1000 Word Blog Post- Collaborations

Photo from:  http://itsonlybusiness.co.uk/blog/business-collaborations-are-they-worth-it/


COLLABORATIONS!

Collaboration: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor (Merriam-Webster.com). The overall idea of collaborating is a beautiful thing, in which it allows a singular person or group to develop various thoughts into one. The use of collaboration can be examined in multiple life situations, specifically when looking at it in the workspace field. What exactly might Workspace Collaboration be? When looking on thebalance.com, it is described as enabling workers to interface productively with others on the job. Here are some examples of collaborating skills that were listed as the following: brainstorming solutions to a problem, identifying obstacles to success, listening to the concerns of other members as well drawing up consensus around goals. All of these collaboration skill examples are able to correlate with the ideas brought up in our ESOC 211 class. Although in class, we focus on various types of collaboration, group work is an essential when dealing with coming together to make one perfect idea.

Throughout the beginning of this course, I was a little frightened as to what direction I was moving towards when dealing with my career and major. But as the semester moves on, I am able to think about the offline and online collaborations that I have dealt with in class and recognize how surrounded I am in my everyday life by collaborations. Here are some personal examples within class & outside of class that have taught me lessons about both online and offline collaborations:


Our Professor has the class as a whole, create a blog post every Thursday, typically about what was gone over in class that day. For our first blog, I was a little taken back by the assignment and stared at a blank page of numerous hours until I sat down re-read the text given and actually wrote about something intriguing. The class text assigned that day was “What is Collaboration Anyway?” by Adam Hyde. What caught my eye in this text was the discussion about Wikipedia. (This topic is what I wrote my first blog on) It basically began by saying, how Wikipedia obviously needed to start somewhere with a blank page. Which, yes in any case is true. But that, that sentence is what drew me in. The idea that, everything starts from scratch and how it takes various people to start up something new. I never once thought about the beginning of Wikipedia & I’m sure you didn’t until I just said something too. This is where my personal experience really comes into play. Yes, not only was I blogging about this type of collaboration, but I Wiki searched a topic I knew a decent amount about and edited my own sentence into this specific page. It was crazy! People from all over the world are able to just go online and write a sentence of their input about any topic.


Photo from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Improve_this_article_about_Wikipedia

This is what makes collaboration the beautiful idea that it is, the idea of diverse people coming together with different thoughts on the same topic but creating one amazing idea as a whole. Within the text “What Is Collaboration Anyway?”, they state “All edits are supposed to advance the collaborative goal- to make the article more accurate and factual”.  Yes, that my friends, is what collaboration is all about.

Over the course of the semester so far, the concept of “Communities of Practice” was brought up. When looking at the overall picture of how Wikipedia is/was created, the main belief is people from everywhere coming together as one, in order to form information from scratch. In one of my blog’s, I was capable of correlating my high school experiences to collaborations, as well as to communities of practice. In one of the class texts “Cultivating Communities of Practice” by Etienne Wenger, it went over vast idea of how collaboration works with groups of people who practice the same plan. This allowed myself to relate the specific situation back to collaboration and experiment in how they all tie together as an offline personal life experience.


Online and offline collaborations, has been touched upon throughout our ESOC 211 class, which made it interesting to learn about this topic. I was unaware how often the use of collaboration is seen throughout technology as well as online. One day in class, Professor Daly assigned us to group up and think about how the use of music can be used as a form of collaboration. When thinking about it, the thought of EDM (Electric Dance Music) artists was the first idea to appear in my head. As a group, we were able to connect the film “RIP: A Remix Manifesto” to everyday music one hears in today’s generation. Overlapping sounds of past music, as well as similar lyrics and beats remixed to something new, but just given a new title, is very common within this decade. For example, about 20 years ago, Santana created the song “Maria Maria” but in June of 2017, not too many months ago, DJ Khaled developed the song “Wild Thoughts” featuring Rihanna in which they used a guitar solo during the chorus of their song with the same beats from Santana’s classic “Maria Maria”. This went to show me that the use of online collaboration can go as far as generations passed in order to create fantastic music today.



Photo from: http://kuulpeeps.com/2017/06/the-truth-behind-dj-khaleds-single-wild-thougts/

Various usage of collaboration has been developed throughout our ESOC class. Zooming in on specific examples of collaboration comes Tuckman’s 5 Stages of Group Development in which is a theory of 5 steps that helps a team through struggles when needed. For example, it helps a team grow, face challenges, tackle specific issues, work to find solutions, and get an end result. Tuckman’s 5 Stages of Group Development are Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjouring. As stated before, collaboration in workspace is very ideal when dealing with situations, specifically focusing on my ESOC class. The reasoning as to why I am informing one on the 5 stages is because this comes in hand when dealing with the online and offline collaboration experiences I have had in this course.



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