Connecting 2 the World

No child left behind, but the teaching profession trashed

2011-10-19T11:05:00.000-04:00

Imagine being an oncologist or hospice healthcare provider and being told that you will be evaluated on how many patients die. If many die, you will be fired.

What does this have to do with education? Well, according to NPR, the president wants to extend no child left behind legislation and to include a provision for states to develop ways to evaluate teachers.

Let's begin with the NCLB. This was legislation that, while good intentioned, changed our educational system from one of creativity, innovation, and critical thinking to one of testing and numbers. As long as your children "pass the test", they have been educated. Likewise, students that can't pass the test are not educated. As a college professor, I can't tell you how many of my students have high SAT scores, test well, and yet flounder in my class. My teaching style is strong on analysis (many have not been taught how to analyze, come to their own conclusions, support their analysis, and--where they really fail--convince others of their ideas). In fact, some of my brightest students have entered college using an alternative method (starting non-matriculated, excelling in their profession and then going back to college, or community college first) when they did not "test" well.

In 1968, France was finally pushed to move from an educational system that tested from the cradle as it was found to be ineffective and unfair. It put too much stress on young children and made education elitist so that those with the means would rise to the top. How many innovations do you think came out of France in the 1960's. How many innovations came out of the US from the educational system many felt was too "touchy/feely" (think of the high tech industry and when those innovators were educated in the 1960's, 70's and early 80's)?

If NCLB is passed, however, (which will be the only way states can get federal dollars for education), the new provision for teacher evaluation will go into place. Which leads me to wonder where politicians have been for the last century. Have you never heard of teaching licenses? How is this different than a doctor's license? If a teacher has been found guilty of an impropriety, their license is taken away!!!!!!!!!!!! So why must we now put an additional "benchmark" on teachers? Children are people, just like patients are people. Some people die because they are sick and no medicine will help them. This does not mean that healthcare providers aren't trying to make them well. Likewise, some students will not achieve the lofty learning goals especially when a child may not have hit the maturity to reach those goals or they are dealing with issues such as malnutrition, poor healthcare, and lack of housing. This does not mean they will not make progress, just that they won't achieve the "benchmarks" outlined by politicians that know nothing about child development (or poverty or homelessness for the most part).

On the surface, this evaluation sounds good (again, why do we need it when we have licenses). However, in NY state, the teacher's union, administrators, and general public negotiated a formula in which test scores were included but did not amount to a major percentage. The board of regents, which overseas educational policy in NY, totally ignored this and set their own policy putting a substantial weight on test scores.

So why would I want to be teacher in NY state? Teachers in NY state make less than stockbrokers, nurses, lawyers, engineers, and many entertainers, yet they are responsible for raising our children, many times from before age 5 and after age 16, the required legal age for children to attend school in the US. They currently are required to have 2 masters in order to teach high school (one in their subject area and one in education) along with 200 hours every two years in additional training. They are not allowed by law to strike so many times they are forced to work without a contract. They are, in essence, powerless. And yet, when there is a raise in taxes, the teacher's union is blamed for the cost of education. How can that be? Isn't it possible that it is the unfunded mandates that push up the price of education?

It is time that we start looking at our society and stop trashing the profession of education. We have mechanisms in place (licensing requirements) that should be enforced for teachers that are not working. I don't always agree with my daughter's teachers, and I need to negotiate/speak to them to understand the situation. There does not need to be law for that. Please repeal NCLB and stop "evaluating" teachers who are evaluated on a daily basis by administrators, colleagues, parents, and students.

Curating, filtering, and increasing traffic

2011-10-10T10:26:00.000-04:00

This week, my computer mediated communication class will be looking at filtering and curating, and the impact these have on traffic to sites. So with that in mind, I decided to write a brief primer on these topics.

Defining curating and filtering

My understanding of curating is the identification and categorization of resources. In the context of computer mediated communication, curating can be done by individuals for their own purposes, creating their own categories that work for their own personal uses and learning. I use curating in a number of ways: resources for classes, resources for my research interests, resources to share with family and friends on common interests, conversation starters.

Online, I use a number of tools and processes. My main tool over the past 5 years has been delicious.com. This program allowed me to access online resources from one of the three computers or 4 or 5 locations in which I work. In class, I am able to access websites for my class by going to sites tagged for the class (i.e. ACOM 203). I then can choose the resource that is relevant for the class and the lesson I want to teach for that day. I have instant access to the resource (as long as my internet connection works), which was not possible without the computer.

Filtering, on the other hand is keeping out information that may not be relevant or meet my needs. Like curating, it is focused on identifying resources. However, filtering is a way to avoid information overload. The key to filtering is finding the correct way to search for resources (i.e. the ideal key word, the correct network to access) and choosing those resources that meet my needs. This requires an ability to skim resources, identify their authors/purpose, and evaluate content.

Increasing traffic

The purpose for most who are active on the internet is to increase traffic. For example, organizations want customers to read their blogs, bloggers want increased traffic to their blogs, individuals want their youtube videos to "go viral", those on twitter want to build their followers. The more traffic to a site, the greater legitimacy it is given in cyberspace.

In the past, "experts" decided on what was relevant and who should have access to resources. With CMC, popular content becomes "expert" resources. If someone is able to access the computer, they are able to produce a resource that may be perceived as "expert."

Tools for increasing traffic

So it is important for anyone involved in computer mediated communication to know, understand, and use tools that will increase traffic. Some of these tools include:

labels, tags, and key words: people who look for resources using search engines input key words. Blogs, facebook, photos, videos, and even webpages usually have the ability to identify their pages on the internet by using labels or tags. It is important to use tags or labels that your audience will use for their searches.

Hashtags: twitter and a growing number of social networking programs use hashtages (a # followed by a keyword identifying a group or category, i.e. #ualbany, #running, #curating). Related to this is the @ sign which identifies an author, as on twitter. @comprof1 would identify anyone who wrote about me using my twitter name.

Links: using links to other sites that might increase traffic (i.e. from "experts" in the field or reporting agencies) can sometimes increase traffic. Some of these sites have employees that track the links and either ask for the link to be removed (if they feel it is ruining their image) or may use a back channel (backlink) to the post/resource.

Using multiple channels: Whenever I blog, these days, I post to twitter the topic and the fact that I have posted something. Some also use this when they upload a new video on YouTube or link the video onto their facebook page. The more channels used to publicize a resource, the greater exposure to new potential traffic sources. Related to this is that the greater the traffic in a concentrated time slot, the better the chance that the resource will be picked up in search engines or "highlights" in the social network programs like linkedin or blogger. Related to this is having various channels available for spreading the resources, e.g. facebook or twitter buttons on a blog, automatic updates on linkedin when you tweet something, or "most popular" posts or videos listed on a blog.

Commenting on others blogs, youtube videos, and/or facebook. The more visible a user is the greater the chance the user will be "checked" out by others.

Filtering and curating tools

In addition to hashtags, tags, and labels, filtering and curating tools may include:

Favorite: By identifying something as a favorite, others may access the resources or a resource may be retrieved for future use

Page counts Programs such as google analytics or stat counter allow your page's statistics to be shown on your internet page (i.e. blog, webpage). This not only allows you to identify your audience, but also allows your audience to identify how "popular" your page is and where your audience is located.

Ratings: By allowing others to rate your content, you are allowing for a review process from the public. Beware, however, that this might result in negative as well as positive traffic. Likewise, the ability to remove negative comments will aid in decreasing negative feedback that could be detrimental to building up traffic, but may also make curating and filtering less valuable.

Notes and descriptions: Putting the resources into context helps to contextualize lists. Programs such as sticky notes, one note, google docs, and delicious not only help to identify resources, but also allow for evaluation of resources and explanations/links within categories.

Developing networks, readers, and interaction online

2011-09-30T12:08:00.000-04:00

In my Computer Mediated Communication class, we currently are looking at the affordances of online communication technologies and how they affect communication. As part of the class, I had my students try out different technologies for 3 categories of CMC affordances: Broadcasting, interaction, and networking.

Broadcasting is the ability to deliver a message to a large group of people, usually including information. Interaction is the ability to have communication between more than two people. The purpose of interaction is to transfer information, give and receive feedback, and create shared meaning. Networking can be broken into two parts, 1) developing a network and 2) accessing a network to find information, create common or shared meaning, and/or to problem solve with others (crowd sourcing).

In many cases, students would try out the same technology, such as twitter or facebook, but using it slightly different so they could determine the affordance of that technology for a particular purpose. I then had them reflex on the experience and answer a series of questions about communicating for those affordances. Below is a summary of what I feel are necessary for effectively broadcasting, interacting, and networking online.

The questions

I had my students fill out a form to answer the following questions for each category of affordance (e.g. attributes for broadcasting, attributes for interacting online, attributes for networking).

1. Technology: What attributes should you be looking for when choosing technology?

2. What information do you need to know about the audience?

3. What guidance will your audience need to communicate with you effectively?

4. What training or experience will employees need to use the technology effectively?

5. What time constraints will the technology impose? Users? Audience?

6. What resistance or potential problems may impede communication?

7. What is the purpose of communication?

Broadcasting

The most important aspect of CMC in broadcasting is to know the audience. In choosing technology, it is important to know where your target audience will go to get the type of message you want to convey to them. One good resource is an infographic that ad-age put together (found on aging online) on how different generations consume technology, broken down by technology, time of the day, and age groups.

One important aspect of CMC for broadcasting is to have a feedback mechanism to insure that the message you intended is the message that was received to the targeted audience. Using a tool like google analytics or any other web page collection code is important to ensure who is seeing the message, how they got to your site, where they went while on your site, etc...

Interactive CMC

Just like broadcasting, online interaction is dependent upon the audience. However, choice of media and the level of familiarity that an audience has with the technology you are planning to use becomes more important. One of the observations my students and I made when they used different interactive technologies was the level of frustration a technology created when they were not sure how to use it. In addition, technology that had instant guidance built in (through prompts, online support) resulted in more communication.

For example, I noticed that most of my students asked me at some point in time how they were supposed to use Prezi, the online group editing feature providing interaction with their classmates. Even though they could find that out through training videos available on Prezi, they did not take the opportunity to do so because it was too time consuming and less frustrating getting direction from a person. One reason for this was the time constraint they were working under in class. However, another factor was their preference to ask targeted questions rather than having to find the answer on their own by filtering a lot of information.

Another aspect of interaction is the understanding of the communication protocols used by a technology community. I found, for example, that my students were much more comfortable interacting on facebook (on which many of my students were members) rather than twitter. Even those that had twitter accounts that they used on a regular basis felt uncomfortable "interacting" on twitter. Once they were shown some of the features (i.e. retweet, reply) and communication protocols (i.e. use of hashtags, search) they began to interact more on twitter.

Networking

While many of the Millenniums are comfortable with social networks, if you asked them to explain how to create a social network or communicate in one, most would not be able to explain them. As I have told my students, in our class, we are looking at ways to improve and "manipulate" networks to maximize its use, especially in a professional setting.

Creating networks requires an understanding of who is in your network and how you can maximize the social net outside of your own network. Communication in networks is based on "what can be" or potential help. This requires getting to know and trust members of your network before you need them. It also means being aware of who can help you when.

The second part of the networking is to actually access those within your network when you need them. This may require interaction, the ability to create a ripple effect (getting those within your network to access their network), and planning out your communication in a more strategic way. For example, my students were asked to find out information from their networks on Linkedin, twitter, and facebook. Many of them were well versed in using their facebook networks, but not as familiar with twitter or linkedin. Identifying those within their network that could answer their question or who had access to experts was important. So was feedback from the network. In some cases, my students had the answers but did not know how to access the locations of those answers (i.e. twitter mentions or searches using hashtags). Likewise, some of them tried so share their answers but others did not see them.

Student evaluation of CMC tools

In the weeks to come, hopefully my students and I will be adding to our insight on CMC. You can help by looking at their reviews of online tools and how they affect communication.

