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Answer the following questions:
a) One counterargument to Silver’s critique of social media is to see online technologies as vehicles for creating closer and more meaningful connections rather than a “quagmire” in which connections get confused and lost. Do you agree or disagree with Silver? Why do you agree or disagree?
b) Is it valid to think of the virtual connection we build online as a supplement to actual connections we forge face to face? Why or why not?
c) How does Silver’s perspective on the inferiority of online relationships, when compared to face-to-face contact, impact the overall effectiveness of his argument? Do you agree with him or disagree with him? Why?
d) Given Colvin’s prognosis, we are facing a very challenging problem in our attempt to build community in a fully-online classroom What actions will you take to make the most of our engagement together within this intentional online community?
Please answer the questions below and support the claim or claims you make with reasons and evidence. It is insufficient to make an assertion without explaining why you are making it.
When you use a quotation or paraphrase from the reading, explain why that quotation or paraphrase supports the point you wish to develop.
There are two ways to explain a quotation. The first method is just what it sounds like: explain what the quotation means to you. Sometimes, though, the meaning of a quotation is self-explanatory. In these cases, you should explain how the quotation relates to what you are saying overall or to some smaller point you wish to make. You can also choose to include both types of explanation—what the quotation means and how it relates to your point—in your discussion of any given quotation or paraphrase.
Quotations with no explanation are sometimes called “hit-and-run quotations,” because dropping a quotation in your writing, without explaining its larger significance or relevance, is loosely analogous to bumping into a car in a parking lot and then driving off in a hurry without leaving a note.
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What Really Makes Teams Work: And What We Lose When We Take Groups Online
(Adapted from Humans are Underrated: What High Achievers Know that Brilliant Machines Never Will)
by Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at Large, Fortune Magazine at Time Inc.
Despite what you might think, as information technology has grown more powerful and influential, the
importance of human groups—as distinct from individuals—in creating knowledge has increased enormously.
The trend is starkly clear in a massive study of 20 million research papers in 252 fields within science and
engineering, the social sciences, and the arts and humanities over 50 years, plus 2 million patents of all kinds
over 30 years. In nearly 100 percent of the fields, more research is being done by teams, and the teams are
getting bigger.
A few factors have combined to produce this historic shift. As knowledge increases, people must
specialize in narrower slices of it to achieve mastery. For almost any given problem, more people’s
contributions are required to find the best response.
The trend is so broad that it has apparently become self-reinforcing: As teams increasingly produce
higher quality work than individuals, individuals become less likely to match it and thus more likely to become
part of teams striving to produce even better work. The result is that humans working in groups are more crucial
to the success of organizations (and whole economies), and the ability to work in groups is more crucial to the
success of individuals.
So what makes teams effective? MIT Professor Alex Pentland is one of the researchers who has
provided the greatest insight into this question. His Human Dynamics Laboratory invented the sociometric
badge, an unobtrusive device that people in a group wear on their clothing. It typically measures the tone of
voice a person uses, whether people are facing one another while talking, how much they gesture, and how
much they talk, listen, and interrupt one another. It does not record what people say; in explaining team
performance, the words themselves turn out to be practically irrelevant.
While researching groups, Pentland and his lab found that the members of the very best teams interact in
three distinctive ways. First, they generate a large number of ideas in short contributions to conversations; no
one went on at great length. Second, they engage in what Pentland calls “dense interactions,” with group
members constantly alternating between advancing their own ideas and responding to the contributions of
others with “good,” “right,” “what?” and other super-short comments that signal consensus on an idea’s value,
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good or bad. Third, everyone contributes ideas and reactions, taking turns more or less equally, ensuring a wide
diversity of ideas.
The most important factor in group effectiveness turned out not to be what everybody thinks—cohesion,
motivation, leadership. Instead, it’s the social sensitivity of the team members, their skills of social interaction.
That’s what encourages those patterns of “idea flow,” to use Pentland’s term. Those three elements of
interaction were about as important as all other factors—individual intelligence, technical skills, members’
personalities, and anything else you could think of—put together.
Human interaction is so powerful that increasing it just a little improves group performance a lot. For
example, Pentland and his lab investigated a huge Bank of America call center where the emphasis was on
productivity; reducing the average call handle time at that one call center by just 5 percent would save the
company $1 million a year. The bank grouped employees into teams of about twenty, but they didn’t interact
much, in part because their work was entirely solitary, sitting in a cubicle with a phone and a computer. They
were unlikely to run into each other very often anyway because the bank staggered break times in order to keep
staffing levels steady. Here was a team that barely justified the term.
