elektronická verzia publikácie - FIIT STU - Slovenská technická ...

254 Selected Studies on Software and Information Systems
Size – Dyads, Small Groups, Communities, Masses
Different scales of collaborative interaction are appropriate in different situations.
The smallest collaborative unit is a dyad in which two peers work on a common task. In
a learning context, dyads enable learners to develop and refine their ideas together with
a single peer, a process normally requiring a whole-class discussion. Growing in size, small
groups of 3 to 7 members have more resources available to attempt dealing with more difficult
problems that a simple dyad cannot solve. In contrast, when the group grows in size
fewer members are given the opportunity to express themselves hindering group's overall
creativity.
As people spend more time online they form virtual communities, groups of people
organized around a specific interest. Within virtual communities people interact usually
by the use of computer technology rather than face-to-face. Typically arranged around
a restricted area of subjects, virtual communities facilitate exchange of experiences within
the field of interest be it fishing or linear algebra; general-purpose communities are not
seldom too, e.g. Flickr, Facebook.
At the largest scale, mass collaboration is a joint effort of a very large number of people
toward a common goal usually coordinated by internet tools such as wikis, blogs, or custom-made
ones, with examples such as Wikipedia, Open Source Initiative in software development,
citizen science projects e.g. Clickworkers, Startdust@home, and distributed computing
projects e.g. SETI@home in search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Figure 9-2. Comments in the OurWeb system (Miettinen, 2005).
As an example of a collaborative learning system, in OurWeb system (Miettinen, 2005) collaboration
opportunities are provided asynchronously using annotations (highlights,
comments) and threaded discussions (Figure 9-2). By the use of annotations, users engage