Working in Groups

Throughout my life, I have found myself being a participant in what I now realize has been a variety of categorized forms of groups. This has primarily been during my past and current years of schooling, as a majority of classes from high school and up have required me to collaborate with a group of peers on several occasions. Just in this last week alone, I have participated in multiple group efforts both in this very course, as well as a handful of my other classes. Despite this, not all of said groups have necessarily been of the same kind, at least according to our reading which discussed how groups can be distinct based on varying factors. For instance, the groups I participated in within this class could be classified as “planned groups,” as they were formed by myself and other fellow members of our groups in order to accomplish a goal that was given to us by our instructor. On the other hand, my instructor for one of my other classes, rather than allowing us to group up on our own, decided to place us into groups based on her own random selection. Because this method was carried out, it would instead be considered a “concocted group,” due to an outside authority deciding our groups for us. Though different in how they were organized, both of these group examples had a common goal in encouraging cooperation, which in itself has proven beneficial to students in a learning environment. This video can serve to better elaborate on why group work is implemented into classes and what students can gain from it.

By Karabo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Reddit - Community and Collaboration

Reddit is an example of what I personally believe to be a website that is forced to rely on both a strong sense of community and collaboration in order to thrive. Within the website is a vast selection of growing communities, each with their own particular focuses, rules, and guidelines that assist in differentiating themselves from the rest. These communities, commonly referred to as “subreddits,” also range in active users and daily traffic, as most of these subreddits vary in popularity. Seeing as how each subreddit is comprised of content either shared or generated by users, it is clear to see that a sense of collaboration plays a vital role in keeping these individual communities alive. Collaboration also comes in the form of moderators, who, in a group effort, attempt to maintain a subreddit's overall quality by enforcing agreed on rules and guidelines upon their user base. Moderators’ collaborative efforts, though often strict, have consistently proven necessary, as I have witnessed subreddits fall into chaos when no one was there to keep the community at bay.

By User:ZyMOS (Open Icon Library) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons