Category Archives: Knowledge development

Using social software for managing research and development projects

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In around 1995 I was appointed by Bremen University to manage a relatively well funded European project on the teaching of teachers and training for vocational education and training. The project had partners in seven or eight countries. I set up a project newsletter and after three or so months announced I would no longer be ending postal copies but it would be sent exclusively by email. There was considerable opposition to this, one person (the Swedish partner) saying he had a Mac and documents would not be compatible, others claiming that they lacked the skills and technical infrastructure to manage a project electronically (my own professor used to get his secretary to download and print off copies of any emails to him).

But the shift was made and by the end of the three year funding period no-one could imagine going back to post as the main means of project communication.

In the last two or so years we have seen a similar radical shift in the technologies we use for research communication and collaboration. At the launch workshop for a project in January I was asked what tools I wanted to use for the project. My list got surprisingly long:

  • Skype for day to day chat and audio communication
  • Flash meeting for online project meetings
  • Diigo for shred bookmarks
  • Twitter for project dissemination and sharing outwards
  • WordPress for the project website
  • PB Works for sharing work in progress
  • Flickr for sharing photographs
  • Google Docs for collaborative authoring
  • DropBox for sharing documents

Interestingly, one of the parters offered us a space on a relatively mature project management system and although we all agreed to use it I doubt we will. In my experience these systems are too restrictive and do not provide sufficient facilities for active collaboration. Of course they usually provide forums, but I have never worked on a project where there has been prolonged collaboration through a forum (despite most projects trying).

The one application not on my list is of course email. And despite having taken part in many projects where it is decided not to use email as the primary means of communication, after a short period everyone reverts back to it. Is this because of familiarity or because it perhaps is the quickest and simplest means of communication?

None of the applications listed require any great technical abilities (although firewalls and interoperability issues do sometimes arise). However they require changes in our working practices – in our socio-technical competences. And that can be difficult, especially where researchers are not used to working in an open and collaborative environment.

In terms of distributed international projects it is probably skype and Flashmeeting which have made the greatest impact. even then it takes time to get used to working online in synchronous environments. Online meetings require preparation and moderation – just as do face to face meetings. Yet because it is online there is often a tendency not to prepare in the same way as we would for a face opt face workshop.

I am not quite sure how DropBox is going to pan out in all of this. It certainly has a clever financial model – my free account was overflowing within a month of setting up an account.

And it is an uncertain science. Whilst organisations like Jisc have invested considerable expenditure into developing relatively heavyweight online research environments I do not know of any research into how we can use loosely coupled social software tools for research projects. We are maki9ng up our own practice as we go!

Using technology to support different forms of knowledge

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I am ever more interested in how we can use technologies for knowledge development and sharing. In terms of research I think we need to bring together ideas and insights from different academic and research communities. Although there has been a traditional of discourse between those working in education and technology developers, this is less so when it comes to ideas about organisational learning and different forms of knowledge.

I have just read an interesting paper by Bengt-Ake Lundvall, Palle Rasmussen and Edward Lorenz on ‘Education in the Learning Economy: a European Perspective’. Let me first say I have always been sceptical about such terms as ‘learning economy’ and ‘knowledge economy ‘which seem to be too often bandied about as a mantra, rather than with any exact meaning. But I would agree with the authors observation that knowledge is becoming obsolete more rapidly than before so that employees have to learn and acquire new competencies. the authors say “It makes a major difference whether economic growth is seen as being fuelled by investments in codified scientific and technological knowledge, or whether it is seen as being driven by learning processes resulting in a combination of codified and tacit knowledge.”

International comparisons tend to focus on the first measure,. looking, for example at expenditure on research and development (R&D) and at the number of science and technology graduates. The latter perspective – captured by the term the learning economy –they say,  “can be seen in work focusing on the way informal networking relations, practical problem-solving on the job, and investments in lifelong learning contribute to competence building.”

