Social World & Online Discussion

The online activities for the past two weeks were very interesting to me. In particular the social world activity, we identified our social worlds and also compared them with others. I like the people who use the Venn diagrams (cycles) because it clearly represents the importance of the social worlds by using the different size of cycles and also it demonstrates the relationships among those worlds by using the vary proportion of overlapping. In our group discussion, we also discover only one person implies the concept of time by using a timeline to indicate the social worlds. Most people (including me) only consider the present, even though we all agree that our past experience definitely has strong impacts on the way we see who we are and how we act now.

Basically I like online text-based synchronous meeting for a small group with 3-4 members, but there is a shortcoming for text-based tools. Even though it’s a synchronous tool, there is still a slide “time delay” during the text-based conversation. The time delay here I mean the typing delay. Fro example, when I am replying to A but because of the typing time the text shows up following by B’s comment, so B thinks I am asking him/her. This delay somehow causes some degrees of misunderstanding during the meeting. For example, we have to come up with three insights and everyone of use takes care of one insight. But when we write up the insights to show to other teammates, it’s obvious that there are some degrees of differences of our perceptions of the insights. I once read a paper about decision making of a online team that the accuracy of the decision is decreased because of the lengthy discussion logs and misunderstanding. Now, I kind of experience how that happens from this group activity.