References

Van Den Dam, R. (2010). How social media is redefining broadcasting. Broadcast Engineering, May 1. Available at: http://broadcastengineering.com/production/social-media-redefining-broadcasting-0510/index2.html

Alcatel-Lucient White Paper (2011)New communication behaviours in a Web 2.0 world — Changes, challenges and opportunities in the era of the Information Revolution. Available at: http://enterprise.alcatel-lucent.com/private/active_docs/Communication%20Behavior%20in%20a%20Web2%200%20World_ALU.pdf

Boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). "Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. Available at Library in eholdings database.

TECHNOLOGY SPHDC (2011) Exploring the potentials of computer mediated communication (blog post). Available at: http://www.sphdc.com/exploring-the-potentials-of-computer-mediated-communication.html

A traditional model of organizational knowledge creation

2011-09-18T14:51:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out how to include my word graphics into blogger and since I don't have a lot of time to figure it out, it will just have to be left out of this post. I have included in the references a bibliography of all of the references used in my literature review (of which I have posted most of it over the last couple of months.

The Traditional Model

The traditional model used by organizational learning theorists begins with the depth of knowledge. This can further be linked to depth of knowledge being greater as it is internalized (Yaklief, 2010), as exhibit 2 illustrates. Most literature distinguishes between content knowledge, which is held outside of the individual; competency, which is usually identified as tacit knowledge developed through interaction with a worker’s or organization’s context and environment; and expertise, which is performance based. The greater the level of internalization of knowledge, the greater perceived depth of knowledge (Allee, 1999; Herling, 2000; Yaklief, 2010). Information becomes content when there is a situation to apply it (Nonaka, 1999, Yaklief, 2010), but does not require a depth of understanding to access or transfer. Competency, as discussed earlier, requires experience to understand and develop skills that become tacit knowledge. Although explicit understanding may not be necessary, the ability to apply information to action requires a greater depth of understanding, than the simple transfer of information from one person to another. Expertise requires both an understanding of the environment and the context of information for knowledge to be applied effectively and efficiently (Herling). This understanding requires a deep understanding of the information so that knowledge can be recreated and negotiated depending on the social and cognitive requirements of the situation.

The second variable often used in organizational knowledge creation is the location of knowledge and the work processes that create knowledge. There are 4 locations often used: the individual, intragroup, intergroup, and organizational. Knowledge can be created by the individual through reflection or developed through interaction at the intra- or inter-group levels. Once created, individual, groups, departments, or the organization can control the dissemination and access to a larger number of people. As exhibit 3 illustrates, the larger the group to control and store knowledge and determine processes to create that the knowledge, the more distant knowledge is from the individual. This has implications for agency and ownership as knowledge that is created by and for the organization may be perceived as being owned by the organization (Ende & Lungsford, 2001).

Based on these two variables, a traditional model of how organizations perceive knowledge and knowledge creation can be developed (exhibit 4). Current organizational learning and knowledge literature identify and categorize 12 different types of knowledge depending on the location in which the knowledge is created and the depth of knowledge. These categories include: Resume and portfolio of work, credentials and degrees (including licensing), performance standards, group documentation, group processes, group outcomes, information processing, interdepartmental collaboration, specialization, institutional or organizational memory, organizational learning or training, and knowledge management.

Individual content knowledge: Resume and portfolio of work. Unlike formal schooling, individual content knowledge is not necessarily assessed through testing (Diaz, et al, 1999). As mentioned previously, content knowledge is explicit. Therefore, there needs to be some mechanism to access it, measure it, transfer its use, and, in some cases, store and retrieve it. One way in which individual content knowledge is evaluated is through a list of knowledge, as found on resumes, and/or through an individual’s artifacts that are created in the workplace. These artifacts can be represented using a portfolio of work which the individual provides as evidence of their knowledge. An individual takes personal ownership of this work and the resume, using it to demonstrate his or her content knowledge.
Sometimes this content knowledge is transferred in the form of presentations, interviews, or workplace dialog. However, even this mode of communicating content knowledge is often backed up with resumes and work artifacts such as reports, products, and work records.

Individual competency: Credentials, degrees, and licenses: Unlike individual content knowledge, individual competency has an element of skill, understanding of processes, and situated application of content all of which indicates tacit workplace knowledge. While individual content knowledge can be listed on a resume and demonstrated using workplace artifacts, tacit knowledge is more difficult to represent as it is not explicit. In the workplace, therefore, minimum tacit knowledge (or competency) is often expressed using credentials (such as work experience), degrees, and licenses or certification. These credentials not only imply a level of content knowledge, but also a certain level of experience and understanding in the application of the content.

It is important to note that the level of competency is based on the types and combination of credentials, degrees, and licenses for a particular situation which indicates the level of internalization of the content. For example, a graduate with an associate’s degree in accounting may be competent for recording inventory, but not creating a company’s tax return. The implication is that the degree does not include sufficient experience to create a tax return. However, that same graduate with a CPA indicates additional work experience which would allow for greater tacit knowledge and understanding of the environment to enable he or she to create a tax return. The certification represents tacit knowledge that the degree on a resume or a filled out tax return (artifact) alone would indicate (content knowledge) which would make a professional qualified to apply content to multiple situations.

Individual expertise: Performance standards: Building on individual competence, performance standards valuate different competencies and the level of knowledge created through individual experience (Allee, 1999; Herling, 2000). While performance standards may be developed externally, these standards attempt to measure the level of internalization or expertise of an individual. In other words, they try to quantify the level of understanding and apprehensive knowledge of the worker. The focus of performance standards is on the application of content and the ability to negotiate understanding within multiple environments and contexts. There is an understanding that while the environment and contexts change, the outcomes (performance standards) will be constant. As a result, an individual will need to be able to adapt to the environment and context (creating and recreating knowledge to do so) in order to achieve consistent outcomes. To be successful, therefore, an expert will need to have a deeper understanding of the content, work processes, and social structure of the environment in which performance standards will be used to valuate the individual’s work.

Intragroup content knowledge: documentation: Within a group, the content that the group uses and produces is represented through group documents such as reports, memos, agendas, and correspondence within the group. This documentation can then be used to store and transfer knowledge created by the group to those outside of the group, either physically located in another place, located temporally in a different space, or occupying a different social sphere.

Not all individual members of the group may have the same interpretation or level of understanding of the content. Through group filtering and curating, documents become a record of the group’s content knowledge or shared cognition (Cannon-Bower & Salas, 2001). The content located outside of the individual’s knowledge and understanding becomes the property of the group, representing explicit knowledge that the group can agree upon (Ede & Lundsford, 2001).

Intragroup competency: group process: Through the negotiation of group processes and interaction between members of the group, group norms and mental models are created (Boland & Tenkas, 1995; Conceicao, Heitor, & Veloso, 2003; Jehn & Mannix, 2001; Mohammed & Dumville, 2001; Moreland & Levine, 2001) which then become the basis for evaluating the group’s competency. While individual members may have differing levels of competency, the group must be able to work collaboratively to achieve group norms and defined level of competency. The group process becomes the structure within which content and tacit knowledge, in the form of expected levels of application of the content, are defined. It also becomes a tangible representation of tacit knowledge for both group members and those outside of the group (Conceicao, Heitor, & Veloso, 2003; Yaklief, 2002).

Intragroup expertise: group outcomes: At the group level, group outcomes measure the performance of the group as a whole, rather than individual members. The ability for the group to apply their shared cognition towards a problem or dynamic environment requires more than individual expertise, but rather a shared expertise created through group interaction and knowledge creation (Herling, 2000; Yaklief, 2010). While a group
may have members with expertise, the group outcomes indict how well expertise is used in creating and applying collective knowledge within the group. The greater the mutual interpretation of the content and processes within the context of the group work, the greater the level of group knowledge created and the more efficient group outcomes, according to organizational management literature (Allee, 1997; Jehn & Mannix, 2001; Mohammed & Dumville, 2001; Moreland & Levine, 2001). The main difference between group process and group outcomes is the level of performance, as group outcomes valuates the group process. In other words, group processes create a shared mental model and group outcomes valuates the level in which those processes have been internalized by the group to create efficient and effective work practices.

Intergroup content knowledge: Information processing: Content knowledge between groups requires the storage and transfer of information that other groups can access and interpret within their own contexts. Information lies outside of the context in which it was developed (Nonaka, 1994; Yaklief, 2010), thus it is not necessarily knowledge until it is processed by the group(s) using it for their own context. Access to the information is dependent upon the individual group(s) making their own content and information available and the individual group(s) accessing and processing the information for their own context based upon their perception that the information will be relevant for their own needs.

Intergroup competency: Interdepartmental collaboration/conflict: While many groups create their own norms within which they are working, often they are unaware of these norms until they are exposed to other groups (Hagtvet & Wold, 2003; McGrath et al., 2000; Moreland & Levine, 2001). Interaction between groups can result in cognitive dissonance which may result in the redefining and/or realignment of norms and meaning (McGrath et al; Mohammed & Dumville, 2001). Cognitive dissonance can be the result of differences in tacit knowledge, in which groups have differing understandings based on apprehensive knowledge which cannot be identified. The resolution of the dissonance creates norms and new perspectives which in turn may result in the creation of comprehensive, tacit, and new content knowledge.

Without interdepartmental collaboration or conflict, individual groups lack the opportunity to reinterpret intergroup content and negotiate meaning. Content from other groups may be transferred, but interpreted using the norms and discourse created within their group. This limits cognitive dissonance and perspective taking which contributes to knowledge creation and deeper understanding of the content.

Intergroup expertise: Specialization: As groups develop their identity in relation to other groups, performance standards are established based on intergroup negotiation (Mc Grath, et al, 2000). This negotiated identity can be termed specialization, which then translates into negotiated performance standards. In order to maintain the group’s identity in relation to the other groups, a group needs to continually perform at the expected level or renegotiate/realign intergroup expectations. As a result, specialization is not a stagnant concept, but rather a dynamic renegotiation/realignment. This requires the creation of new knowledge and the ability to apply content and processes to a changing environment, as well as the ability to understand social and cognitive factors impacting the work environment.

Organizational content knowledge: Organizational or institutional memory: Organizational or institutional memory is storage of information perceived as being owned by the organization which members can access when needed. The interpretation, valuation, and use of the information is dictated by the organization, even though individuals and groups may have a different interpretation that deviates from the official organizational memory. The organizational interpretation becomes static knowledge that can be stored for use by those who were not even a part of the organization when the knowledge was created. In addition, the interpretation of the organizational knowledge can be reinterpreted to align with the organizational culture as time and distance require.

Organizational competency: Organizational learning or training: Organizational competency is the minimum standards of organizational behavior in which knowledge is embedded in the cultural routines and processes developed through training and learning. Through the establishment of organizational culture and behavioral expectations, individuals develop tacit knowledge which then helps to shape cultural and behavioral expectations (Brandt, 1992). As a result, learning and training at the organizational level establishes work processes and an organizational culture which helps to capture and structure tacit knowledge at the organizational level (Cook & Yanow, 1995).

Organizational expertise: Knowledge management: Most knowledge management literature identifies knowledge management as the ability to access knowledge embedded in the organization (Akgun, Lynn, & Byrne, 2003; Cook & Brown, 1999; Cook & Yanow, 1995; Nonaka, 1994). The deeper knowledge is embedded and the broader that knowledge is distributed within an organization, the greater the level of internalization of knowledge at the organizational level. This means that knowledge is not held by just one person to be lost when that person (or group of people) leave the organization. Likewise, the ability to access and share information through dialog, work practices, and development of shared organizational culture allows the organization to create synergy that goes beyond any individual’s level of understanding. This knowledge (especially in knowledge based industries) becomes the organization’s product. As a result, the management of knowledge becomes more than access to embedded knowledge; it becomes the organization’s identity.

Conclusion

Using this model as a starting point, it is important that any study on collaborative workplace writing looks at the different types of knowledge that are being used to accomplish the writing task. These types of knowledge include tacit, explicit, collective (or organizational), individual, social/relational, and cognitive. Because this study begins with the premise that knowledge is constructed, dynamic, and influenced by both social, political, and cognitive factors, it is important that the study be conducted in authentic or natural occurring context. It is equally important that the context in which the collaborative writing project takes place is studied in order to situate the creation of knowledge within the various levels that knowledge creation can take place; namely the individual, group, departmental, and organizational levels.

