Assignment 3: Emily Wagner

As many people wrote about last week, the cognitive system I thought of was the officer’s council (OC) for my sorority. As a general goal, we try to keep the house running. We meet for an hour every Sunday, and as a more specific goal, we work to plan events (philanthropic, social, academic, etc.) and keep everyone in the house updated and aware of what is going on. After the officers meet, we then announce everything to the whole chapter.


The announcements are represented in many ways as an attempt to get everyone to really remember what is being said. The officers bring the information to OC either written down or as a memory, and as each member says their announcement it is going from internal to an external representation. The information is written down all together and then announced again to the whole chapter. Often during chapter, girls have to sign forms, or sign up for activities. These are representations. Girls bring their calendars, write notes to themselves in their phones, bring money if something needs to be paid for. These are all representations as well.

After the meetings on Sunday, all of the announcements are sent out in an email on the list-serve. This makes the representation more concrete, it allows everyone to have the information with them at home, and it allows the girls to check back to it without having to ask the officers. We hope that in hearing about events and news more than once, and in different ways, the girls are more likely to remember and therefore get involved. I would consider the email we send out, to be a transformation of the final copy of our announcements. Sending out the email is the last thing we do in that given week to try to get the information to everyone. It is definitely our step closer to the goal state of having everyone aware of everything (and hopefully therefore participating).

I think that the task is generally loosely coupled. While we do meet every week, most organization over the officer’s council as a whole takes place online. We all remain aware of what the others are doing, but we are generally in charge of our own work and don’t have the need for immediate contact with the others. If a problem arises, it is very likely that the girls will communicate in other ways such as on the phone or face to face, causing this activity to become more tightly coupled. Olson describes one feature of loosely coupled work as, “The work can proceed in parallel” (Olson 422). This is a great way to describe the work we do because we mostly work independently all week long and then meet at the end of the week. The meetings on Sundays are the main time I would call our work tightly coupled because we discuss things that require immediate, group interaction instead of just notification.