Understanding Collaborative Processes


The main aim of collaboration is to use all members as cognitive resources to collectively innovate existing ideas, resulting in something that did not exist prior to collaboration. This type of collective, improvisational, cognitive activity has been argued to lead to various forms of innovation. Collaborative tasks are ill-structured tasks with cognitive interdependence between members. When collaborating, group members depend on others to share what they know so as to synthesize collective information to create shared understanding and negotiate what is known by the group so as to use the groups collective cognitive efforts to create new knowledge or solve complex problems. What this implies is that collaboration requires two important collective communication processes:  information synthesis and knowledge negotiation. Within these two processes there exist a collection of smaller patterns that can lead to better or worse collaborative activity.

Important Patterns for Collective Information Synthesis 

Verbal Equity

Joint Idea Building

Developing Joint understanding

 

Important Patterns for Collective Knowledge Negotiation

Alternative Ideas

Quality of Claims

Norms of Evaluation (Constructive Discourse)