References
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Categorizing and identifying CMC tools

2011-09-09T10:43:00.002-04:00

Computer Mediated Communication does not exist in a vacuum. CMC consists of both the tools of communication (apps, software, equipment) and the process of communication (sending and receiving of messages). It is important, therefore, to try to distinguish how different tools affect communication. A starting point for this blog should be how to make distinctions and analyze a specific tool's affordances.

One framework that can be used is to distinguish between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.. While the web 1.0 (emails, webpages, static content) and web 2.0 (blogs, social networking sites) definitions are fairly consistent, the definition for web 3.0 is still in the evolution phase. For some, web 3.0 is the semantic web in which the control of content is based on the computer program which gathers information from the user and customizes it. For others, web 3.0 is the portability of information that can be found, collected, and recreated it multiple sites. One thing that all agree upon is that the web 3.0 is dynamic and restructures data to customize its use by the end user.

Another way to assess the affordance of CMC is to use the categories created by Herring (2007). This consists of two different sets of factors: medium and situation. The medium factors describe the possibilities of a tool (app, software, equipment) whereas the situation describes how a tool might be applied.

A good example of this is facebook. Facebook was originally created as a secure spot in which college students could interact with each other to create a social space. However, others found this secure place to be useful in other ways. Schools/teachers used it as a learning space in which students could keep up with work, share ideas outside of class, and link to resources. Teenagers used facebook to keep in contact with friends outside of school, meet new people both within their school and out, and to keep up with tends and happenings. Businesses began to use facebook to interact with customers and provide customized information to be broadcasted through a network of targeted audiences. The tool itself, the medium, had standard attributes. However, how that tool was used was situated, resulting in different uses of the medium for different situations.

In the weeks to come, students will identify the medium and situate it in their own experience. They may also identify whether a tool falls into the Web 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0 categories.

References

Herring, S. (Classification) (2007) A Faceted Classification Scheme for Computer-Mediated Discourse. Language@Internet (4). Available at http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/2007/761/index_html/

EPN (2008) Evolution Web 1.0, Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 (video clip on YouTube). Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsNcjya56v8

Nonprofitorgs (2010). Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 Simplified for Nonprofits. Available at: http://nonprofitorgs.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0-simplified-for-nonprofits/

A new student blog

2011-09-02T11:34:00.002-04:00

My class is writing a blog on computer mediated communication and technology. Check it out in the weeks to come. My first post to introduce the blog is here.

Expertise, competency, and content

2011-08-08T10:06:00.001-04:00

Three terms, expertise, competency, and content, are used interchangeably with knowledge, especially in the context of workplace learning and training. However, they may have multiple meanings depending on the theoretical constructs of the research. Therefore, it is important to discuss and define each of these terms as they relate to knowledge.

Content Knowledge

The traditional form of knowledge often is referred to as content knowledge. This is knowledge that can be possessed (Nonaka, 1994), as “what is known, or the corpus of knowledge that does not belong to any particular individual or context (Yakhlef, 2010, p.39).” Knowledge of content can be measured, identified (especially lack of content knowledge), and/or recorded and stored for use by those who would not ordinarily have access to the knowledge. As a result, content knowledge can also be abstracted for use by those that have never required a particular content knowledge, nor have had access to an environment or situation that required that content (Yakhlef, 2010). For example, a teacher in a rural area without access to internet service may not have access or use of learning management system (LMS) software. He or she may learn about the software, how to use it by using reading a textbook, or even receive some hands on training away from his or her classroom. However, he or she would be prepared on how to use the software should his or her school install the software, and be able to formulate ways in which to use the software in his or her teaching should the opportunity arise, without ever having to use the LMS.

Because of the ease in measuring content knowledge, most training and professional education focus on transferring content knowledge at the individual, group, and organizational level (Cook & Yanow, 1995; Yakhlef, 2002; Yakhlef, 2010). However, with the advent of the internet, for an individual to possess content knowledge is not as important as for an individual to be able to access and know how to use content knowledge. In other words, individuals need to have skills and experience to use content knowledge efficiently and effectively. This is then known as competence (Herling, 2000; Yaklief, 2010). Content knowledge without competency means an individual may have difficulty performing his or her work or changing his or her behavior as the situation requires (Herling, 2000; Laufer & Glick, 1998).

Competency

Herling (2000) defines competence as “an ability to do something satisfactory-not necessarily outstandingly or even well, but rather to a minimum level of acceptable performance (p.9).” At the organizational level, the competency model of management is based on the identifiable skill sets needed to efficiently perform required work and the overall capacity among workers. Organizations need to identify skill sets, gaps in the skill sets, potential problems due to the gaps, and ways to manage/train so that the organization can perform efficiently (Herling, 2000; Sanghi, 2007). Training to develop competency may include interdepartamental cross-training, interaction with experts to develop performance expectations, guided practice, and the opportunity to engage in dialectic reflection (i.e. negotiating meaning with others) (Goodwin, 1994; Herling, 2000; Laufer & Glick, 1998; Sanghi, 2007;Yaklief, 2010). Content knowledge plays a part in competency training in that trainees must first either have the content knowledge or access to content knowledge in order to develop the skills that lead to perforance which demonstrates competency.

Expertise

Much has been written about organizational expertise, especially in the context of differences between the expert and novice. One common theme is that expertise requires a depth of understanding based on experience. An expert not only knows what (content knowledge) and how (competency), but also why and when to use knowledge (Allee, 1997). This requires a certain level of tacit knowledge about the domain and/or environment in which the application of knowledge is required (Sternberg & Horvath, 1999). Expertise requires the translation of content knowledge into practice, applying knowledge to the environment, problem, and/or situation, modifying content through discursive processes (Laufer & Glick, 1998;Yahlief, 2010).

Although researchers may not agree upon the order, many differentiate generalized expertise and specialized expertise. Specialized expertise is knowledge that comes from experience and learning within a specific domain, such as aerospace or endocrinology within the engineering and medical professions. Through focused interaction with the environment, professional artifacts, and other professionals within a community of practice, in-depth specialized understanding is created (Herling, 2000; Sternberg & Horvath, 1999; Yaklief, 2010). This specialized understanding often is then converted into content that can be disseminated back into the community of practice or to outsiders (who may then be interested in joining the specialized community of practice). While an individual may have a specialization, expertise requires knowledge within the domain that the community recognizes as important. Without the social acceptance of the specialization, there is no expertise.

Disseminating Content, Competency, and Expertise in the Workplace

Generalized expertise can either be developed through application of a specialized expertise across domains (Herling, 2000) or through a deep understanding of the domain as a whole, within multiple specializations within that domain linked together to create general expertise (Allee, 1997; Herling, 2000). Herling defines expertise as “displayed behavior within a specialized domain and/or related domain in the form of consistently demonstrated actions of an individual that are both optimally efficient in their execution and effective in their results (p.20).” He bases this definition on three componants required for expertise: knowledge, experience, and problem solving. In this case, knowledge is equivilent to content knowledge.

For this paper, we will differentiate expertise from competence and content knowledge through the depth of knowledge and understanding. Content knowledge can be defined as the information and explicit knowledge that can be stored, accessed, possessed and translated/abstracted outside of the situation/environment in which it was created. Content knowledge is static and is minimally impacted through social interaction except through the social valuation of the content knowledge. In other words, if the content knowledge is not identified as being valuable it may be lost, and if it has perceived exceptional value, it may be controled. Competency can be defined as the minimum skills and understanding of processes needed to effiently perform tasks within a given environment or situation. This requires tacit knowledge to conform to the situational and environmental requirements that impact performance. Expertise can be defined as a depth of understanding through experience, content knowledge, skills, and discoursive interaction with multiple settings, artifacts, and others. Expertise is dynamic in that knowledge and understanding is constantly changing as deeper meaning is developed through interaction.

A person who is perceived as having expertise and the ability to apply that expertise to varying, yet specific situations is an expert. Herling contends that an individual first specializes, using specialized content knowledge. Eventually, the competency in the specialized field will be added to an individual’s overall general knowledge moving an individual from competent to an expert in a specialized area to a generalized expert. However, as discussed above, some individuals may first have competency in a domain, then develop a general knowledge about that domain learning about different componants of the domain, then develop various specialties within the domain to understand the socio-cognitive aspects of the domain. As a result, new content knowledge is developed to give a deeper understanding of the domain.

Knowledge can then be desiminated through a group, department, or organization. Content knowledge is accessed by an individual, group, department, or even organization (in the form of training materials). Through interaction (both social and cognitive) with the environment and the content competency is developed. The longer that one performs competently in a dynamic environment (such as the workplace) the more expertise is developed. This expertise is then captured through artifacts such as finished products, reports, discussion, curriculum, and training which then can be desiminated to novices, in which the process begins again. Knowledge creation, therefore, is a dynamic process, rather than the static form that content knowledge represents (Allee, 1999; Cook & Yanow, 1995; Herling, 2000; Sanghi, 2007; Yaklief, 2010)

References:

Allee, V. (1997). The Knowledge Evolution. Newton, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Akgun, A., Lynn, G., & Byrne, J. (2003). Organizational learning: A socio-cognitive framework. Human Relations, 839-868.

Cook, S., & Brown, J. S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing . Oranizational Science, 381-400.

Cook, S., & Yanow, D. (1995). Culture and Organizational Learning. Journal of Management Inquiry, 373-390.

Herling, R. (2000). Operational definition of expertise and competence. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 8-21.

Laufer, E., & Glick, J. (1998). Expert and novice differences in cognition and activity: A practical work activity. In Y. Engeström, & D. Middleton, Cognition and communication at work (pp. 177-198). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organizational Science, 14-37.

Sanghi, S. (2007). The handbook of competency mapping: Understanding, designing and implementing competency models in organizations, 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Sternberg, R. & Horvath, J., eds. (1999). Tacit knowledge in professional practice: researcher and practitioner perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Yakhlef, A. (2002). Towards a discursive approach to organisational knowledge formation. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 18, 319-339.

Yaklief, A. (2010). The three facets of knowledge: A critique of practice based learning theory. Research Policy, 39-46.

Organizational learning theories

2011-07-28T07:55:00.001-04:00

My dissertation not only looks at distributed group collaboration, but also how that effects organizational learning. The following is my discussion on organizational learning, including how I differentiate knowledge management from organizational learning.

Organizational Learning Theories

There are two prevailing schools of learning theory at the organizational level. The first is based on the idea of organizational knowledge management in which knowledge is codified into information which the organization and individuals can access, monitor, acquire, and store (Allee, 1997; Contu & Willmott, 2003; Raelin, 2008). Similar to Kolb’s (1980) apprehensive and comprehensive knowledge, this school of organizational learning theorizes that the process of codification creates knowledge which can be stored and accessed for use when needed by those within the organization (Raelin; Yakhlef, 2002). Organizational knowledge then becomes the aggregate of individuals’ knowledge and experience (Allee, 1997; Cook & Yanow, 1995). As Raelin describes DiBella, Nevis, and Gould’s three-step approach to organizational learning from a knowledge management perspective, knowledge is acquired, shared, and utilized by members of the organization. Rouwette and Vennix (2008) describe the information processing approach used within knowledge management which includes attention to identification of problems, encoding information so group members create shared meaning, store information perceived as valuable which creates organizational memory, create informational retrieval processes, create workspace processes that support organizational culture, and create communication structures that support sense-making and feedback from individuals and groups within the organization.

Knowledge management based theories of organizational learning begins with codified knowledge that can be retrieved and stored from members of the organization (Cook & Brown, 1999, Nonaka, 1994). For knowledge to be useful, therefore, individuals need to be able to transform tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Knowledge that cannot be codified would not be useful to the organization as knowledge would not be able to be retrieved and stored for use by others within the organization. As a result, organizational processes need to be structured so that tacit information can be transformed into codified knowledge thus resulting in organizational learning. Using Anderson’s ACT cognitive model, Nonaka explains, “declarative knowledge has to be transformed into procedural knowledge in order for cognitive skills to develop…it can be argued that transformation is bidirectional (p. 18).” In other words, codified knowledge needs to be in a form that fits into organizational procedures, but also organizational procedures can produce knowledge that then needs to be codified for organizational use.

