it into a more completed one.

In conclusion, there is a lot of difference when we are doing individual work and group work, due to the interesting situation when people are communicating with each other. When people are exchanging ideas, they are affecting each other’s’ thoughts at the same time!

Reference:
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1rHsQ8OxFe9RwTuGwVZFmnU5m7cqF1rq6cMjCNg1Lip4