 Hi, and welcome to the lecture for chapter one, Small Groups at the Heart of Society. Over the next several minutes, we'll go over some introductory issues that are going to be important for you as you progress through the rest of this course. Let's dive in. So, one of the most important things to understand at the offset of this class is the importance of groups in your life. As you've gone through your life, you've actually been a member of a variety of groups. One of the most important groups you've been affiliated with is your first group, and that was the group that you were born into. For most of us, that's our family group. The family group is a very influential group in that that is the group that we learn most of our values and our morals and our ideas about the world. As you go through your life, you're going to enter a wide variety of groups, including primary groups such as friends, professional groups, such as the individuals that you work with. The key thing is that most of our life is spent in groups. The goal in this course is to gain better insights into how to communicate effectively with those groups. People participate in groups for a wide variety of reasons, and groups can actually be beneficial to individuals for a wide variety of reasons as well. One of the key things that we look at is that groups can be really good at demonstrating effective problem solving. The basic idea here is that individuals that are members of groups can typically accomplish more and have a wider selection of ideas available to them. So when we break down the functions of groups, specifically in regards to group communication, we can kind of see two separate areas that are starting to appear even at this early point in the course. The first aspect is task accomplishment. This means that groups tend to work towards common goals and common ideas to accomplish tasks. The other side of the coin is group connection, and this has to do with the relational aspects being in a group, the friendships and the connections that you make as being a member of a group. Something to keep in mind as we move forward is that being in a group tends to be a game of give and take. Specifically, this means that you're going to be putting yourself into the groups that you're part of. This means your time, your resources, and your emotional investment inside of that. The goal is to have an effective group experience, meaning that at the end of the day that you get as much, if not more, than you put into the group. Over this course, we'll talk about conflict and how those things arise, addressing tensions effectively, and how ultimately you can put all of these things together through communication to be successful in the groups. So an important concept that's covered in this first chapter is the idea of how groups versus individuals function as problem solvers. So let's start with looking at groups as problem solvers. One of the reasons that groups can be an effective structure to be a part of is that they're a really good source of alternative ideas. You and yourself are some of your parts and some of your experience. However, when you come together in a group, it allows you to have a wide variety of ideas that ultimately can lead to better decision-making. Groups can also be really useful for conjunctive tasks. This means accomplishing things that have lots of moving parts to them. You and your group members can come together to ultimately accomplish things more effectively than an individual trying to accomplish the same task we're able to. Groups can help facilitate active learning, working together and teaching and learning at the same time can be a good construct to gain insight and understanding as you go throughout your life. And finally, there is some research to show that certain cultures and certain backgrounds and different lived experiences tend to prefer groups over the others. We'll discuss more of that in chapter five. So when you find yourself in situations where a group is a good choice, you can gain some good net benefits from this. First is that increased source of ideas. When you're in a group, you're gonna be able to get more ideas than you would have access to just as an individual. Secondly, groups tend to be self-correcting. The process of being in a group is a communicative one, meaning that as you and your group members work through processes and problems and just everyday work processes, that ultimately you're going to have to communicate with each other about those things. The end result is this is that as problems arise, you're more likely to be able to identify them than if you were just working as an individual. Again, kind of as a spinoff on this, is problem identification. Having to communicate and discuss problems out loud with other group members means that you're more likely to identify problems sooner and more often than you would if you were just going it alone. Groups as a in general tend to be investigated, meaning that they tend to kind of focused on exploring and understanding things better which tends to lead to things being more positive as you work through issues. Finally, more often than not, groups tend to be solution oriented, meaning that as a result of going through the process of being in a group, you're going to look for solutions to problems instead of just getting caught up in things. So there are a few times, however, in specific situations when perhaps a group is not the best choice. These situations can be, for example, when you just need an expert to provide input and influence. Now there are situations where having an expert in a group can be really useful, but oftentimes on very hyper-specific tasks, it can be more useful for one person that has the expertise just to take that task on. Groups tend to be more difficult when conditions are considered dynamic, meaning conditions are fast changing. The reason for this is that when groups work together, why they might come up with better ideas and have more variety of solutions to draw upon, they are more static in nature, meaning that they're more difficult to adapt to changing conditions. So if things are changing fast, it might be more useful in that situation to have an individual that can adapt. The third thing that kind of pops up is sometimes you see huge chasms on certain issues. So if there is a huge ideological divide between individuals, putting those individuals in a group won't necessarily lead to a solution and in fact might lead to more issues. I think that you can almost always look at current political situations in the United States to see an example of this. Last, whenever there is a situation where one or more group members experience the concept of group hate, and this is a concept that describes a severe loathing of group life. If people hate groups to that extent, it's unlikely that the group is able to be successful. That said, if there is just some mild group hate, there are strategies that we will talk through over the course that will help you alleviate these things. All right, just a brief note on some terminology. In this class, you're gonna hear us use a couple of different terms, groups, small group, teams versus groups and the like. When we talk about a group, what we're talking about is three or more individuals and we separate this for reasons of the communicative aspects of being in these types of numbers. If there is less than three people, you're kinda dealing with dyadic communication, meaning communication between two people and that is a whole nother specific thing. So when there's more than three people, we start to see connections on what we call that a group. Specifically in this course, we're gonna be more interested in small groups and these are groups of between three and eight people. The reason that we focus on these groups is that when you have