My working definition of knowledge management is the access, monitoring, acquisition, and storage of organizational information which is codified into a common format in order for those within the organization to participate in sense-making, group decision making and problem solving, and the creation of shared mental models at the group, departmental, and organizational level. While organizational learning may need to access some forms of knowledge management, organizational learning is not synonymous with knowledge management. In addition, not all organizational learning requires knowledge management, although knowledge management might augment organizational learning.

The second school of organizational learning theory is based on organizational members’ social and cultural interaction with the environment, often through the establishment of communities of practice within the workplace (Akgun, Lynn, & Byrne, 2003; Cook & Brown, 1999; Cook & Yanow, 1995; Nonaka, 1994). Those within this school of organizational learning believe that learning within the organization is not based on individuals possessing needed knowledge, but rather learning is a construction of knowledge within the organizational environment. Cook and Yanow go one step further by placing learning into the organizational culture which establishes patterns of activity that create knowledge. They define organizational learning as, “acquiring, sustaining or changing of intersubjective meaning and/or the artifactual vehicles of their expression and transmission, through the collective actions of the group (p.280).” In other words, it is the interaction with the environment, stimulated through organizational practices such as collaborative writing, project management, and both formal and informal group discussions that create organizational learning opportunities. These work activities, both cognitive and social, create both tacit and explicit knowledge through social interaction and the organization of work patterns (Cook & Brown, 1999).

Akgun, Lynn, & Byrne (2003) further define the organizational learning process as “ a social process mediated by artifacts. This view thus emphasizes the importance of culture, communication, and group activities in organizations (p. 843).” While the first model presented above (knowledge management) assumes that knowledge is created and possessed at the individual level and is then dispersed collectively at the group and organizational level, this second model (constructed knowledge) theorizes that there are different types of knowledge created at each level (individual, group, and organizational). Organizational learning, therefore, is influenced by the social environment, organizational culture, and work patterns that are the result of political influences within the organization’s powerstructure (Akgun, Lynn, & Byrne, 2003; Cook & Yanow, 1995; Nonaka, 1994). As a result, not all organizational knowledge can be culled and transferred to others within the organization (often through training) because the knowledge is imbedded in organizational practices and culture.

Both Cook (1995, 1999) and Nonaka (1994) concluded that there is implicit or tacit knowledge that is created within the confines of organizational boundaries. Looking at work patterns in various industries, they both concluded that knowledge is created through perspective taking, meaning making, and dialog necessitated when there was dissonance or differences in understanding within the work patterns. Perspective, meaning, and the form that communication takes are dictated by culture. In this study, we will use Cook & Yanow’s definition of culture:

We define culture in application to organizations as a set of values, beliefs, and meanings, together with the artifacts of their expression and transmission (such as myths, symbols, metaphors, rituals and ritual objects), that are created. Inherited, shared, and transmitted within one group of people (p. 388).”

Therefore, those who adhere to the second theory of organizational learning would conclude that organizational learning is bounded by organizational values, beliefs, and meaning, and transmitted and stored using organizational forms, formats, and processes that create the myths, symbols, metaphors, rituals, and ritual objects that become organizational artifacts representing the organizational culture. As a result, knowledge that is embedded within the organizational culture, would change when used outside of the environment in which it was created. Knowledge, therefore, can be dynamic as its affordance is dynamic (Cook & Brown, 1999).

The second theory of organizational learning has broader implications as knowledge could be created and transmitted both formally and informally. In the knowledge management perspective of organizational learning, knowledge is viewed as something that can be stagnate and captured for others outside of the culture and environment in which it was created. In the constructed perspective of organizational learning, knowledge may be converted from implicit to explicit formats, but any knowledge captured would need to be modified (or recreated) for a specific environment. As such, the process of knowledge creation could be learned, but the content would change depending on the environment.

Organizational learning is distinguishable from knowledge management. Organizational learning may not result in operational or behavioral changes at the individual, group, or even organizational level, and as such may be difficult to measure. In fact, Cook & Yanow (1995) give examples in which organizational learning may make subgroups or individuals less productive. Rather, organizational learning is the interaction that results in deeper knowledge and understanding at the organizational level. For this study, I will use Cook & Yanow’s definition of organizational learning:

The acquiring, sustaining or changing of intersubjective meanings and/or the artifactual vehicles of their expression and transmission, through the collective actions of the group.

References:

Akgun, A., Lynn, G., & Byrne, J. (2003). Organizational learning: A socio-cognitive framework. Human Relations, 56 (7), 839-868.

Allee, V. (1997). The Knowledge Evolution. Newton, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Contu, A. & Willmott, H. (2003). Re-embedding situatedness: The importance of power relations in learning theory. Organizational Science (2003) 14 (3), 283-296.

Cook, S. & Brown, J. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization Science, 10 (4), 381-400.

Cook, S & Yanow, D. (1993). Culture and organizational learning. Journal of Management Inquiry, 2 (4), 373-390.

Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as a the source of learning and development. Englewood-Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Nonaka, I (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14-37.

Raelin, J. (2008). Work-Based Learning. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Yakhlef, A. (2002). Towards a discursive approach to organisational knowledge formation. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 18, 319-339.

Nuts and Bolts of twitter

2011-07-20T12:52:00.000-04:00

So I now have been using twitter for almost 4 weeks now. And there are some nuts and bolts that I would have liked to have known before I started. This post is meant for those that don't use twitter (or use it regularly). Anyone who is more experienced than I am, please feel free to add on insight or tips in the comments area.

Retweet, mentions, and favorites

It took a while for me to figure out these options. I could intuitively figure out WHAT retweet was. However, unlike the "reply" option, retweet just rebroadcasts without comments. However, I wasn't sure WHY you would use this. After using twitter for a while, I figured out how most people use this.

Each person has their own social network which is slightly different than anothers. Retweets allows you to pass information (or questions) on to those that may not have access to all of those within your social network. In other words, it helps to broadcast your comments/questions to a wider audience. I saw this happen when I posted a question to those who were studying for a Phd who had children, how they found time for thinking. This was then picked up by a group studying for their phd (#phdchat) and soon I had a lot of answers.

An alternative to just clicking on the Retweet button is to mark a tweet with RT (retweet). This allows you to comment on the retweet and not just pass on the information. For example, if you had a particularly good link in a tweet that you think a group would be interested in you cut and paste the tweet, starting with RT, then put a comment or hash tag to identify why this is important.

This brings me to the third way you can bring attention to someone else's tweet: the hashtag. The hashtag begins with a # and identifies a group or topic which others might be interested in. For example, many who are tweeting at conferences will use an agreed upon hashtag to identify all tweets having to do with that conference. You can then search for all tweets using that hashtag. This is how the Phdchat group identifies its members.

Another option tweeters have is to engage in a dialog about a topic. You do this through the reply button (if you move the cursor over the comment it will come up on the menu below). The reply will then be saved as an exchange. You can have a long chat just by using the reply. It took me a while to figure how to access the dialog and sometimes I lost the thread of interaction or missed others contribution to the dialog until I found the feature that allows you to see contributions to a thread through the reply button. In the upper right hand corner of the tweet is an open comment icon (the type you see in the comic strips). If you click on that or the little arrow that pops up, you'll get the dialog that includes all people that contributed the discussion.

Finally, you might find something that you feel is very important and want to save for the future. This is when the "favorite" button comes into play. I was marking things as favorite, but then wondered how to retrieve it. So I tweeted to my followers and got the answer back immediately (this is one of the things that useful in twitter: immediate answers from your network). Go to profile (menu up at the very top, next to "home") and click on favorites. Those tweets you marked as favorites will be listed. This comes in handy when you want to "bookmark" favorite resources.

Communicating Using Twitter

Twitter was originally designed for mobile technology. As such, a tweet is limited to 140 characters. For those, like myself, who are used to writing rather long sentences/comments, this can be challenging. Over the last 4 weeks, I have found that I need to think differently when writing for twitter. In fact, I think one reason that twitter is popular among businesses, but not academics is because of the writing style.

So here are some hints for writing for twitter:

1) Use truncated words when possible (i.e. U, R, 4, b/c, w/, etc...). Learn the tx spch such as RT commonly used in twitter. I find that most people use their own forms of abbreviation. Research has found that English speakers can decipher words as long as there is the initial and final sounds spelt out.

2) Simplify your words. Use "hard" rather than "challenging". I feel that I have gone back to my business writing roots when using twitter. Most academics are used to using large words and complex sentence structures. Twitter requires that you use direct sentence structures and words.

3)Learn to write without punctuation (unless lack of punctuation will make it difficult to understand your tweet) and spaces. Most of us learned that you have two spaces after a period. This is at least one less character you will have for your tweet.

4) Twitter has a new ability to shorten your links' url. It used to be that you would need to use an outside ap (tinyurl was the most popular). Twitter now automatically shortens the link so you have more characters to explain what the link is to.

As I mentioned above, these are only some of the suggestions I have from 4 weeks of being a twitter user. Please add any suggestions you have in the comments section.

What creativity, time, and interest can produce

2011-07-07T08:36:00.001-04:00

I have often felt that the current focus in the US system has lost is creativity. As China focuses their research on moving to a more creative system, the US has moved to "standardizing" which kills creativity. Pushes in creativity within the educational system has resulted (usually after a lag time) of great prosperity. This can be seen in the 60's and the 90's.

This spring and summer, my daughter had more time on her hands. She also attends a school that is 100% project based learning. One of the unexpected results of project based learning is the increase in creativity. The initial focus of the school was to improve STEM education. However, where students excel on standardized tests was English and History. Why? I believe it is because these topics allow for greater levels of creativity within the testing assessments. However, STEM needs personnel that have a high level of creativity.

With this in mind I began to think of what conditions are needed (and that her school includes in their curriculum, including STEM). If STEM assessments began to include creativity in their assessment, teaching within STEM would need to change. So what would need to be included? In looking at the work my daughter has done over the last 3 months, I would say that creativity needs time (to try things out), interest (see Dr. Margaret Haviland's post on project based learning to see how to integrate student choice into the curriculum), and student accountability/self direction.

Examples

My daughter set a goal to get on the dance team at her dance school despite the fact that she did not know how to tap dance. She taught herself how to tap using YouTube and spending three hours a night a week before tryouts practicing. When she got stuck, she would ask me (6 years of tap). She used both online tools and personal experts to help her to learn something that was needed to achieve a personal goal she set. Part of the goal setting was due to her school, as was finding resources to achieve that goal. However, the other part was time (she did this during a week off from school) and passion (not for tap, but for dance in general).

During the month of May, my daughter finally found herself with time on her hands as school work was winding down and she no longer had any extra curricular activities (plays, dance). She took this time to play around with audacity, a program she had learned about school. She has been very focused this year on developing her music skills, both in her piano/keyboarding skills and singing. She spent hours putting recording her singing and putting together harmonies. This was the result:

The entire piece is her voice (6 tracks) that she figured out and recorded on her own.

Finally, again using a combination of YouTube and experts, my daughter has taught herself to sing. Again, this is something that she takes seriously and wants to be able to do without hurting her voice. She has acquaintances who have lost their voice (as teens) because of improper use.

The end of the school year in New York State

2011-06-26T07:25:00.001-04:00

I know that I have a number of readers of this blog from New York state. However, many are from outside of the state and the country. I am always interested in the blogs that I read, about learning what their end of school year is like. So I decided to write a "cultural" piece about how students (at all levels of education) end their school year in our state. Interestingly, it has not changed much since I was a child (in the dark ages of the '70's and my mother assures me it was much the same when she was a kid in the '40's).

