Group Cognition - Online Group Cognition

Online Group Cognition

Online interactions, if carefully planned for, can provide ideal data for research on group cognition. If the interaction takes place through text and persistent drawings, logs can preserve an excellent detailed record of virtually everything that took place across the network. Thus, one can analyze everything that was available to the participants and shared by them. In contrast to video analysis, there is no need to worry about camera angles, lighting, transcriptions, interview protocols, coding reliability, etc. to produce an accurate and useful record.

The data can be analyzed for evidence of the accomplishment of problem solving and other tasks (group cognition) through collaborative interaction within the online small group. This can be achieved through close analysis of how small groups of participants co-construct shared meanings and sustain joint activities through the sequentiality and relatedness of their situated contributions and their social participation. Of course, there are many questions that cannot be addressed this way, such as what goes on in individual heads and what is remembered by specific participants years later. But these issues are beyond the scope of a group cognition research agenda. The group accomplishments have been largely ignored in previous educational research, but may constitute what is unique to computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and most promising for the future of computer support for building collaborative knowledge.