Collaborating w Emma

Communities of practice were a very unfamiliar thing to me before reading this article . It took me a while to grasp onto the concept and then it hit me. It was something I had been doing my entire life.                 The friend group I made out of the kids that’s mothers would sit together at swim meets, or the shared google doc for my chemistry class where we would discuss homework, where to meet to study, and even laugh about something funny that happened in class in the instant messaging section and then the document where we shared notes. If we look around these groups are made and formed by the minute. They can be there to collaborate, share information, or even for a laugh. These similar groups have been the start of great things like the two examples in the article, Xerox and Chrysler, two major companies that have benefits juristically from such grouping. Collaboration and putting our mi...

In the reading, What is Collaboration Anyway ?, it made me ponder how different collaboration and sharing are. I used to see them as interchangeable, but I realized that is not the case. Often times the internet is seen as a way to share information and help connect people by using information. While similar concepts, online sharing barely scrapes the surface of collaboration. Collaboration helps users to feed off each others thoughts and constitute a chain of ideas, facts, or other information that was not published by one person. Collaboration creates more of a community that uses individuality to pool information. Don't get me wrong shared posts from individual users are very helpful in many circumstances but, after delving deeper, one can realize the potential that can be had because of the melting pot of ideas. For example, sites such as wikipedia pool information and people may add/edit information as they go to create the utmost accurate/descriptive information for each topi...