Scholarship, Practice, and Leadership in Motion

Research is field where many stakeholders are involved. These stakeholders can be at the level of community, the government sponsors, research institutions and in general the research community of the researchers who are spread across the geographies. When a community of researchers share the knowledge with each other there are often instances where some part of knowledge transfer does not happen completely. This raises a situation of lacuna in knowledge transfer where some team members within the project are unaware of some aspects of the project. This happened with our group as well. We were undergoing through a long period of a lack in knowledge share where team members were finding it difficult to communicate the recent development to each other. The shortage in time and involvement with other commitments also made it difficult to update the peers on the research activities – both internal and external. As social theorists have said that learning is a lifelong process and it takes a whole life time in learning the social interactions and mastering the art of interaction. By this they have also postulated that the art of interaction can be understood most effectively when one is within the social domain and has opportunity to have a conversation (direct) with the significant others (Graham, 2004). This theory somehow contradicts the theory where the experts say that the computer managed interaction or CMI is also to an extent able to replicate the communication process. The boom of social networking sites has made it possible to replicate the social structure over internet. An added advantage of this kind of a model is that it allows one to communicate with the user generated content and allows oneself to give the comments and feedback without necessarily feeling comprehensive about getting an immediate interaction. This way people can connect with each other in the cyber space and also connect at one to one level at a later stage when they can meet. Our Approach – Analysis As is a commonly stated fact that complex learning’s are often associated with groups and addressed more effectively at the group level, even we tried the same strategy while learning in our group. Burdett (2003) postulates that learning in groups provide opportunities for students to negotiate meaning, manipulate ideas, and create their own knowledge – skills that correspond to those needed in the wider society. We initiated the group learning by first organising a group and defining the group membership in order to increase the group cohesion (Hirokowa, 1999). The next step was to define the group goals. For doing so we together formulated the group goals based on the available information, resources and incorporated them with the ways we can achieve the goals by using these resources. The next step was very crucial which was to regulate our performance continuously. This regulation was important in terms to know the direction we are progressing with the right and realistic aims and goals and if are able to achieve the desired goals or not. This was also a stage for us to reiterate on the accomplished tasks and goals and to forms new deadliness and also to update each other on each other performance by the means of giving the feedback. This strategy worked the best out of the other two strategies of communication and interaction as well as this was the strategy where maximum amount of communication of involved. The online system also worked very well with our team. The computer managed interaction (CMI) as it is called also did set a greater level of communication up to a certain level. This communication was through the mode of computer mediated interaction which though not being a direct form of communication was highly popular. This enabled the group members to share the thoughts and share the knowledge in the more virtual form which enabled the group members to be in par with the new development and also a much better knowledge transfer was enabled by this way. Conclusion From our experience we found that the most effective way of keeping a communication was a direct way of communicating where face to face interaction was involved. This also helped the team members to remain in personal contacts with each other.