elektronická verzia publikácie - FIIT STU - Slovenská technická ...
elektronická verzia publikácie - FIIT STU - Slovenská technická ...
elektronická verzia publikácie - FIIT STU - Slovenská technická ...
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262 Selected Studies on Software and Information Systems<br />
port individual learning, propose shifting to collaborative learning, and negotiate to form<br />
a group of learners with suitable role assignment, based on the learners' information from<br />
individual learning. Authors devise the Learning Goal Ontology (LGO) that accommodates<br />
learning goals of several learning theories such as learning by observing others, learning by<br />
self-expression, learning by teaching, and learning by diagnosing. Furthermore, LGO describes<br />
dependencies between individual a whole-group goals, and thus is used as a rationale for<br />
forming appropriate groups.<br />
Another interesting method of repeated group formation is described in (Supnithi,<br />
1999) where students represented by agents bid in an iterative Vickrey auction to join their<br />
favorite group. Agents utilize virtual currency earned from previous collaborative activities.<br />
After each completed activity, agents are rewarded with virtual currency depending<br />
on their individual and group performance based on peer evaluations. Better achieving<br />
students receiving more are thereby capable to bid for the future membership in their favorite<br />
groups more successfully. This auctioning group-formation mechanism is also utilized<br />
in the I-MINDS system (Soh, 2006).<br />
9.2.2 Group Evolution<br />
Once the group participants are selected they can engage in a collaborative activity. In this<br />
section we describe how the interactions within the group affect the participating users<br />
and the group itself.<br />
It is widely recognized that during their lifetime groups undergo an evolutionary<br />
process in which they become efficient teams. More than 100 theories of group development<br />
exist to date, the most prominently cited one being the Tuckman and Jensen's stages<br />
of group development (Tuckman, 1977) consisting of five stages:<br />
1. Forming – group members get to know each other and the task to be solved. They can<br />
feel uneasy not knowing what is required and how the group will function.<br />
2. Storming – when things get “stormy”, individual differences surface and conflicts<br />
emerge, and roles of the participants and the group structure is put to question.<br />
3. Norming – after resolving these problems the group starts to function harmoniously,<br />
establishes rules, and group members start to support each other.<br />
4. Performing – at this stage rules are well in place, group is doing the work on the<br />
common task the way it is supposed to do.<br />
5. Adjourning – group retires as the project ends, feedback on the group performance facilitates<br />
learning.<br />
Different groups may spend different amounts of time in each of the stages but the theory<br />
suggests that all groups pass sequentially through all these stages.<br />
Face-by-face vs. Computer-mediated Groups<br />
Group evolution is the subject of extensive study in psychology and social sciences; called<br />
group dynamics that is examining how people work in small groups. For an up-to-date<br />
treatment of group dynamics and teamwork see (Forsyth, 2006; Levi, 2007). We briefly<br />
mention main differences between face-to-face groups and computer-mediated groups.