Groups, Group Cognition & Groupware

Groupware refers to programs and softwares that help people work together collectively while located remotely from each other. Such software systems as email, calendaring, chatting belong to Groupware category.

Microsoft Exchange is the typical example of Groupware, which facilitate calendar sharing, e-mail handling, and the replication of files across a distributed system so that all groupware users can view the same information.

There are two different chat patterns of Groupware technique:

i) Expository narrative

ii) Exploratory inquiry

The Expository narrative involves one person dominating the interchange by contributing more and longer texts, for example if one person in a group finds the solution of given problem, he just distibutes his solution and all the persons in the group have different reasoning on that solution. In Expository narrative, Cooperation analogy involves in which people divide the work up, each working by themselves on their own part and then joining their partial solutions together for the group solution.

In Exploratory inquiry the group members work together to explore a topic. In Exploratory inquiry , Collaboration analogy involves which involves a group of people working on something together.

In an online chat discussing a series of 11 math problems given to the students and collaborate them in a chating room group.

From the result, i was clearly shown that the
problems answered by the students more correctly in a group as that in individuals.

Also its observed from the test that

i) In some cases, everyone proposed the same answer and it was easy to establish a consensus.

ii) In some other cases, only one person proposed an answer and the others simply went along with it

iii) In more interesting cases, when someone proposed an answer that contradicted other people’s opinions or was questionable for some other reason, the proposer was required to give an explanation, justification or accounting of their proposal.

If researchers studying the use of groupware focused on processes of collaboration and the methods that groups used to solve problems, as opposed to treating exclusively individuals as cognitive agents then research methods might focus more on conversation analysis , video analysis and their application to discourse logs than on surveys and interviews of individual opinions.

There are some suggestions for groupware design principles like

a) The group work visible and persistent so that everyone in the group can easily see what has been accomplished by all members.

b) Patterns of references among proposals, adjacency pairs and responses between different group members could also be displayed.

c) The groups should be like Virtual Workspaces.

d) The group memebers in a group provide computational support to the work of their users.

e) Groupware can provide structured access to information, tools and other resources available on the Internet.

f) Groupware could facilitate the building of open-ended networks of individual, group and community connections, or the definition of new sub-communities.

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