This weekend my apartment threw a party for two of my roommates who both turned 21 this week. We did most of the planning on Tuesday in what could be considered a hybrid configuration. I was sitting with two of my roommates in the living room, and we were talking to our other three roommates on gchat (all three of them were in separate places). During our planning, we made lists of things we needed to buy, decided who would get what, created a facebook event (obviously), made a guest list and invited people to the event.
This situation seemed like more of a collaborative situation than the Shape Factory one discussed in the Bos et al article, but I think a lot of the same principles applied. It definitely did seem like those of us who were together formed an in-group, because it was clearly a lot easier for us to sort things out. I don’t think, however, that our other three roommates formed a separate group. Instead I noticed more that they would each try to communicate with those of us that were at home. I think this was because since we were closest to the task, they found that communicating with us was a more valuable use of their time. This conflicts with the findings in the Shape Factory (disagreeing with Hypothesis 2), and I think the differences may be caused because this was more of a collaborative task than the factory one.
The third hypothesis that is discussed in the article is the prediction that the collocated workers would perform better than the isolated ones. This is somewhat harder to examine in terms of our situation since it wasn’t a competitive one, however, I generally think that the three of us at home contributed more to the planning process. If we were to do this again I think I would suggest using a richer medium such as video chat to communicate with remote roommates because I think the text-based CMC was not enough to involve them enough. I also think that since our other roommates were separated from us, they were probably less focused on the task and might have been doing other things like homework or checking their email. In addition, the fact that they trusted us to plan an awesome party (who wouldn’t?) probably led to some social loafing, which is a hard problem to avoid.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I'm curious to know how well gchat functioned given that the collocated group, at least as far as I can tell, was communicating with the other 3 roommates in 3 separate gchat conversations. It would seem like the process of relaying information in the discussion would be somewhat difficult in that sort of setup. I also wonder if there was some sort of in-group formed with the remote roommates, via their own side conversations on gchat.
ReplyDeleteThis situation was collaborative but also could have involved a delegation of tasks that would have had each group more focused on particular tasks. At this point the two remote members could be as focused as any other person. Of course, there seems to be a need for group consensus, but this again could be improved by using shared outlines of prior research and decisions. At this point, the gChat could have been used to vote a decision up or down, or to reject it. This saves a lot of the noise that appears during initial planning stages/
ReplyDelete