At the heart of their argument is the nature of different forms of knowledge. They propose “a taxonomy of knowledge where it is divided into four categories (Lundvall & Johnson, 1994):

  • Know-what refers to knowledge about ‘facts’. Here, knowledge is close to what is normally called information – it can be broken down into bits and communicated as data.
  • Know-why refers to knowledge about causality nature, in the human mind and in society. This kind of knowledge is important for technological development in science-based industries.
  • Know-how refers to the ability to do something. It may be related to the skills of artisans and workers. But actually it plays a role in all economic activities, including science and management.
  • Know-who involves information about who knows what and who knows what to do as well as the social ability to cooperate and communicate with different kinds of people and experts.

Lundvall, Rasmussen and Edward Lorenz point to important differences in the degree to which these four categories of knowledge can be codified and in how education systems are affected by the degree of codification. the main point of their paper is to look at how traditional schoolings systems have become isolated from society and how the organisation into subjects and disciplines fails to maestro the needs of how we are developing and using knowledge. they also point to dramatic difference sin work organisation and opportunities for work based learning in different countries in Europe concluding that “Educational principles and cultures focusing on collaboration, interdisciplinarity and engagement with real-life problems are needed to prepare people for flexible and innovative participation in the economy and society.”

They do not deal with the issues of how we are using technology for learning  and knowledge development although they acknowledge that “data bases can bring together know-what in a more or less user friendly form”. Interestingly they piontyt0 to “the failure of IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard to develop management information systems that could substitute for ‘the art of managing’ ” despite considerable investment and incentives to do so,
Traditional, Technology Enhanced Learning has focused on the know what and know-why. There has been little attention on the know how. yet it is this form of knowledge which is perhaps the most important within many enterprises and is changing most rapidly.  True, we have access to increasing numbers of know-how videos. yet we have possibly failed to develop pedagogical and learning approaches to how to use video and audio in an active sense. We tend to use it in the old English pedagogic sense of ‘watching Nellie’ rather than in any thought through way. and even though the web allows us to find people, their is only limited linkages to knowing who does what well, and even less to “the social ability to cooperate and communicate with different kinds of people and experts.”

Can social networking fill such a gap? Once more my feeling is that it can, but only to a limited extent. Social networki9ng allows us to tell what we are doing and what we are thinking. recommender systems allow the development of patterns. Yet they lack the idea of purpose and intent.

There are many instances of exchange of knowledge through different platforms in communities of practice. equally companies like CISCO or IBM have set up platforms to promote the process of turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge though for example podcasts and other companies such as Shell-BP have established extensive wikis for the same purpose. However these initiatives fail to ‘scale=down’ for use in smaller enterprises. One of the issues may be that of fragmentary knowledge and the difficulty of how we can scaffold fragments of knowledge gained through practice – or know how = into wider knowledge bases, which necessarily have to build on purpose and context.

Furthermore, looking at practice in smaller enterprises, the nature of collaboration and social exchange becomes critical, Lundvall, Rasmussen and Lorenz cite the work of Marshall (1923), “who was concerned to explain the real-world phenomenon of industrial districts, (and) emphasised the local character of knowledge. He found that specific specialised industries were concentrated in certain regions and that such industrial districts remained competitive for long historical periods.”

So another issue is how to support that local character of knowledge – and indeed to rethink what local might mean in a connected world.

(More to come in a later post)

Lanyrd and designing applications to support Communities of Practice

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Last night I spent a hour or so playing with new social software startup, Lanyrd. And I love it. Why?

Well I logged in or rather pressed a button saying something like login with Twitter and there I was. No filling in forms or making up passwords. And there straight away was a message for me:

Hi there! we have had a look at conferences your friends on twitter are going to, perhaps you might like to go too.

And indeed, apart from the lack of time I might well want to go. So the site is already personalised for me based on the ideas and knowledge of my friends. Pretty good. But more important is the site is useful to me: it contains information and knowledge and links to people which will and already does form an integral and useful part of my work practice. In other words, it makes my work easier. That is because it is based on the artefacts and practice of my community of practice, of the people like me who work in technology enhanced learning, knowledge development and teaching and learning. This isn’t a friends site for everyone – of you do not go to conferences then Lanyrd offers little to you. But this surely has to be the future of social software.of niche sites based on the practices, concerns and artefacts of particular communities of practice.