Yet the members did interact a bit, and when Pentland asked them to wear the sociometric badges for six
weeks, he found that the best predictor of team productivity was how much the members interacted in the little
time they had, and what he calls engagement, the degree to which all team members were involved in the
interaction.
Which leads to a seemingly obvious conclusion: If lots of interaction and broad engagement are the most
powerful drivers of a group’s performance, then hasn’t technology brought us to the doorway of nirvana?
Aren’t e-mail, texting, and social media the greatest gift to groups in history? The answer is no, or at least not
necessarily. Social interaction is the very essence of being human, as we’ve seen—a phenomenon so highly
evolved that we’re still discovering all the ways in which it happens, sometimes affecting us deeply without our
even realizing what happened. We didn’t develop these wondrous abilities in the electronic age, and a lot of
them just don’t work online.
Evidence is clear that face-to-face interaction is far richer and more effective than is the fragile, meager
digital version in building trust, cooperation, and the patterns of behavior that make groups effective. Is anyone
surprised? We humans were interacting face to-face long before we developed language, and today even when
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we’re talking; it isn’t what we say that matters most. After badging hundreds of groups in face-to-face
interaction and collecting billions of data points, Pentland and his colleagues realized that unspoken social
signals—who’s talking, how much, in what tone, interrupting or not, facing toward whom and away from
whom, gesturing how – told them all they needed to know about the performance of a group. They didn’t need
to hear any words. Pentland’s striking finding is that “usually we can completely ignore the content of
discussions and use only the visible social signals to predict the outcome of a negotiation or a sales pitch, the
quality of group decision making, and the roles people assume within the group.” But most of those visible
social signals aren’t available in digital communication.
When digital interaction is effective, it’s most likely between people who already have a face-to-face
relationship. Some 61 million U.S. Facebook users got a “go vote” message on Election Day 2010, part of an
experiment by political science professor James Fowler and Facebook researchers. A simple informational
message about voting had no effect at all; people who got it were no likelier to vote than were those who got no
message. But other users received the same message plus randomly selected profile photos of up to six of their
Facebook friends who had clicked an “I voted” button on Facebook. Those users were more likely to vote; the
message merely informing people that some friends had voted got an extra 60,000 users to the polls. But the
real effect was in what happened next: When those users clicked the “I voted” button, triggering a message from
them in their friends’ news feeds, as distinct from the randomly generated message telling them some friends
had voted, an extra 280,000 of their friends voted.
This would seem to be strong evidence of the power of online relationships. But actually it was just the
opposite. When the researchers dug deeper, they found that these influential friends weren’t just any friends.
“Only close friends influenced users to vote in the real world,” the researchers found. “Facebook users have an
average of about 150 friends, but they are likely to have close relationships with only ten,” they reported, and
those few friendships, based on face-to-face interaction, made all the difference. “The closest ten friends on
Facebook mattered; the other 140 didn’t matter at all,” Fowler said. “Online networks are powerful . . . but it is
those real-world ties that we have always had that are making a difference.”
That is, there are Facebook friends, and then there are actual friends. Other research underscores the
difference, but your own experience with online-only relationships versus strong in-person relationships is all
the evidence you need. Effective teams are built on person-to-person interaction, usually among small numbers
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of people. Digital media can help sustain strong relationships that were established face-to-face in the real world
but cannot create such strong relationships. It’s the way we’re wired.
It may seem ironic that few people have ever understood that fact better than one of the greatest digital
geniuses, Steve Jobs. “Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its
isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings,” reports Walter Isaacson in his Jobs
biography. He quotes Jobs: “‘There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by
e-mail and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You
run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.’”
It all has to happen in person. That’s why Jobs famously designed the Pixar headquarters the way he did.
Pixar is the animation studio that Jobs initially funded and eventually ran in the years before he returned to
Apple and for several years thereafter. It’s arguably the most successful film studio ever, since it has never
produced a flop. The Toy Story films, Finding Nemo, the Cars films—of the fourteen features it had produced
through 2013, every one was a major financial winner. Jobs wanted to keep it that way, so he insisted that Pixar’s new headquarters be designed around a central atrium; he then placed the cafe, mailboxes, conference
rooms, and other elements so as to force people to criss-cross it. “We designed the building to make people get
out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium,” he told Isaacson. He felt so strongly about this that he
ordered just two giant bathrooms for the whole building, both off the atrium. That was going too far. An
employee revolt killed the idea, but all of the bathrooms to be added were—guess where—near the atrium. Jobs
knew what makes teams work. It isn’t e-mail.
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