Our school year starts late (first week of September, just after labor day or the first Monday of Sept.) and ends late (third week in June). In addition to finals, high school students take the regents exams, which goes back as far as my mother's time. Regents exams are curriculum based topical standardized exams (i.e. algebra, geometry, living environment, foreign language, world history, english, etc...). These exams are given usually the second and third week of June which is why our school year is so long.

At the grade school level, the last week of school usually has a number of half days involved. Students help the teachers pack up the classroom, have some fun activities such as school field day (outdoor activities and games), school picnic, or other community building activities. This is also when the kids get the assignment for the summer (usually summer reading requirements).

At the university level, most schools end in Mid-May. There is usually the end of classes the first week of May, followed by a "reading day" in which students can study for exams. Exams may be anywhere from 4-10 days depending on the university. The weeks leading up to the end of the semester, students start looking for summer or permanent jobs. Even during finals week, many students go home, returning their possessions they use during the year to their homes or moving into off-campus housing (for the following year) and/or looking for summer jobs. This year was especially hard for our region to find summer jobs as many of the chronically unemployed and senior citizens now work the traditional summer jobs year round so temporary part-time employment is not available. As a result, many college students are working retail and camp jobs, often the jobs taken by high school students.

After finals week, there is usually a week of activities for graduating students culminating in the graduation ceremonies.

High school students don't graduate (for the most part) until the third week of June. Often, high school seniors are done with their regents exams so most seniors are finished with school by the first week of June. Between exams and graduation, seniors take their class trip, attend their senior prom (formal dance for those outside of the US), participate in College orientations/registration (although this may happen throughout the summer) if they are attending college or begin job training (for those going to work right out of high school). For those with jobs (which I mentioned is low this year) they begin to work a full-time shift.

After the graduation ceremonies, either the day or weekend of, or during the summer, most students have graduation parties. These parties can either be elaborate (rented hall) to simple (family in the backyard) or anywhere in between (combined with others, at a park, etc...). Usually, the students receives cash to use in college or to establish themselves (i.e. deposit on an apartment) if they are going to be working full-time. Throughout the summer, graduates will attend parties for their friends. My son has 2-4 parties a weekend, every weekend until he leaves for college in August.

Interestingly enough, college graduation usually does not result in a big party. It is high school graduation which is considered the important milestone. The other important milestone (though not as much as high school graduation) is the transition from Middle School to High School. Often there is a middle school graduation, at the end of the school year. Most people I know have a small family party to mark the middle school graduation, but more often than not, this is celebrated by going out to dinner. Some schools also have a formal dance, but often that is the private schools rather than public schools.

Once the school year is over, many families take a vacation. Depending on the year, the end of the school year might fall close to the end of June which allows for an extended vacation over the 4th of July holiday. At any rate, most people in New York take their vacations the end of June, or first week of July or during the week before Labor Day (the end of August). Most camps start right after July 4 and do until the first or second week of August.

So how does this compare to the end of the year for where you are? I'd be interested in knowing what some of the rituals are for others outside of NY state.

Mobile Technology: An instructor's viewpoint

2011-06-21T09:15:00.000-04:00

I was a member of a panel at a recent CDETG conference on Mobile Technology. CDTEG is a group of people interested in integrating technology at the higher ed level. The group, started by a classmate of mine, is comprised of instructional designers, members of ITS, employees of educational technology developers, professors and instructors, and administrators/Educational Technology policy makers in upstate/northeastern New York state. The organization is set up to create a dialog and share information about issues around educational technology at the university level.

This last meeting was on mobile technology, something that I have noticed is a growing trend in my classes. I thought it might be useful for my readers to read about some of the take aways from the conference that I will be including in my teaching this year.

1) One of the first speakers was a project manager for an online syllabus developer, Itellidemia. I had never thought of the mechanics behind mobile technology (partly because I don't use apps on any of my own mobile technology...my phone is just that: a phone, not access to the internet). However, since many of my students use their phones and pads/tablets as their access to the internet, it is important that I understand the technical requirements behind apps.

2) There are two different types of apps: read only and interactive. As the presentation by the project manager at Intellidemia and the ITS programming team from the College of St. Rose explained, Native Apps are those that are designed to work with a specific device. For example, St. Rose developed an interactive registration app where students could check on the status of a class during registration, and be put on a waitlist to be notified via their phone when a seat opened up. This required customization between the different phone types (i.e. droid, blackberry, iphone). The other type of app is a read only which means that the app is webbased in which a phone can access the web for information but cannot interact/change information. Student notifications of events or class cancellations used this technology for mobile technology. An instructor or administrator would need to access the site via a computer or Mac, and once the information was changed, a mobile technology formatted version would be available to students via their mobile device. Technologically, this is a lot easier for ITS departments to program, but it also means less customization and interaction.

3) Students need intrinsic motivation to use apps and mobile devises educationally. In my own experience, (this was part of my presentation), you can offer alternatives that students can access mobilely, but ultimately it is up to the student to decide which tool (if any) they want to use or will engage them. For example, I had a very interesting program I assigned, that students could down load onto the ipod or watch using their laptop. I thought students would prefer this to reading a boring article about the same topic. However, about half of the students did not do the assignment. Some students just preferred to read rather than watch a video on line.

Our discussion at CDETG concluded that not all students like to use technology to learn, nor do they have access to mobile technologies that will interact with the material. So it is important to provide alternatives for students. One affordance that mobile technology allows is different means of access depending on student preference for learning.

4) Often, instructors are unaware of the opportunities/affordances of new technology. Also, because of the wide range of technologies and limited time faculty have, there is resistance to changing or adopting new technology. It is important, therefore, to identify faculty members that might be interested in integrating new technology into their teaching and use them for pilot programs.

Empire State College (I was a member of their adjunct faculty at the advent of online learning) does a good job of getting their faculty to use new technology by choosing volunteers they will train and support during pilot projects, then getting the faculty to recruit colleagues who become interested when they see what can be done with the new technology. They used this format in mobile technology, drawing faculty from education, business, science, and humanity departments. Each faculty member created a pilot program for their own course, which was then assessed by the ITS department. The results were disseminated during the required annual training sessions. Having concrete goals and outcomes for the pilot programs helped convince faculty members that there was a role in education for mobile technology.

5) A major consideration for faculty is that they don't have time to learn all of the possible apps or different types of mobile technology available for their students. The group concluded that a faculty member does not need to know how specific devises work or what apps are available. Rather, they need to know what technology can do and have their students find specific apps or instructions on how their particular devise works.

Among the affordances instructors and instructional designers need to consider are a) how the technology will be used (read only or interactive), b) formatting so that it will be accessible to mobile devises (i.e. format is narrow and/or in small chunks so it will be easy to find read on a smaller mobile device), c) why the technology will be accessed mobily, d) when (in what context such as class, homework, administrative updates, etc...) mobile devises will be used to access course content/activities, e)support available to the student and faculty in developing mobile content (level of ITS support, support from the devise or app).

In my own teaching, I know integrate mobile technology into my classes by sending students out of the classroom to work on activities and keeping in touch with them as I (and other students) stay in the classroom. I also allow student to access resources through their mobile devises on certain activities. Sometimes I will have them begin without their mobile devices, then allow them later in an activity to access the devices.

This summer, I am trying to learn more about mobile devices and technology that interact with it. This is one of the reasons why I am playing around with twitter (yes, I plan to send students out of the class room and use twitter to communicate with them). One tool I am going to try out is a create-your-own app site recommended at the conference.

Related blog: The Instructional Design Guy

Twitter update: Are you a follower or do you follow

2011-06-05T13:41:00.000-04:00

As mentioned last week, I am playing around with twitter for a computer mediated communication course I will be teaching next semester. Thanks to one of my blog readers, Anne Marie, I got a good jump on how to be a follower on twitter. She recommended:

If you want some people to follow have a look at this list of people who I have labled as 'learning' http://twitter.com/#/list/amcunningham/learning
I'm not sure what you mean by 'follow twitter sites'. You follow accounts not sites.
It's not necessary to get any notifications my email. But I still allow notifications to my usual email address of DMs (direct messages).
How to access twitter? I think the best way is to download a desktop application such as tweetdeck. It's easiest to see everything that is happening then. But the main webpage is still manageable.

I got so caught up in looking through her list, I forgot to "follow" her! I found, though, that others had followers that were interesting. So I looked at who some of my favorite bloggers were following. One problem with this is that sometimes you loose the context of who they are, so I made sure that I also looked at their biography.

So lesson #1: make sure that you have a "vision" for twitter (just as you would for blogging) and that is evident in your biography.

Lesson #2: check out your favorite bloggers and their followers/people they follow. This helps you to create a network that will be helpful to you.

One thing that I noticed was that I had 3 readers immediately. What was odd to me was that none of them had followers and they had no tweets. This got me to wondering why they would follow someone and not tweet. One possibility is that they use twitter as a resource to find out about certain resources. At least one of my followers appears to be this as she is a marketing blogger. She may follow any one who has "communication" in their description to capture trends and resources.

Another possibility is that they too are new to Twitter and I am a follower of someone that they know, but being new to twitter don't have anything at this point to tweet (or rather are too nervous).

The third possibility is much more nefarious. Like with Linkedin or Facebook, they may want to get a large following so when they finally tweet, it will have a greater impact, putting them on the "favorites" page immediately.

Getting a following

I'm not sure how I got the initial following. However, I did get a few more followers through becoming a follower myself. This is like friending on facebook in which a person has the ability to reciprocate the "follower". I may not want to know about the person following me, so I don't feel obliged to reciprocate (nor do any of those I follow need to feel obliged).

In getting others to follow me, I need to let them know how to find me on twitter. Just like when I began blogging, I have to decide how public I want to make this. As I will be using this with my class, and I am still new to it, I decided to go with a pseudonym.

I also need to figure out how to tie my twitter account to my blog. Of course, as I write this, I realize that I should have named my twitter account something like @connecting2. Oh well, this is something I will need to work out in the future.

I would appreciate any suggestions from my readers on how to expand my following. You can also follow me (I'll post new blog post titles on twitter) at Comprof1 (that is the number 1 at the end) unless I decide to change name in the next week or so (let me know if you think I should keep what I have or change the name or create a new twitter account that is dedicated to the blog and items related to the blog).

Looking on the bright side

2011-06-02T08:59:00.000-04:00

I am an optimist by nature. However, just like all humans, there are times when the pressures of living, studying, working, dealing with teenagers...get to me. And then I take stock of what is going on in the rest of the world and it puts things into perspective.

My cousins live in the Springfield, MA area and at least one's town got "walloped" (as she put it).

But they had no damage. We had baseball sized hail in our area (those storms turned into the tornados when they passed over the NY border into Massachusetts).

This video was taken right in Downtown Springfield (they were right near the basketball hall of fame...this is the major north/south interstate down to Hartford).

But my family and I came through unscathed. So I am concentrating on the fact that my son came through knee surgery fine, I have a part-time job next fall (I'd like a full-time job but part-time is good), my daughter has the chance to concentrate on dance and her school work (so it doesn't matter if she didn't get into the play she tried out for), and my husband still has a job.

Entering the world of "Twitter"

2011-06-01T11:48:00.000-04:00

As many of my loyal readers know, I'd do "twitter". This, however, is about to change as I prepare to teach a course in computer mediated communication next semester. In fact, I don't think I can teach CMC without looking at the type of communication used in twitter and facebook. So for the next few weeks, I will be setting up a twitter account and blog about my journey in trying to figure out 1) how to use twitter; 2) communication strategies for twitter; and 3) how to incorporate it into my class.

What I've learned so far

In preparation for using twitter, I went to the website. I was impressed at the amount of information and support in setting up twitter there was. This may be a reason why it has taken off in the last couple of years.

I know that when I set up my twitter account, I should not only be interested in getting people to follow my account, but also I should begin by following other people based on my interest.

I also know that twitter consists of short messages which I assume means little context in the tweets. This is why so many who use twitter connect to a webpage or blog. The webpages and blogs can give context that short messages cannot. I relate this to the difference between telegrams and letters in the 19th and early 20th century. Telegrams gave basic information that without context made very little sense. A follow up letter would give the details that would give a telegram context or there needed to be personal/shared experience that would give a telegram meaning.