small groups, you have the emergence of a concept known as interdependence, meaning that everyone is kind of mutually influenced and impacted by other people and this is where the group is small enough basically for people to connect and have connections with one another. Just a last note before we move on in terms of terminology, teams versus groups. Why there is some research to show that teams might be more highly structured and fall into a set of hierarchy. In this class, we're gonna go ahead and use the term team and the term group synonymously. Basically in other words, they're going to mean the same things as we move through this. All right, so communication. What is communication? There's a lot of different definitions and we're gonna get into that more in chapter three but kind of a basic introductory understanding for you right now. When we talk about communication, we're talking about the perception, interpretation, and response of people to signals produced by others. Basically, we're interested in what people say and do intentionally to one another. When we bridge that into small group communication, we're kind of putting that into the connection of that three to eight person group that we're talking before but more specific than that, we're talking about the verbal and nonverbal interaction among members of a small group and we'll go into more specific about how influence takes place in there, the requirement of interaction between those individuals and then they're again in small groups versus groups, there tends to be more informal and spontaneous than public communication or large group communication inside of that. A brief note, especially since you're already experienced some of this by watching this lecture in a mediated format, technology is a growing thing that we're seeing in our society and throughout this course, you're going to have a lot of exposure to technology specifically as it relates to groups. Briefly, just a couple of things here. It is very possible for technology to be a positive force on groups and can actually help groups go throughout their work. Specifically tools that allow face to face conferencing such as Skype and Google Plus Hangouts can be really useful for groups to get together when they cannot do so in the same physical space but still be able to have a high degree of connection and that kind of face to face interaction that you would see in a more traditional setting but there are also a wide variety of tools that we'll discuss over the course that can help groups collaborate through digital spaces. These can include things such as wikis as well as file sharing tools such as Dropbox. Now that said, there are certain situations in which technology can actually be harmful for groups. Specifically, one of the things that I've seen in recent years is that more students are using cell phones and text messaging and email and Facebook to connect with one another and why that can be convenient. It's important to understand that those asynchronous technologies have a lack of social presence meaning that there might be less connection between individuals and ultimately that might hurt the relational development. There's a lot that goes into this and we'll be discussing this in more depth as we go out but just kind of a warning early on to make sure that you're balancing the mediated portion of interacting with groups in your life with the actual face to face interaction because both of those things can be important. All right, so another definitionary thing that we wanna talk about before we move on here is classifying groups by their main purpose. Two definitions that we talk about here, primary versus secondary groups. So when we talk about primary groups, what we're talking about is groups that are formed to meet primary needs for inclusion and affection, right? The most obvious example of this is your family group and why your family might have secondary things like you might have a family business and the like primarily your family serves an interpersonal need. For the most part, what we talk about in this class and what we will practice and experience in this course is secondary groups. And secondary groups are formed to meet secondary needs for control and problem solving and other things. Now it's important to notice here at the offset that no group is really completely primary or completely secondary. They both accomplish those aspects to a certain extent, but we do break secondary groups out into more categories. So we might talk about support groups that support people going through specific issues or specific tasks in their life. We talk about learning groups. We obviously see a lot of those in education and then we go into more specifics about organizational groups specifically because organizational groups tend to have a large impact in your life. As you leave college and you go on for those of you who already have, you'll notice that you spend a lot of your time in different organizational groups and different work groups. There are even specific subgroups of organizational groups that we'll talk about, such as serving on committees, self-managed work teams or even quality control circles as we progress throughout the semester. So briefly it's important to talk about what it means to be ethical inside a small group. First off, let's start with the definition. What the heck is ethics? We talk about ethics, we're talking about the standards that we use to judge and enact appropriate behavior. This basically has to do with the, which is what is socially acceptable inside society. Now what we're really interested here is what it means to be an ethical group member. And over the course of this class, you and your group members will be working together. You will be going through throughput processes and trying to accomplish things. To be an ethical group member, this means that you need to communicate and share ideas. You don't wanna remain quiet more than necessary, but you wanna be able to get your ideas out there so other people can understand your perspective and point of view. You wanna try to create a culture of respect inside your group. That way, even when things get difficult as you work through processes that you're able to communicate and work. You wanna be a good critical thinker, which means that if you see something wrong, speak up, share about it, point out your ideas. Don't suffer from something that we'll call group think later on in the semester. And finally, make a commitment to the group. If you're going to join a group, specifically for a task completion concept like you will in this course, you need to show your group members that you're committed to the group, you're committed to the team, and you wanna be able to accomplish the goals that you set out. Last, one of the things that we wanna touch on before we wrap up this chapter is a concept called the Participant Observer Perspective. The goal of this class is for you to have a chance to join a group and do some experimentation of the ideas and the concepts that we talk about. To do that effectively and learn from that experience, you wanna put yourself in what's called a Participant Observer Perspective. So first off, what is a Participant Observer? A Participant Observer is a combination of engaging and participating in activities while remaining the ability to take a step back for a second and observe and reflect on those things. So the skills that you need to be effective in this are being a good lease listener, paying attention, taking notes when necessary and making sure that you are engaging with other group members. All right, well that wraps up our first chapter discussion. I wanna thank you for watching. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me in any of the variety of ways that have been made available to you. Thanks for watching.