I've always been dubious about the utility of group work in a classroom setting. In my experience, nobody is ever satisfied with group work assignments. Most groups tend to divide work poorly, and feature personality conflicts. This leaves students cranky, and produces work of uneven quality. Work produced by groups filled with students who make unequal contributions also poses a serious challenge for evaluation.
I think that the structure of mmo guilds might offer some ways to improve collaborative work. Being in the right guild, after all, kept me playing WoW long after I'd grown bored with the game itself, and motivated me to invest a great deal of time in aspects of the game that I never much cared about on their own. A good guild is an association that is durable over time, based on mutual consent and cooperation, civil and pleasant, and composed of individuals with a wide range of skills and talents. All of those characteristics are potentially useful in other forms of social organization.
Consider, as an experiment, student learning groups that are formed on a voluntary basis, and which exist throughout much or all of the educational process. Students might have an option to join a learning guild at some point in their second year on campus, and to remain in one until they graduated. Members of a guild could leave, and could also evict unproductive colleagues. These guilds would have some legal standing in the university community, and would endure beyond the scope of a single class or assignment. This system could be particularly useful in online education, where students lack the social bonds that serve to motivate some learners in ordinary classrooms, and where courses are often much shorter (which makes it significantly harder for students to form effective working groups for a single class).
Alternatively, consider a system in which a pool of employees at a corporation are allowed to form themselves into durable groups to tackle assigned tasks from a queue. Shared success and failure, combined with the ability to exit or to evict unproductive team members could produce better focus on the goals of a particular project, while allowing individuals to make the best use of their own particular skills.
Like good gaming guilds, the better academic guilds or professional guilds would persist over the course of years. Some successful academic guilds might opt to enter the job market collectively, in order to capitalize on their demonstrated ability to work effectively together. Group bonds would drive productivity, in the same way that my desire not to be a burden on a raid led me to spend endless hours farming materials to secure enchantments or other minor gear upgrades so as not to bring shame and sorrow on my guild. The proper structuring of academic goals or professional obligations could even make use of the same tiered difficulty that allowed guilds to learn to work together through ever-more-challenging raid instances.
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Very interesting post. In many business environments, we're seeing the growth of communities of practice which embody some of the concepts you're discussing here - but not all of them. Communities are usually an online forum where like-minded people can come together to discuss questions, hot topics, lessons learned, etc. However, when they are inside of a particular company then it would be different than an external community that might be industry specific. The external communities, in many cases, are already like guilds or have the opportunity to become more like the mmo guilds you describe. Definitely worth further exploration and one more angle of the "gamification" concept. It's not just about the technology but also the psychological aspects of what attracts us to gaming.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't actually considered professional organizations as roughly comparable structures - although they clearly do serve many of the same functions. I suspect that people tend to naturally form communities of a certain size and social complexity within almost any organizational matrix. From my own experience, the groupings of 'people who care about Russian rock music' and 'people who were part, broadly speaking, of my research year in Moscow', have formed smaller functional communities. The level of commitment to shared goals differs greatly, of course - in academia, at least, most friendships are mixed with a certain amount of nervousness caused by the need to compete for scare resources, which makes some forms of cooperation much more difficult. I suspect that differences in corporate culture could produce communities with very different structures, and people balanced the advantages of collective work with the need to secure personal rewards.
DeleteWhy would learning guilds even require a university committee? Why couldn't such things exist out in the world?
ReplyDeleteConsider the book club as a similar model. Could we build a new type of educational system around something like this? Hmmm... something like this might be happening at hackerspaces.
Some of my most rewarding social relationships fit this model, certainly. Off the top of my head, I see two reasons to formalize such relationships. On the one hand, this type of structure is currently actually banned in many academic settings, and you'd need some level of approval to avoid running afoul of various code-of-conduct issues. The other issue is one of accreditation - it would be very useful for a group/pod/collective to be able to have ways to demonstrate its prowess to potential interested parties. I can certainly see a role for non-traditional forms of accreditation here - anything from technical certifications to badges to positive peer reviews.
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