Twitter works well with mobile technology. However, twitter users tend to be older or professionals (corporations). I also read a report that said that twitter was used more by African Americans than facebook. Little is known why there is that preference except that twitter works well with cell phones.

What I don't know

In the next few weeks, I will need to identify some people to follow.
The twitter site gives some ideas on how to do this. However, I'm interested in knowing how others set up their twitter followers.

The site also gives advise on how to follow twitter sites. I am going to need to figure out how to do this without overfilling my email. Do others use a separate email account? What about something similar to RSS feeds? Are there RSS feeds or readers for twitter like with blogs?

How are tweets different than other forms of online communication? Can they be stored and accessed later? Nancy White recently had a post in which tweets were pieced together to create a story/dialog. Can this be done in a central location (i.e. facebook's wall to wall which shows discussions between two people)?

I'd appreciate any help you can give me and I will continue to post my progress.

Study Findings

2011-05-26T10:20:00.000-04:00

As promised, here is the first draft of my study findings. I'd appreciate feedback.

The traditional model of collaborative knowledge is based on the type of knowledge (moving from tangible to intangible, explicit to tacit) and the place of collaboration (moving from the individual to the group to the organization). The assumption is that knowledge within an organization is housed and can be captured for use. However, with the rise in the use of distributed groups in the workplace, there is the recognition that knowledge that is distributed in the form of distributed cognition, may not be accessed in the same way that traditional organizational structures allowed.

For service industries, whose business is knowledge, it is very important that knowledge is accessible at the individual, group and organizational level, especially during the collaborative process. The collaborative writing process has the potential to make the knowledge creation and transfer process more transparent to group members. Therefore, this study looked at the collaborative writing process within a naturally occurring distributed group to determine what factors affected creation of knowledge within work collaboration for team members that may have had no previous interaction or limited interaction in completing their project. In order to answer the research question of what knowledge members of a distributed workplace group identify as being important when creating a group product and what factors influence the choice of what knowledge is important, I answered the subquestions:
1. How do individuals define “knowledge”?
2. What process or processes does a distributed group in the workplace use to create shared meaning and understanding during collaborative writing projects? What factors do they identify as shaping that process or processes?
3. What patterns of work activity are maintained and changed at the individual, group, and organizational level within a distributed group? Who do workers identify with in maintaining or changing work patterns in different contexts?

Individual definitions of knowledge

In answering the question of how individuals define knowledge, I first looked at the definitions the study participants gave for knowledge, know-how, content, and design. During the interviews, participants were asked to define the terms knowledge, know-how, content, and design. Knowledge and know-how definitions were elicited in the first set of interviews. In the second set of interviews, I asked participants to define design as this was a term used differently throughout the first interview when participants discussed topics such as information, knowledge, meaning making, and processes. Participants were also asked to define content as this was a term often used interchangeably with knowledge in the first set of interviews.

Knowledge
When asked to define the term knowledge, the study participants defined the term knowledge differently. There appeared to be three different groups among the participants: those that defined knowledge as something measurable or tangible (“information”, “content”, “things that you know”), those that had difficulty defining knowledge, and those that defined knowledge as something more intangible (“with knowledge, I know how to behave in any particular situation”, “shared meaning”). Surprisingly, those that identified knowledge as something tangible felt that they were within the organization and group’s power structure. They also were part of the traditional training group, which had a greater influence on the project according to the second round of interviews, 3 months later.
On the other hand, those that defined knowledge as something more intangible, were the most disgruntled with the project 3 months later. One participant had difficulty defining knowledge, also felt a disconnect from the group and organization throughout the project. On the other hand, another participant had difficulty initially in defining knowledge. However, eventually the definition he provided was fairly closely aligned with those within the power structure. Interestingly, both participants had difficulty in placing themselves within the organization and they also tended to be much more careful with the answers they gave during their interviews. This might be an indication that their understanding of knowledge would depend on the definition used by those they perceived as having power over their position within the organization, their departments, the group, and their profession.

These differing definitions of knowledge would indicate that knowledge workers need to be aligned with the epistemologies of their organizations to be satisfied. When there are different epistemologies, belief is in what knowledge is, within an organization, for example between departments, than there might be tension within distributed groups or between group members and those outside of the group. This tension was not obvious in the study group when they executed the routine collaborative written project (quarterly report) in which the format and even content was dictated from outside of the organization. Participants often noted that the quarterly report was not important to their work, but was a means to document the work group members had completed. As a result, it was not necessary that personal epistemologies aligned with the organization or the funder in writing the quarterly report. In other words, the quarterly report from the group needed to align with the funding organization’s epistemology. Additionally, the quarterly report was not perceived as being owned by either group members or the group itself. Rather, the organization (in the form of the Project Manager and Project Director) were perceived as owners of the report by the participants in the study.

However, in the creation of the document that required more group interaction and group ownership, differences in epistemologies were evident and became sources of tension. For example, there were tensions between members of the stand-up training, elearning, and management groups over what exactly the Project Map represented. There were differences in interpretation, often based on the different understanding of how end-users/trainees would learn, need to know, and use what they learned. Since the Project Map would result in the actual final product each group member would contribute to the project, participants felt a much stronger sense of ownership to the Project Map. In other words, knowledge workers might be able to accept different epistemologies in their work when they do not perceive the work as their own, but they would try to exert their own epistemologies when they felt the work was perceived as theirs (each individual taking ownership for the work).

So the greater level of ownership that an individual feels towards a project or piece of work, the more likely they will align that work to personal values and knowledge. Relating this to Skitka’s (2003) AIM model of Social Identify Theory (as discussed in Chapter 2), a greater level of ownership may create higher stakes for the individual within a group. A group member would want to be tied closer to the other group members’ norms if the individual member perceives he or she have a higher level of ownership in the work or work processes. Therefore, if his or her work is not accepted by the group, more than his or her work is questioned; his or her social identity and group acceptance is at risk. On the other hand, if the work is perceived as conforming to the norms and values outside of the group, as the quarterly report did, the group member would perceive the ownership of the work as someone else’s. As a result, their social identity within the group is not at risk. Therefore, he or she might be more open to changes in the document, especially if those changes are perceived as coming from those outside of the group and the organization’s power structure.

There was the perception that knowledge can be located, owned, and/ or accessed either by an individual or the group when needed. Externally owned knowledge (e.g. the funding agency or organization) did not always need to align with personal epistemologies for collaboration to take place within the distributed group. However, with internally owned knowledge, the more work was perceived as being owned by an individual, the greater the necessity that the epistemologies were aligned with the organization, group, and group members in order for collaboration to take place.

Content

Unlike knowledge, the definition of content was consistent throughout the group. In most of the definitions, the term “information” was included. In many cases, some description of a tangible product was included. The participants included descriptors such as: “a variety of media”, “source material”, “images”, “what goes in a page”, “curriculum”, and “whatever the written material is.” Additionally, most participants included skills and knowledge or the word know in their definitions. In many cases, the definition also included how content was applied.

Interestingly, however, is that while content was consistently defined, and often used interchangeably with knowledge, knowledge was not consistently defined. In other words, they defined content as a tangible subset of knowledge. While there might be differences as to what content is valuable or needed, the idea of what content is within a group did not seem to differ.

Know-How

Many of the definitions were similar for know-how. Often participants identified skill and process, “how to use” and “experience.” Those who defined knowledge as something that was possessed also implied that know-how was possessed.

While participants defined know-how differently, they all seemed to share a common understanding that know-how was not easily measured, had to do with a process or skill which helped to create know-how, and was informal learning. It also seemed that many of the definitions included how know-how was applied. Some of these included:

“

Application of both what to do and knowing how to use it, mainly in an efficient way.”

“I guess I know…I’m going to use as…I know the know-hows of web development, know-hows of graphic design.”

“…, know how get things done even if it’s delegating.”

“I guess that’s knowledge that translates….into an ability to do something.”

“…intuitive gut navigation.”

While content seemed static, know-how seemed more action oriented. Know-how also appears to be an individual concept. When defining know-how, the participants tended to use the first person. No one used a collective pronoun in their definitions.

Design

After the first series of interviews, I noticed that many of the participants used the term design, but each in a slightly different way. As a result, a definition of design was included in the second interview. In fact, the definition of design had very little in common from speaker to speaker. In addition, it seemed the most difficult term for the participants to define, most having long pauses before they answered.

Those from the stand-up training department tended to perceive design as a definitive construct using terms such as “strategies”, “content”, “framework”, and “curriculum.” For those in the elearning department, design was a more situated term to define, grounded in the creative and meaning making process. For example, “Design is the…planful…elegance and pattern…which gives…definition and meaning.” Not only is there some situated aspect to design, but those in the elearning department identified a sense of agency in their definitions.

Such a divergence in the understanding of what design is could lead to differences in understanding during the creation of a collaborative document, especially when there is no structure to the document, such as the Project Map. The first writing project, using a clearly defined structure was, “Well, the quarterly report’s always a by-product of individual contributions.” On the other hand, the second collaborative project studied was a document created by the group to help identify the various aspects of the elearning project. In discussing this document in a group interview, the difficulty in creating an agreed upon product was obvious:

Well, what formally…I think the … for the classroom trainers, they have a document. Module 1 contains X number of elements. Module 2 contains X number of elements. Eh…for me, there’s a sort of isomorphic mapping of those content elements onto a schema that reflects those same strains and tho…and that same order.

Later:

P: There’s a certain way to do that in the classroom. So, um… I think that’s…I don’t know if you can…say right now what your product is going to be. It’s going to be some type of elearning product.
R: Right. I mean…
P: But what it’s going to look like and how it’s…how it’s going to work is not…really isn’t there yet.
R: It isn’t really there... I mean, we have an idea…

Those in the stand-up training department seemed to perceive design in what Buchanan (1992) refers to as the categories of design: “Categories have fixed meanings that are accepted within the framework of a theory or a philosophy, and serve as the basis for analyzing what already exist (p. 12).” The elearning department looked at the possibilities of design, however. This is what Buchanan refers to as placement of design. “Placements have boundaries to shape and constrain meaning, but are not rigidly fixed and determinate. The boundary of a placement gives a context or orientation to thinking, but the application to a specific situation can generate a new perception of that situation and, hence, a new possibility to be tested. Therefore, placements are sources of new ideas and possibilities when applied to problems in concrete circumstances (p. 13).”

It appears that coming to the collaborative writing process from these two different approaches affects the knowledge creation and collaborative process. In the one instance, categories, the design is part of tangible knowledge: artifacts, clearly defined processes and skills. In the second instance of placement, design requires spatial knowledge, or the ability to link ideas and construct or create knowledge by building new ideas and theories. The categories of design, then, use knowledge that can be identified or represented tangibly (i.e. diagrams, processes, symbols, formats) whereas the placement of design requires environmental, social, and cognitive interaction to create knowledge networks where externally held knowledge can be accessed when needed. During the collaborative process within this distributed group, the different approaches in design resulted in tensions due to different expectations.

Three types of knowledge

In analyzing the data collected through interviews, documents, and online interaction, knowledge could be placed into three categories: tangible representation of knowledge which is represented by policies, forms, formats, curriculum, degrees or credentials, records, and other artifacts at the individual, group, departmental, organizational, and/or professional level; procedural and tacit knowledge, which would include an understanding of work processes and the knowledge created as a result of those processes; and partaged knowledge, which was created through the linking of ideas, social relationships, cognitive interaction, and/or cultural interaction.

These categories vary from the traditional model, namely content (or explicit knowledge), competency (or tacit knowledge), and expertise (which is performance based). The tangible representation of knowledge is close to Kolb’s (1984) apprehensive knowledge. This is knowledge that can be articulated, represented in various forms (such as visuals, documents, presentations, interviews), and stored for future use. Unlike the more traditional content or explicit knowledge, tangible representation of knowledge may include tacit knowledge. For example, educational credentials (e.g. licensing, degrees) tangibly represents certain knowledge that may include implicit and explicit knowledge. These credentials, as we will see later on, can be used as currency within a group. Within a traditional model of knowledge management within a collaborative group, this would be considered a competency or implicit knowledge that would be expected to be applied in any given situation. This is often used in Best Practices, for example, that can then be replicated and used throughout an organization. In comparing credentials to competency using the traditional model, the assumption would be that they are one in the same.

