Monday, November 5, 2012

Epistemic Aim:Individual vs.Social



PART 1 --- An experiment: Individual vs. Social
We did an experiment in the last class, which is about the different of individual cognition and social cognition.
First we read a part of paper about Social Cloud, and then gave comments and thought about questions individually. Here are my individual answers (this is class activity one):

1. What is the definition of Social Cloud?
A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network. – Answer from the paper (Unchanged after searching the Internet)

2. What are the possible applications of a Social Cloud?
Social Computation Cloud, Social Storage Cloud, Social Collaborative Cloud, Social Cloud for Public Science, Enterprise Social Cloud. –Answer from the paper
Friend Networks, Identification, Data Formats – Answer from the Internet

After that, we assembled our ideas and had a discussion on the same questions together by using a Google-doc, and finally we got the answers of the same questions, I also changed my answers and listed them (this is class activity two):

1. What is the definition of Social Cloud?
A Social Cloud is a scalable computing environment in which virtualized resources contributed by users are dynamically provisioned amongst a group of friends or colleagues. – Collect from group members

2. What are the possible applications of a Social Cloud?
Social Computation Cloud, Social Storage Cloud, Social Collaborative Cloud, Social Cloud for Public Science, Enterprise Social Cloud. – Keep unchanged.


PART 2 --- Behind the experiment: A change of epistemic aim
Actually, we only changed a little about the two answers after discussion, but even a little change makes a big difference, and the difference is included in our Group doc, instead of listing our answers and voting for the best one, we gave comments to other member’s answers or gave comments to comments, searched for references and evidences and absorbed ideas from others, even one of the group members listed the definition and applications of Cloud Computing (P.S. This concept a little-bit overlaps the concept of social cloud). It seems that our epistemic aim was changing trough the discussion. Take myself as an example, in activity one, I was concentrated on the paper in order to understand the concept, so in this part, my main epistemic aim was to answer the two questions, so my answers mainly based on the paper, in other word, I used functions of cognition and metacognition at that time and never in touch with the Epistemic Cognition level. But when editing the Google doc (Activity two), I seldom considered the content of the paper but focus on the other’s answers and comments to improve my knowledge of Social Cloud by gong through the references giving by others and writing down my own opinions, this is something about higher levels of cognition. And my epistemic aim totally changed.

PART 3 --- Conclusion
Using social ways to do idea generation and knowledge management is more effective. And it is more likely to ‘Think out of box’ by discussion in a social network environment because our epistemic aim changed a lot.

5 comments:

  1. As you mentioned in the last conclusion, Using social ways to do idea generation and knowledge management is more effective . Nowadays, the collaboration is more and more important in our learning and communication. In terms of the epistemological. Behavior, I think with the help of the group, we can get more understand .

    ReplyDelete
  2. As mentioned in your article,even changing a little about the two answers after group discussion,it has made a big difference.It happened to my group too.Although these questions are not difficult to get from individual work,group study gives us much more.In the modern world,cooperation with others is very important.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think most of us agree that group discussion can help a lot. My group discussion help me better understand the social could. But I still have a question, discuss face to face or on the Internet, which one is better? I perfer to discuss face to face. what about you?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In my opinion, discuss face to face is more efficient in most cases because all the members concerntrate on the topic. However I still think discussing on-line is better, for the reason it is a more open way because very likely people may say something that they would not say in a real world when discussion online. In addition, when we're having a mindstorming, I think an on-line environment may make you think outside the box much easier.

      Delete
  4. Oh,I find we have the same action in group discussion. After we all put our answers in the Google doc, I just consider the work what others have done, and never care the article given by teacher again.I agree your point that it is something higher level cognition, which is much more efficient than we answer the question indivisualy.

    ReplyDelete