Assignment 7

This semester, I am taking an entrepreneurship course in the College of Engineering. As part of the course, we are assigned group members, and within these groups, we come up with a business idea and create a business plan. In order to easily keep in touch with everyone, I created a ‘group’ in my contact list in Gmail. This list contains all the names and respective emails of my group members. This group contact list allows me to easily email everyone at once, instead of having to enter each member’s email separately. This created stronger ties among each of the group members. When I need to contact everyone, I simply email my group, and then my group members can easily “Reply to All” in order to reply back to everyone else in the group and keep the online “conversation” going.

We have a common, shared purpose to email each other—the course work. We are all in the same course, and need to meet at least once a week, face to face, to work on our presentation. So, we share a common language and identity—we are in the same course, and are all engineers. However, we are all different majors within the College of Engineering.

CMC allows our group to communicate and work on our project when we are not meeting face to face. CMC brings our group closer together, because we can communicate with each other even when we are not meeting face to face. In fact, this community as it exists in Gmail would not exist without CMC. CMC allows us to share documents with each other and use our time when we are not in meetings effectively. The online community allows us to easily get in contact with each other and schedule our meetings.

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