Using this new definition of tangible representation of knowledge though, a credentialed employee or group member may not know how to access the knowledge or apply the knowledge needed to complete work or contribute to the group because of the lack of understanding or experience with the complexities within the environment or the situation. He or she, however, does have some knowledge that may need to be reformulated in order to be relevant for a given situation. One participant, for example, had credentials in healthcare, but the group did not perceive him as having procedural or tacit knowledge for the project. In order for him to use the tangible representation of knowledge, he would need to learn how to apply it (creating know-how for the project).

Reconceptualizing competency to procedural and tacit knowledge, moves knowledge and know-how from the individually held ability to a socially constructed understanding of how things work within a given situation. It expands the term from cognitive individually possessed knowledge about procedures and processes (competency) to an understanding of the situation (requiring analytical ability), the intangible variables that affect the situation, and the interpersonal relationships and meaning negotiation that create social cognition. When participants discussed competencies in the interviews, they were often referring to tangible representation of knowledge rather than the intangible tacit knowledge. Their discussion of procedures and processes, however, often included such factors as work quality expectations, reconciling processes and procedures between group members and departments, and understanding the environment in which their work and the work of their group members were situated.

The term partaged knowledge is derived from the French word partager which means both to share and to divide. Partaged knowledge is knowledge that one would need to be able to access and link to other knowledge (i.e. linking ideas, putting into context). This might be internal such as what happens during an individual’s writing process. Initially there may be many ideas, seemingly without any correlation (divided). Through the writing process, an author must link together those ideas into one cohesive whole (thus the sharing or putting together through interaction of ideas).

The same can happen with group processes in which members come into the group (especially a distributed group) with different expertise, access to resources, cultural influences, and experience/mental models of the work (divided resources and expertise). Through their work processes, their knowledge is partaged through knowledge networks throughout the group and beyond. This knowledge is then accessed when needed and modified or translated for use within a given situation. Partaged knowledge therefore includes the ability to co-create knowledge, divide the knowledge for later use, access the knowledge when needed, and translate or interpret the knowledge for a given situation. Partaged knowledge is the most valuable for knowledge based organizations as it allows for knowledge to be evenly distributed throughout the organization, thus making them less vulnerable should an employee leave. It also allows for others who are not directly exposed to content, work processes, experience, and/or environments to be able to access knowledge outside of an individual’s knowledge base. Knowledge can be part of the network internal to the group, external to the group, within the profession, internal to the organization and external to the organization. However, partaged knowledge is difficult to quantify, control, and capture.

Partaged knowledge is created through creative practices (writing, design, problem solving) rather than through the imposition of formats or processes. While the traditional knowledge model identified expertise as an intangible form of knowledge held at varying degrees by individual group members demonstrated through performance, partaged knowledge recognizes that expertise, tacit knowledge, and content can be held by individuals, the group, the organization, or even stakeholders. Partaged knowledge is the ability to access expertise and tacit knowledge, when needed in the form that will fit the situation. Once accessed, the knowledge will then need to be translated, renegotiated, and appropriately applied to the situation. Since partaged knowledge is knowledge that one would need to be able to access and link to other knowledge, there must be a sense of internalization that allows for the linking and understanding of the knowledge.

Unlike the traditional collaborative knowledge model, the model identified through this study resulted in continuum of tangibility where each of the three types of knowledge (tangible representation of knowledge, processes and tacit knowledge, and pariaged knowledge) are actually on a continuum of tangibility, as shown in Exhibit 1 (Unfortunately, I can't seem to upload the images in this format).

As knowledge becomes less tangible, groups are able to create knowledge through interaction and negotiation. In other words, partaged knowledge is creative or knowledge that is created through the group process. Exhibit 1 also is a visual representation as to how knowledge becomes more spatial and less linear when it is partaged.

Each type of knowledge was manifested, accessed, created, and valued differently at the individual, group, and organizational level. By redefining the traditional model of collaborative knowledge within a distributed group, organizations will have a better understanding of how knowledge is used, created and recreated, transferred, withheld, managed, and lost at all levels (individual, group, departmental, organizational, and professional).

Level of Identity

The other set of factors that affect knowledge within a distributed group has to do with the level of identity to the knowledge. Using social identity theory (McGrath et al., Skitka, 2003; Van Knippenberg, 2000), the closer the knowledge is related to a person’s social identity, the more likely that person will want the group’s norms, values, and knowledge to be aligned to the individual. When faced with information or an event on the group level that contradicts an individual’s personal identity construct (value, knowledge, epistemology, personal schema), that person has three choices: modify his or her own personal identity, modify the group’s beliefs, values, or understanding, or leave the group in order to maintain the individual’s personal identity (Levesque et al., 2001; McGrath et al., 2000; Moreland & Levine, 2001; Skitka, 2003; Whitworth et al., 2000). However, there is a fourth option that the group in this study used: distance ownership of the work, contribution to the work, and/or expertise needed to complete the work. In other words, the product becomes the group’s, department’s, organization’s, or an external entity’s rather than the individual’s. Related to this is the perceived agency an individual may have over their own work. The greater the perceived agency for a task, process, or final product, the greater the level the individual perceived of ownership over their work or work products (i.e. writing, designs, etc…).

In the traditional model, ownership was based on the location of the group work (individual, intragroup, intergroup, organization). This did not allow for influence outside of the organization on knowledge creation and access. Most knowledge management models (Conceicao, Heitor, Gibson, & Shariq,1998; Cook & Brown, 1999; Foss, & Pedersen, 2002; Nonaka, 1994), for example, assumed that knowledge was held by individuals within the organization. Information could then be transferred from individuals to others within the organization, thus creating knowledge at different levels. Occasionally, there was discussion of transferring the knowledge to external stakeholders (Mason & Lefrere, 2003; Yakhlef, 2002). However, the ultimate owners of the knowledge, to be kept or given away, were the individuals where the knowledge was housed (Cook & Brown).

If knowledge ownership, however, is perceived as being something that is created through agency granted at different levels, the management of knowledge requires the granting of agency at different levels. The closer to the individual that agency is granted, therefore, the higher the level of ownership (and the closer to personal identity) the individual will feel for that knowledge. The new model for distributed collaboration, therefore, would use a continuum of the location for agency and ownership of the work.

Exhibit 2: Location of agency and ownership (not able to upload it to my blog)

In looking at the Quarterly Report, for example, the old model would place the writing as an individual product, with high individual agency and ownership. This is because each individual wrote their own section which often was edited by Robert; but much of the original writing was in the words of the individual contributor. The location of the work was somewhere between the individual and group levels. However, participants repeatedly distanced themselves from the quarterly report. In fact, the purpose and format of the quarterly report was perceived as being imposed on the individual and group by the funding agency. Therefore there was very little perceived ownership and agency in writing the quarterly report at the individual and even group level.

This is an important distinction to make as a traditional model would look to capture the individual contributions, interpreting it as expertise at the individual level. However, much of the individual knowledge was withheld or not captured as the individual knowledge the group possessed was not perceived as having value for the organization and funding agency.

As discussed in the group interview:

R: You know one thing the quarterly report doesn’t do is it doesn’t capture…it…it fails to capture a lot of work that is, eh, either a false start or kind of cons…concept building or teaching one another. And that’s…that’s been an incredibly important subtext of this all of this interdependence has been teaching one another about our work. And the quarterly report doesn’t ever…it’s only interested in what you did. Meaning, like what have you got evidence for. Um…what’s yo…what kind of paper can you point to that would, you know, document and, you know, documentation only goes so far.

In addition, the quality of the work, since it was perceived as being owned by the organization and funding agency, did not affect the social identity of the individual, therefore, there was little time and effort put into writing the quarterly report.

Distributed Group Processes

In looking at a distributed group collaborative writing processes, there were four levels in which meaning making took place: the individual, the project group and departmental (intra-group), the organizational (intergroup, including inter-departmental), and exterior to the organization (including the profession). Each level had different discourse communities with established norms, communication structures, valued knowledge, means of making meaning, and culture.

Placing the findings of this research within the organizational learning, knowledge management, and small group literature, the idea of group knowledge needs to be extended from the traditional model. The traditional model assumed that knowledge was ultimately located in the individual. Organizations only needed to capture and manipulate the knowledge through knowledge management, organizational training, and human capital development. However, in studying the collaborative writing practices of this distributed group, the construct of knowledge is more complex. It includes the social, environmental, political, formulaic, functional, locational, and cognitive factors that affect the perception and use of knowledge in knowledge intensive organizations.

Exhibit 3 is a summary of the types of knowledge accessed, used, or created by distributed groups during their work. This knowledge grid identifies twelve actions that happen during a distributed groups’ collaborative work process. These are dependent upon the location of agency and ownership of the work and the type of knowledge accessed, used, or created during collaboration. While the focus of the study was on the collaborative writing process, the summary could be applied to any distributed group processes, products, work tasks, projects, or communication.

Knowledge definitions need to be reconceptualized using the location of agency and ownership, on the one hand, and the type of knowledge based on tangibility/complexity on the other hand. The knowledge grid outline in Exhibit 3 is a starting point to understating the internal and external environment that affects knowledge use and creation by a distributed group. Each of the twelve types of knowledge represent the political, environmental, cognitive, and social factors that result in different types of perceived knowledge within a distributed group. The next section will look at each type in the context of group collaborative work.

Tangible Representation of Knowledge
Individual-Credentials: Credentials are the establishment of tangible representation of knowledge possessed by the individual. They can take the form of reports and other documentation of individual work; degrees, drafts, postings, or notes that contribute to the group process; and transactional knowledge such as degrees, awards, and job titles. Unlike the traditional knowledge model, credentials within a distributed group is a socio-cognitive construct. Credentials represent valued knowledge that can be used or transformed into an identifiable form to be used as currency for the individual (eg.. future jobs), within the group, between groups, and externally (e.g. product or service sales). The value of the knowledge is situated within the power structure and environment in which the individual works. As a result, perceived credentials will need to be identified and negotiated with each work task. In other words, standard credentials for distributed group work could result in misalignment between the knowledge needed to complete a work task and the actual individual knowledge needed for the work. Therefore, credentials are situated within the knowledge needed for a particular task.

Credentials, unlike documentation, deliverables, and certification, are perceived by the individual as being owned by the individual to dispense whenever the individual believes it is to their advantage. As a result, a group member might have hidden credentials that they feel are undervalued or not needed by the group. Credentials also may be tied to the individual’s social identity, so the undervaluing of the individual credentials may result in a group member disengaging from the group, withholding knowledge, or presenting knowledge in a form that is inaccessible to group members (e.g. unfamiliar formats, technical jargon, limited access documents). In the last case, the individual then becomes invaluable to the group as they are the only ones able to translate knowledge into a form that is identifiable and useful for the group.

Intra-Group-Documentation: Documentation is the transcription of group knowledge into formats that can be stored, accessed at a later date, and used as a collective memory by the group. The group documentation might take the form of meeting minutes, web-based postings, drafts of work (with feedback notes), work plans and checklists, and emails. Documentation of the group processes may be used to create shared mental models; communicate assumptions, interpretations, expectations, resources, and understanding of individual situated knowledge; or create a shared vision, cognitive dissonance, or a collaborative product in order to make the knowledge creation process transparent for those within and outside of the distributed group.

The main difference between credentials and group documents is that group documentation has input from multiple members. As the knowledge grid indicates, ownership and agency is on a continuum, from perceived ownership of a document being owned by a group member with input from other group members to group members claiming equal ownership of the document. The type of ownership and level of agency in producing a group product (such as a written report) depends on the perceived power structure, both internally and externally, a group member’s social identity within the group, the perceived value of individual group member input and contribution of knowledge to the group as a whole, and alignment between the individual and group in the vision of the knowledge work.

