Communication Networks--Reflect of Lecture 5 & 6

Note at the beginning: This article will be divided into two parts. The first part I will talk about the Communication Networks which is proposed by Porf. Chan in the lecture 5. And the second part I would like to share something around the assignment in the lecture 6, including the answer of the two class activities.

Let’s talk about Communication Networks first. We have learnt many concepts around social networking and we studied Social Psychology Theories of Groups and Group Behaviors, Social Experience as well as Cloud Collaboration in the fifth lecture. What interests me most in this lecture is Communication Networks and I am going to illustrate some understanding of mine about it in this blog.

We shall begin with the concept of group. A group indicates that its members should be aware of and somehow interact with each other, specifically, they consider themselves as a group. Like Prof. Chan said that a group is a structure consists of members with different roles, status, relations and communication networks, as well as subgroups. Group members usually share the same interests, topics or target. So we may think about the question, that is, how can those members share the information with others. In other words, what does the communication between them look like? Now we focus on communication networks, which can be regarded as communication structure that restrict its member can communicate with whom at one time.

There are five organizations of communication networks if we consider the number of members in group is five, which was proposed by Bavelas in 1950. The communication structures are as follows: Circle, Chain, Y, Wheel and Concom. According to the picture of communication patterns in problem solving involving five peoples, we can clearly see the relationship and state of members in group.

Figure of Five Different Communication Structures

Take Circle pattern as example, a person can only communicate to his/her neighbor on both left-hand and right-hand side, so does everyone else. In such pattern, information or messages can only be delivered by person to person like cascade form but in two directions from the start. You may notice the situation that if one of them receives the message but do nothing about it, such as not telling the other neighbor, that neighbor still have chance to get the message if others are responsible to deliver the message to their neighbors. Imagine that a group of students deliver paper note in class, one pass the note to another and the note can be delivered back from different student, which forms the circle pattern.

We can easily cut off one of those communications to form Chain pattern, just like the situation we mentioned that one do nothing about the communication to the next one. Unlike the Circle pattern, its disadvantage is obvious that the information may not go further if one in the middle of chain is unwilling to pass on the message. So in this Chain pattern, a requirement that members must be active in the group is needed. The Chain pattern is just like the process of posting a letter.

We continue cutting off one of communications’ connection but link the separate member to the middle one of the chain, thus we gain the Y pattern. Y pattern is similar to the Chain pattern yet the one who can communicate with three members plays a more important role in the group.

It can be seen more easily that the middle member’s status isn’t the same as others if we keep on cutting off the connection and do the same thing that link the apart one to the middle member, where we get the Wheel pattern. The middle member is called as central person or key person. Nowadays, many enterprises’ management structure is using this Wheel pattern to managing the company and normally the key person is exactly the CEO. Centralized networks is recognized as a structure that is both appropriate and fast to deal with simple task while decentralized network is apt to handle complex task.

The Concom pattern is formed if every two members can communicate with each other and it is the most popular pattern in building social networking communication. In this pattern, there is no such a central person or leader existing, so everyone in the group plays an equal role with the highest participants’ satisfaction. Members can talk without any hesitate like in the real life because that the social network doesn’t have his/her boss or superior. We can hardly see any e-commerce social network don’t use this pattern to form their social networking and thus the users have the highest flexibility to buy things from one online-shop to the other.

To sum up, Communication Networks is diverse and each of them leads to different level of leadership among the members. To find out the most suitable and effective communication pattern to solve different problems is very important in social networks.

As for the lecture 6, we have learnt some concepts about collaboration and specially, we have an assignment in class, that is, to do a reading and answer two questions as an individual and as a group.

As a solo assignment, my answers of the questions are as follows:

The first question is that what is the definition of Social Cloud? By highlighting in yellow color in the article, I found the definition: A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network. It leverages pre-existing trust relationships between users and its resources exchanged need not be symmetric and can represent vastly different capabilities.

The second one is what are the possible applications of a Social Cloud? Also by highlighting in gray color, I found that there are mainly five aspects of possible applications of a Social Cloud which are as follows: social computation cloud, social storage cloud, social collaborative cloud, social cloud for public science, enterprise social cloud. Each has its own property and difference between others.

As for class activity, our group create a Google document to edit, share and discuss the answers.

The former answer becomes that a Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network. It can change the situation that some individual users of a social network are bounded by finite capacity and limited capabilities. A cloud-based usage model is used to enable virtualized resource sharing through service-based interfaces. And the Social Cloud leverages pre-existing trust relationships between users and its resources exchanged need not be symmetric and can represent vastly different capabilities.

The latter one turns to be like this:

There are mainly five aspects of possible applications of a Social Cloud which are as follows: social computation cloud, social storage cloud, social collaborative cloud, social cloud for public science, enterprise social cloud. Each has its own property and difference between others.

Examples:

Social Computation Cloud : Onlive.com

Social Storage Cloud: SkyDrive by Microsoft, Google drive(docs can be shared with others), dropbox

Social Collaborative Cloud: Google Docs

Social Cloud for Public Science: Wikipedia, SETI, Rosetta, Docking

I think the epistemic aim in Class Activity One is just the metacognition part. We find the answer from the article and highlight it, whose process is exactly the same as knowing the knowing and learning the learning. We just classify which sentences are relate to the questions and acquire the most correlative belief and explanation. But in Class Activity Two is totally different. We discuss the answer of our own and explore more information about the social cloud. We correct our wrong understanding by listening others’ elaboration and relearn the same thing in a different point of view which you don’t think like that before. You absorb others new idea or knowledge and think the question again to find the best definition, which approaches the truth, that’s why we change our aim from just understanding.

According to the assignment as individual and group work, the epistemic cognition is different and the group work reaches the third level of the cognition. The reason is mainly because the aims at the two stages are different. For individual part, we just try to understand the key words. Meanwhile, we modify and correct our understanding in a group discussion. Besides, limitation and justification of knowledge are different from person to person, which affect the belief of one own.

When talking about the process of approaching to those problems, I do the different ways in two activities. As individually, I read the whole article first, then find and highlight the key words or sentences which relates to the question, summarize those highlight part to get the answer as well. As in a group, I put my understanding to the group mates and express my thoughts. Then listen to the others and discuss with them not only to find the consent but also to inspire myself through group mates’ ideas. Finally, we share and summarize the ultimate answer.

In addition, I find it interesting that everyone does the metacognition in different ways. Some of them highlight the original sentences in the article and some of them just underlining the key word in the sentences. Moreover, some write down their answer using their own words.

To sum up, everyone has his/her way to achieve the cognition and metacognition. Yet we usually achieve the epistemic cognition as a group, and it mainly rely on the individual cognition, understanding and knowledge.