Other things I liked. The site is very open. Anyone is free to add and edit on the wikipedia shared knowledge principle. And the FA (not a TOSS( says anyone is free to scrape the site and get information out in any way they wish.

Obviously on a roll, developers Simon Willison and Natalie Downe are rapidly adding more features allowing the use of the site to accumulate the outcomes of conferences, be they papers, videos, presentations or other artefacts. Once more they are building the site around the practices and artefacts of the research community.

And finally the site is simple and intuitive to use and attractively designed. A lot of thought (and code) has gone into making it easy to use – for instance the ability to cut and stick from Open Office (or Office)without inserting any horrible formatting code.

What are the drawbacks? The major weakness is base don its very strength. The site relies on your Twitter friends for its recommendations. And by no means all – or even a majority – of the research community are on Twitter, especially outside technology focused subject areas.  Even the Educa Online Berlin conference, for just the kind of people you would think would be attracted to Lanyrd, has only 16 attendees signed up, despite there being some 2000 delegates enrolled for the conference. But it is early days yet. Lanyrd was only launched in August. And I can see that in a few months it will become an essential tool in our community – especially when they launch the API to the site.

This has got me thinking about design – how can we capture the practices of other communities – particularly in relation to work and learning and design social applications around other aspects of their practice. I think one big lesson from Lanyrd is that more is not, always better. Lanyrd does not try to do everything for researchers bu8t takes am (important) part of their practice and does it better.

How do we capture and share our community learning?

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Well it is PLE2010 Conference week so no apologies is that is the theme of the week. And in pre-conference reflection mood I wanted to reflect on some of the things we have done well and some we have done less well.

Fist of all, PLE2010 has some 70 or so presentations and over 100 delegates. Considering we set out with no large organisations or associations backing the conference I think this is pretty good. The conference has been put together through the hard work of a fairly inexperienced organising committee backed by the experience and enthusiasm of the community – edupunk working at its best!

And most of the publicity has been generated not through traditional media but through the4 us eof social media especially Twitter – just look at #PLE_BCN for proof. There are still barriers to the do it yourself cvonference model – we had big problems setting up payments systems that worked> And whilst the opens ource EasyChair system is sort of OK it does have its quirks (it would be very useful if someone could do some more work on the software).

As I told yesterday, I am very happy about our mix of traditional calls fo contribution (needed for researchers to gain travel grants form institutions with more unconferencing formats for presentation. I am sure the event is going to be a lot of fun.

The issue I think we have not paid sufficient attention to is what we do with the outcomes of the conference. True all the papers etc. are available as on-line proceedings. But how do we represent the outcomes of the different sessions to the wider community? How can we capture ideas and use such ideas in practice and in future research? How can we use the conference as a live event in our community generating new shared knowledge and experience?

Face to face events are valuable, not just for the participants, but for the community as a whole. But I am not sure we make best use of them at the moment. Your ideas would as ever be very welcome.

Looking forward to seeing some of you in Barcelona. :)

Personal Learning Environments and Context

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I am rushing to produce my paper on ‘Supporting Learning in the Workplace’ for the PLE2010 conference (and trying to resist the temptation to recycle previous material!). The paper focuses on the issue of context, building on discussions I have had with Jenny Hughes, based on her contributions to Stephen Downes and Rita Kop’s excellent Critical Literacies course.

The  key section (which is most certainly only a first draft) is called “Problematising the Learning Space: Contexts for Learning.” Any feedback very welcome.

A major issue on designing a work based PLE is in problematising the learning space. This involves examining relations, context, actions and learning discourses. Vygotsky’s approach to cognitive development is sociocultural, working on the assumption that “action is mediated and cannot be separated from the milieu in which it is carried out” (Wertsch, 1991:18).

