Communities of Practice

This week we spent class time talking about Communities of Practice. A community of practice is groups of people who share a concern, set of problems, or passion about a topic. These groups of people work together to gain more knowledge and make the group better by sharing information and getting everyone to contribute. I found this week's topic to be very interesting because it correlates very closely to a lot of what I do and what everyone does whether they think about it or not. Everyone looks for other people and groups for support and to better themselves. For example I consider the fraternity that I am a part of to be a community of practice because we all share the goal of improving the fraternity and helping the community around us. One of the activities that we are most proud of is helping contribute and offer help in any ways that we can to the kinder garden the is right next door to us. We help by picking up trash near and around their building and on the holidays we like to make crafts for the kids. This last Thanksgiving we made little pipe cleaner turkeys for all the kids at the school and they were all very excited which made our fraternity, or community of practice, feel very good.

Wiki Pages

This week in class we were put into groups and teamed up to create a Group Wiki Pages page. Our assignment was to make a page that describes and provides examples for five different terms from the list of terms about group dynamics. Group dynamics is the processes involved when people in a group interact with each other, or the study of these. The purpose of these five definitions from within the study of group dynamics was to gives us a further insight into what goes into group work and the different forms that it is possible. By understanding how a group functions and what is important to make it successful, we will be able to use this knowledge in our studies of preexisting groups online to see what they have done fundamentally right and what they could possibly do better in the future.

Our group was given five topics to focus on and those topics were; task groups, weak associations, social categories, interactions, and Tuckman's five stages of groups. First I will talk about task groups, a task group is a work group brought together in an employment setting in a variety of non employment situations. An example of this is a group that I worked in for another one of my classes. We used an app called Slack which is a platform for groups of people to collaborate on anything that they want and we used it to schedule meeting times. The next topic that we focused on was weak associations. Weak associations are spontaneous meetings of people for a brief amount of time. A good example of this is snapchat because in snapchat there is a limited amount of time that the picture is available. The next topic that we discussed on our Wiki Page was social categories. Social categories are groups of people that are brought together through similar aspects of their social lives. A good example of this is dating sites where people are matched together based on their similarities. Another topic that we reviewed was interactions. Interactions are when individuals in a group are influenced by each others actions. A good example of this topic is when you react to someone's post in a Facebook group. Finally, the last topic that we discussed on this assignment was Tuckman's five stages of groups. The main point of this topic is that there are five stages of groups such as: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.

Social Media "Friends"

In a time where people can get lost in the vast world of online communities, people are able to have millions of "friends" without even knowing all of them. Silver critiques the modern technology that provides us with social media by saying that it ruins our personal relationships with people and creates false friendships. I think that Silver is correct depending on the person that we focus on. For someone who uses social media more often than interacting with other people, it can absolutely be a viable source for people to create and grow relationships. For example, if you spend most of your time at the gym playing basketball and very little time out on the soccer field then you are going to build better relationships with people at the gym playing basketball, simply because that is where you spend most of your time. This is the same with social media; if you spend most of your time interacting with people online then that is where you are going to build more and better relationships with other people. However, for people who spend very little time online, they will not be able to maintain meaningful relationships with everyone they know online. These people require face-to-face interactions with people in order to sustain these relationships. I think that if a person were to spend a majority of their time on Facebook and updated their profile very often and used it to communicate with people then it would be a good source to build relationships. However, I think that Facebook can also have the opposite effect on people that spend very little time on it and do not check in on their "friends" often.