Groups- Intentional or Not?

Image by James MacDonald via Flickr.

There are many different instances where groups come into play. Whether it be in class, on public transit or even at a party, you're always grouped with people whether you realize it or not. There are many different types of groups, which is sort of weird because you would think that there would only be one type of group. The type of group that stood out to me the most was circumstantial groups. These groups emerge when external forces almost force the people to form a group because of the situation at hand. One example that came to mind while learning about this type of group was the showLost. On the show, there's a huge plane crash which forces all of the people on the plane to band together. They all get stuck on an island and have to group together to survive basically. The external force of the plane crash made them all band together for a temporary amount of time to survive. Now that I know all about the different kinds of groups, it's super interesting to analyze people in groups because I know they probably don't know what kind of group they're in.

Collaboration Station

Image by Geralt (own work) via Pixabay

If you think about it, collaboration is everywhere. It's in social media, it's in classrooms, and it's even in our day to day speech. The key to collaboration is sharing your ideas with the world and asking for help/people to collaborate. There's definitely a fine line between just putting your ideas out there, and actually causing collaboration to happen. For example, if I posted a video of me talking about any given topic but did not ask for people's thoughts and opinions, that would just be me sharing my opinions. If I made the video and did ask for people's opinions, that would technically be collaborating. Like I said, collaboration is used in many day to day activities, however it is really easy to confuse collaboration with just regular conversation. This video should give a loose idea of one definition of collaboration, as there are many different definitions. Collaboration has many different meanings but for the most part means that more than one person is working towards a specific goal. This is why collaboration is almost everywhere because even if it's unintentional, humans collaborate every day.