The socio cultural milieu mediating actions and learning in the workplace includes s series of different relationships (Attwell and Hughes, 21010).

The first is the relationships between teachers and learners. Yet, as we have already pointed out, much learning in the workplace may take place in the absence of a formal teacher or trainer. It may be more appropriate to talk in Vygotskian terms of a More Knowledgeable Other. “The More Knowledgeable Other. is anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the leaner particularly in regards to a specific task, concept or process. Traditionally the MKO is thought of as a teacher, an older adult or a peer” (Dahms et al, 2007),

The second relationship is that between learners themselves. The third is relationships between learners and the wider community. In the context of work based learning that community could include formal education institutions, communities of practice or local or extended personal learning networks. Institutions. And in the context of Personal Learning Environments it is important not to forget the relationships between learners and technology. Technology will play a key role in mediating both the other relationships and mediating learning itself.

The socialcultutal milieu also includes the learning contexts. The most obvious aspect of context is where the learning takes place. Learning takes place in wider physical and online communities as well as at home and in the workplace. This relates to the issue of. physical domains. We can learn through h training workshops, through online communities or even through watching a television programme. A key issue here may be the distance of that domain from our practice Learning about computing through using a computer means the learning domain is close to practice. However learning through a training workshop may be more or less close to actual practice. Equally some enterprises have developed training islands within the workplace with aim of lessoning the distance between the learning domain and practice. Obviously the context of practice is key to work based learning and we will return to this issue. A further aspect of context is the wider social political, cultural and sub cultural environment. This in itself contains a raft of issues including factors such as the time and cost of learning and rewards for learning.

A further and critical aspect of context is what is judged as legitimate in terms of process and content. How are outcomes defined, what constitutes success and how is it measured?

Another critical issue on problematising the learning space is the nature of different learning discourse s. Learning discourses are dependent of different factors.

Firstly they can be viewed as am set of practices. Wenger points out that we practice eis not learned individually but is dependent on social relations in communities.

“Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore to call these kinds of communities communities of practice.”

Although the nature and composition of these communities varies members are brought together by joining in common activities and by ‘what they have learned through their mutual engagement in these activities.’

According to Wenger, a community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:

  • What it is about – its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members.
  • How it functions – mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity.
  • What capability it has produced – the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artefacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.

A community of practice involves much more than the technical knowledge or skill For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community. In other words, it involves practice: ways of doing and approaching things that are shared to some significant extent among members.

Secondly, learning discourses can be viewed in terms of processes methodologies and structures. As we said earlier work based learning may be more or less structured and formalised and the degree of interaction of learning processes with work processes.

Learning discourses can also be seen as taking place through the exploration of boundary objects, Boundary objects are another idea associated with Vygotsky and have attracted particular interest by those interested in Communities of Practice. The idea was introduced by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer (1989): “Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.”

According to Denham (2003) “boundary objects serve as point of mediation and negotiation around intent” and can comprise a place for shared work. Denham goes on to say “Boundary objects are not necessarily physical artifacts such as a map between two people: they can be a set of information, conversations, interests, rules, plans, contracts, or even persons.”

As a class of knowledge artefacts their importance may lay in their role in dynamic knowledge exchange and are “associated with process, meaning, participation, alignment and reification.”

Whilst reports and documents may be considered boundary objects, they can also be seen as information spaces for the creation of knowledge. A boundary object could also be a space for dialogue and interaction. Ravenscroft (2009) has advocated “knowledge maturing through dialogue and the advantages of linking ‘learning dialogues’ and artefacts.” Knowledge maturing, he suggests, can be  “supported through setting up an appropriate dialogic space in the digital milieu

The key aspect of learning discourses it that they are fluid and relational. Vygotsky held that “environment cannot be regarded as a static entity and one which is peripheral in relation to development, but must be seen as changeable and dynamic.” It is this fluid and dynamic nature of learning  environments and discourses which provides the central challenge to the design of a PLE, particularly in a workplace context.