A group that I would like to analyze was a team of three I was working with last year to build a website. The ultimate goal of the group was to produce a website for a customer, but there were sub-goals involving quality of work, learning as we went, and working together effectively. All in all, the task was tightly coupled, our group working together frequently face to face so that we could communicate easily.
It’s interesting to view this as a cognitive system because it is a good example of a time when a group must work effectively as a single group and not connected individuals. As Perry says, cognitive systems “coordinate transformations on representations in goal-seeking behavior.” When working with any type of document, especially computer code, it’s important that only one person is working on a file at any given time. The most effective way to do this involves tight coupling, as it is the most efficient way to communicate who should be working on what.
That said, there were also periods of loose coupling at times when we were not able to meet. We would have to communicate via emails and instant messaging to assign files to be worked on.
The information in this group was being represented by html (and php) files. Each task performed by the group involved transforming these representations to adjust them in order to more accurately fit our goal. Obviously, the files are transformed by our direct input. Again, looking back to Perry, our group was a system the transformed these representations in a “goal-seeking behavior.”
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I agree with the fact that the group must work closely together to develop the end product but I wonder if the incorporation of other technologies would have made it possible to create a group dynamic that was a mixture of tight and loosely coupled. I would suggest using some sort of repository CVS or SVN to deal with several people working on a file at once.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is important for a group to be working very tightly to achieve the end goal in this situation. I also think it is important to note that the task was tightly coupled in the sense that each person was designated to work on their own project or file. It was not tightly coupled in the sense that everyone had to sit down together and work on one thing. I think it is better when each person is designated their own job to work on because everyone does not always need to be in the same place when they work. They can focus on their own thing and then come together to report on what they finished.
ReplyDeleteI heard a rumor that you had a really good group, just wanted to pass that along...
ReplyDelete*shifty eyes*