Second thoughts on online collaboration

I have been reading a book called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking". The book deals with the fact that one third to one half of all of us are introverts, and yet we live in a culture that is increasingly favorable to extroverts. Our schools and businesses are built to favor and to create extroverted people. Our celebrities are gregarious people, etc etc.

One of the ideas in the book I found relevant to this course was a chapter on "New Groupthink", which was a concept that started as internet collaboration became easier. Business executives saw how open source coding (when the DNA of a computer program is shared so all can edit and build on it) improved creativity and productivity. It was thought by businesses (and eventually schools) that the best things happen in group work. The problem is that the exact opposite is true.

"Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

The one exception to this is online brainstorming. Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it performs. The same is true of academic research—professors who work together electronically, from different physical locations, tend to produce research that is more influential than those either working alone or collaborating face-to-face.

Page(s): 110-110, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

NOOKstudy (Matthew Pietrucha, truedatkey@gmail.com). This material is protected by copyright.

---------------

So perhaps our group project wouldn't have turned out any better (or perhaps worse) if we had collaborated in person. Personally, I have always hated group work. But I enjoy working online.

Susan Cain may have a point for more online work and less face-to-face group work.