Bibliography

Hsu, Jung-Lung & Chou, Huey-Wen. (2008), The effects of communicative genres on intra-group conflict in virtual student teams. //International Journal of Distance Education Technologies//, //7// (1), 1-22.


 * Key words: qualitative research; technology integration; secondary education**

The study attempts to identify whether collaborative interaction has any effect on the network structure or the level of conflict in virtual groups. Primary data was synthesized from a questionnaire along with a subset of 2,546 email messages gathered from 105 undergraduate students in Taiwan. Both quantitative and qualitative primary data was used to identify how intra-group conflict, network structures, and communicative genres were affected. Results suggested communicative genres have the potential to affect the degree of participation and interaction among group members and were more likely to be associated with intra-group conflict than that of the network structure. It also suggests that instructors and developers may wish to focus on providing a well-designed interface that supports communicative procedure for coordinating distant learners.

The work presents a credible premise by referencing a number of established theorists and addresses the central issue adequately by going to great lengths to supply primary data to back-up the research. However, it should be noted that although the article was published in 2010, the primary data was collected from September 2004 through to January 2005, and as such regard should be made to the availability of present genres of technologically mediated communication. Whilst this does not affect the findings of the research, further contemporary research may produce a different spread of results. Linguistic variance presented some challenges to clarity of the article however this may only be an issue to a native speaker of English. The study admits that a limitation of the work would be that the sample group came from just one university and that because of scheduling issues only email was used. The experience of researching, annotating and critiquing this article has in many ways mirrored the communication complications experienced by the sampling group, these difficulties may reflect some of the online challenges that our cohort will face over the next two years.