Birth and sharing of learning objects through the use of collaborative tools
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NLII’s Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice (LOVCOP) is undertaking several research projects within the framework of the ANGEL (hosted by CyberLearning Labs) site. The projects will explore how to use some of the new collaborative or knowledge management technologies to capture, store, and retrieve insights from a group of like-minded practitioners studying the same things: knowledge creation, creativity, and collaboration. A pretty tall order!
The first experiment will focus on the potential of a collaborative blog to produce new knowledge about possible academic uses of the blog as a knowledge creation tool. Each experiment will be tightly controlled in terms of time frame, process, and products.
The LOVCOP’s re-framed mission for 2004 includes three active research projects which focus on the potential of three relatively new tools for collaborative work and knowledge management. The tools we hope to explore include the blog, wiki, and RSS feed.
Because that is an ambitious agenda, I propose what I hope will be an efficient way to use the talents and time of our participants. I would like to offer a compressed schedule and a carefully framed project that will make the most of people’s knowledge-generating contributions to the VCoP.
Each tool will become our focus for a one-month period.
Week One:
3-5 introductory emails, setting out framework of the topic (blog, wiki, RSS); sort of a step-by-step guide/background to the field
Weeks Two and Three:
Five to ten volunteers will agree to visit the collaborative blog site on a daily basis and contribute to the ongoing discussion. The topic will be established in the blog description which should remain visible at the top of the blog page.
Week Four:
We will create a discussion forum where all participants share thoughts, ideas, critiques, and proposals for the future use of the tool being examined. With regard to the knowledge management component, each of us needs to reflect on how it “felt” to contribute to a group blog, how much time it took, how did the “voices” appear.
Product:
The co-facilitators will then compile a report, based on our experiences and a careful reading of the discussion forum. We will submit this report to the volunteer group for feedback. We will directly address this collaborative tool and its potential to support NLII’s mission and to advance the field of teaching and learning.
The next project, the wiki, will directly follow the first project and follow the same pattern.
How Do Learning Objects and Knowledge Management Meet Here?
One of the distinctions that helped me understand knowledge management and CoPs the best is the one between tacit and explicit knowledge. When a community of practice, virtual or not, works together, the insights and the new knowledge that arise from collaboration must be captured, stored and somehow made available to the larger community.
Discussion Forums perform that function well, which is why that feature of ANGEL will be the capture tool for the three mini-research projects. In the case of the blog project, the discussion forum will capture and “tag” the reflections, the metacognitive processing, and the new ideas about the blog as a collaborative tool.
The blog is the experimental space itself. By its very structure it captures and archives individual contributions. My office mate uses the archives feature to be able to locate specific items which can then be re-purposed in articles, book chapters, or other ongoing academic projects. By titling each blog entry carefully, by writing to one idea at a time (a form of modularizing), you can automatically structure the knowledge capture to make items accessible as well as readily reusable.
The discussion forum would capture the reflections of the group on the process as a whole. The forum entries are harvested by hand, so to speak. I will go into the forum, read and summarize what I find, send a draft out to the participating members, and the final result will be a product harvested from a larger archived body of thoughts, ideas, speculations, suggestions, etc.
These two tools, the blog and the discussion forum (and one could easily add a virtual chat such as iCohere’s QuickMeeting with its ability to save a transcript), used purposefully, can begin to set up a structure to capture that tacit, personal, collaborative, “unstructured” information and begin the transformation of that tacit information into explicit knowledge that can then be shared and disseminated, – maybe even in the form of a learning or knowledge object.
As new collaborative tools emerge and become more sophisticated, we need to examine carefully how they might contribute to the transformation of teaching and learning. The knowledge-creating powers of NLII’s VCOPs should be in evidence at the end of the LOVCOP’s 2004 work. We accept the challenge!
Blog entry: “Communities of Practice: Going One Step Too Far?
http://www.aim2004.int-evry.fr/pdf/Aim04_Kimble_Hildreth.pdf
July 23, 2004
Kimble and Hildreth ask an insightful question: “Can a CoP ever be truly virtual?” Their focus is largely directed toward the business world which hoped to achieve productivity gains, less costly training, and an increased ROI from utilizing these informal but knowledge-rich “communities” that formed ad hoc within an office environment.
As the concept of “learning object” emerged from the world of object-oriented programming, so Communities of Practice (CoPs) emerged in the late 1990s from the world of business, often as an offshoot of knowledge management projects. The first KM projects, as is widely acknowledged in the literature, had been so technology-centric that when they failed to produce the expected results, the initiators of many KM projects turned back to the drawing board to try to decipher why this great idea had failed to have an impact on business.
Information studies had already identified tacit and explicit forms of “knowledge” or “information,” and building on that concept seemed to move the discussion forward effectively. Explicit (hard) knowledge was captured, codified, and stored – which the technology made readily possible. Tacit (soft) knowledge then emerged as implicit, fluid, unstructured, and heavily dependent on informal networks of people. The “water cooler” group?
In addition to the tension between hard and soft knowledge, another tension emerged as CoPs found their way into KM projects. These KM projects had been developed within a formal business organization and were always intended to focus on the mission of the company and its bottom line. Dynamic CoPs, on the other hand, seemed self-perpetuating and self-directed. These characteristics made them rich but also made them difficult to co-opt.
To further their analysis, the authors quote Wenger (1998) and use his definition of the parameters of a CoP:
What it is about: “The focus of the CoP is a particular area of activity or body of knowledge around which it has organized itself.”
How it functions: “people become members of a CoP through shared practices and they are linked to each other through their involvement in common activities.”
What it produces: “The members of a CoP build up a “shared repertoire” of communal resources over time.”
Because of the tension between the nature of a formal business environment and the fluid, social, personal nature of a CoP, the following four processes are possible:
1. CoP drifts into non-existence
2. Redefine themselves
3. Merge with another CoP
4. Become a formal organizational unite
I very much like the idea that the “capricious” nature of a true CoP makes it very difficult for business to co-opt but on the other hand, this same capriciousness makes it a challenge to incorporate the potential riches of individual members in a virtual community of practice.
I know that the participants in the Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice (LOVCOP) have enormous riches in their minds, their philosophies, their practice, their research, and their presentations. But how to capture that wealth within the framework of an artificial VcoP is a daunting question.
