Analyzing the Communication Network of the 2012 COINs Seminar
In this seminar about 50 students from the five universities MIT/SCAD/Aalto University/ University of Cologne/ University of Bamberg worked together for five months in multinational virtual project teams as COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks). They formed ten teams ranging in size from three to six students from at least two locations, working on a project related to social media and social network analysis (2012 course Web site). Students were asked to cc all their project-related e-mail communication to a dummy mailbox. This allowed us to construct a virtual mirror of ongoing communication within and between teams. At the end of the course, each team presented their results to their classmates in a virtual meeting. Each of the ten presentations was ranked by the students in the three categories “presentation quality, content quality, and creativity”. Comparing the virtual mirror of communication with the peer and instructor ratings permitted us to identify the communication pa...