Interestingly, documents that are aligned with the group vision and accurately represent group vision become valuable because they make the group knowledge creation process more transparent. This can then be used to help improve a distributed group’s image, output, work environment, and standing within the organization.

Intergroup-Deliverables and Organizational Genres: Most organizations have standard formats, forms, and genres which are used to create documents that will be accessible across units, departments, and other working groups. These organizational genres usually translate knowledge from individuals and groups into standard representations of knowledge that can be understood between subgroups within the organization. The standards and structures that genres provide may also be referred to as style, standard forms (e.g. reports, printouts, templates), jargon, and communication protocols. These organizational genres in the form of standard formats then are used in delivering service products (also known as deliverables) to stakeholders external to the organization. In other words, the standard representations of knowledge is the product that is the core of an organization’s work, be it for profit (i.e. selling knowledge) or non-for-profit (i.e. providing the use of knowledge to benefit an external stakeholder).

Genres are used to create knowledge boundaries within the organization. As a result, ownership of the knowledge becomes collective within the group rather than the possession of an individual. While an individual may perceive that knowledge is aligned with the organization’s, they perceive that the organizational knowledge is owned at the organizational level. In other words, an individual must conform to organizational genres or they will need to either change genres at the organizational level (e.g. through approvals or training) or leave the organization. Often, organizational genres have been developed over time without any individual member realizing the change. Factors such as the environment, changes in vision, a dynamic power structure, and fluidity in interaction between groups (teams and departments) will affect organizational genres and expectations. At the same time, the organization itself often remains a stable structure within which the boundaries of the knowledge intensive work are established for individuals and groups. The organizational structures take the form of organizational genres. As a result, the organization establishes knowledge boundaries through organizational genres, which in turn are constantly being redefined as a result of the intergroup interaction within those organizational boundaries. So organizational genres are dynamic, especially when distributed groups are being used.

External-Professional Standards and Certification: Licensing, training using standard professional curriculums, and accredited degree programs are all ways in which professions provide tangible representation of knowledge the profession perceives as necessary to be part of their discourse community and community of practice. These representations of education and training, also referred to as content or subject matter, outline what a professional needs to know to delineate him or her from one profession to another.

Unlike the organization, an individual can self-select to be part of a profession, but those within the profession might not recognize that individual as a member of the profession. The profession, therefore, has ownership of the standards (professional genres) and knowledge which they may use as currency to control membership within the profession. An individual has the agency to align themselves with a profession, but they have little agency in the development of standards and certification unless they part of the professional power structure. As a result, professional genres are not impacted by distributed work the way that organizations are. Professional genres will be more static.

Procedural and Tacit Knowledge

Individual-Know-how: As discussed previously in this chapter, know-how is the application of knowledge, especially tacit knowledge. According to the definitions given by participants, know-how is an individual understanding of the situation and environment to which tacit knowledge is then applied. Because know-how is based on tacit knowledge, the boundaries of understanding are not well defined. As a result, it is important for the individual to interact with the environment, the task, and tacit knowledge to create a greater understanding of the environment and factors that will affect the performance of the individual. In the study, members that were exposed to a wider divergence of experiences were perceived as having a greater amount of know-how. Individuals with diverse experience were able to transcend the knowledge boundaries within their departments, moving between departments, organizations, professions, and external environments.

For an individual to be able to apply and develop know-how, they need to feel a high level of self-efficacy and agency within their environment. They need to be able to identify procedural knowledge and apply it to any given situation. In other words, the person with the ability to develop and use know-how will be able to identify patterns (cognitive, social, structural, and power) within the environment and develop procedures based on tacit knowledge appropriate to the environment. Those with little know-how will need to rely on others at the intra-group, inter-group, or external levels to establish procedures and translate implicit (tacit) knowledge about the environment.

To develop know-how, individuals need multiple experiences in multiple work contexts, time to understand the context of their work (including planning, feedback, and reflection), a safe environment in which the ambiguity of the work allows for trial and error problem solving, and dialog with others both internally and externally. The development of self-efficacy is also an important component to developing know-how because without self-efficacy, an individual will hand over the responsibility of knowledge development and procedures to the group.

Intra-group-Collaboration: Collaborative knowledge includes both cognition and social understanding of the group environment, including the external and internal factors that affect group procedures and tacit knowledge. Collaboration components include creating a shared mental model, developing group norms, perspective taking, and the ability to align multiple processes, procedures, and standards. This description of collaboration aligns closely with small group research and literature (Jarvela & Hakkinen, 2002; Levesques, Wilson, & Wholey, 2001; Lowery, Nunamaker, Curtis, & Lowery, 2005).

However, collaboration within the knowledge grid can be limited to knowledge within the group (intragroup knowledge) that might be difficult to access by non-members, those not perceived as having value to the group, or those who have limited access to the group’s processes. For example, the video group had limited access to the study group’s processes and therefore did little collaboration within the study group. The video group had limited procedural understanding of the study group’s processes and did not appear to share tacit project knowledge with the study group.

Collaboration needs time and communication space to develop group procedural understanding, trust, a shared vision, vision and task alignment with other groups that members are a part of, an understanding of the perspectives of group’s membership, and an understanding of the political and power structures that will affect the group’s work environment.

Intergroup-Knowledge Management: Traditionally, knowledge management was the culling and organization of information collected from individuals within the organization (Foss & Pederson, 2002). However, knowledge management within the knowledge grid situates information, routines, and understanding within the broader vision of the organization. Organizational routines, the context in which knowledge is managed, are “sequenced patterns of behavior and communication by multiple agents” within an entity influenced by power structure and organizational relationships (Cohen & Bacdayan, 1994, p. 555). According to Cohen & Bacdayan, knowledge is stored at the organizational level within the organization’s routines. The organization then will try to harvest knowledge by monitoring routines.

While a piece of information or routine might be relevant within a group or department, its relevance within the organization will change based on perceived importance by the organizational power structure, the relationship between groups and departments (including the level of communication), perceived situated usefulness by those within the organization, and alignment of organizational, departmental, group, and individual goals and vision.

For example, the video department had its own procedures to ensure access within the department of its knowledge resources on creating and producing quality videos (as defined by the department). There was a shared understanding of the video creation processes, based on the shared cognition of the department about video production. However, this cognition was not shared by those outside of the department. By simply collecting information about the video department’s production process, the organization would not be able to capture the tacit knowledge held by department members. In order for the tacit knowledge of the video department to be useful to the organization, the shared mental model of what good video production was would need to be developed within the video department to align with the organization’s mental model.

Therefore, it is not enough for knowledge management to be effective to simply collect and organize information and data. Information and data needs to be contextualized or situated. There also needs to be interaction between the power structure, departments, work groups, and individuals to negotiate and create a shared mental model. The collaborative writing process required at the organizational level, for example, is an opportunity for employees to create a shared mental model. The feedback mechanisms (i.e. editing, authorization, informal feedback) provide members of the organization to interact and create shared understanding (mental models) that manage cumulative knowledge. These all fit into the four modalities of knowledge creation: socialization, externalization, combination, and internalizations (Castelfranchi, 2004).

Another way to create shared knowledge at the organizational level is to provide interdepartmental cross training in order to develop a cumulative understanding. The result of collaborative writing and cross training can be that the knowledge is owned at the organizational level in which one person leaving the organization will not impact the organizational knowledge. On the other hand, individuals will only need to provide the organization with knowledge that the organization perceives as valuable using knowledge creation processes developed by the organization (Foss & Pederson).

External-Community of Practice/Best Practices. Within the knowledge grid, the professions create shared culture and values, goals, processes, understanding, and experience external to any one organization (Barab& Duffy, 2000). The profession accomplishes this through actions and interaction situated within the professional practice. Cook & Brown define practice as “action informed by meaning drawn from a particular group context (1999, p. 387).” In following a profession’s best practices as defined by those within the community of practice as being experts, members of the community create meaning through their actions (or practice).

Unlike an organization, the development of understanding and knowledge within a profession is more organic and less structured. As a result, tacit knowledge is more visceral and more difficult to transpose into explicit or identifiable form. Because the context of work, routines, and knowledge is situated in a broader environment, the knowledge that is known within the profession may be limited to a few universals. These universals or best practices owned by the profession become a way to identify membership within the community. As a result, the building blocks of the profession (best practices) have the potential to be greatly interrelated with a member’s social identity.

For example, the tone and jargon used in the healthcare counseling profession was an indicator of professional membership. When one of the study participants, not a member of the healthcare counseling profession, used a tone and jargon that study participants who were members of the profession did not perceive as being appropriate to the profession, professional members were almost offended. They felt a strong social identity with the healthcare counseling profession, so they would feel any breech of the profession’s shared understanding as unacceptable. It was difficult for them to convey to the member outside of the profession why her choice of tone and jargon was offensive because it was based on tacit professional knowledge that was difficult to identify.

Partaged Knowledge

Individual-Expertise: The definition of expertise within a distributed group needs to be expanded based on the idea that experts are able to access partaged knowledge. This means that an individual has the ability to access knowledge outside of their own mind. This external knowledge is part of an individual’s knowledge network. Individuals who access others knowledge networks then create what Boland and Tenkasi (1995) refer to as a knowledge net, from which to cull, filter, and highlight knowledge that can be used for a specific purpose (Goodwin, 1994). Expertise, then, is the creation and weaving of knowledge nets for specific purposes. The creation and weaving of the knowledge net is situated in an individual’s environment, task understanding, meaning-making, perspective, and social and cognitive abilities. Experts need to be able to identify the boundaries of their own knowledge; make connections with others though interaction, meaning-making dialogs, and perspective taking; create processes to access their own and others relevant knowledge in the time frame that it is necessary, and redefine knowledge boundaries that are situated in a specific context.

Expertise is also dependent upon an individual’s ability to recognize and react to fluctuations in the environment (Nonaka, 1994). To do this, an individual would need to continuously identify knowledge gaps (the difference between what is known and what needs to be known), understand relationships within the social environment (including perceived power, power structure, and perspectives), and identify relevant social and knowledge networks.

In order for expertise to be developed, individuals need to be given opportunities to create complex knowledge networks. These opportunities might include membership to a variety of distributed groups, cross-functional training, access to professional social networks and communities, access to a variety of communication tools and channels, and time, opportunity, and space for individuals to interact. Expertise is a continual process as the work environment is dynamic, rather than a static state.

Intra-group-Collaborative Design: Fundamentally, design is always done in the context of a group. Collaborative design gives ownership of the process and product to the group. However, design does more than develop a shared process and product. Collaborative design creates a shared mental model and understanding of the work task, identifies group member strengths, weaknesses, resources, and knowledge networks, and develops social relationships within the group. It also gives access to group member knowledge networks and group members that can translate knowledge from outside of the group so that it has meaning for the group. Design becomes both the categories (schemata, paradigms, values and perspectives) and the placement (possibilities) in the application of group knowledge (Goodwin, 1994, Nonaka, 1994).

A good example of collaborative design was the Project Plan which later became the project map. Since collaborative design is not static, this document provided both a framework which defined knowledge boundaries and a roadmap for knowledge creation within that framework. The framework became the basis for the shared mental model, which changed as the environment and external factors within which the group was located changed. The group accessed resources from the group’s knowledge network, translated knowledge and created new meaning from the knowledge net created by the group. They then developed new group perspectives by continually updating the Project Plan/Project Map. Nonaka (1994) refers to this group process as semantic knowledge. The insight created through the group design process “provides a new point of view for interpreting events that make previously invisible connections or ideas obvious or shed light on unexpected connections (Miyazaki and Ueno as cited by Nonaka, p. 16).”

To maximize partaged knowledge within the group, distributed groups need to have time to design collaboratively on a continual basis. It is important that group members have a mechanism to continually align perspectives and understand group members' knowledge networks as these networks redevelop. Interdepartmental training and cross functional training will also allow group members to update their knowledge networks, creating social and cognitive relationships outside their established networks. Training will also help identify group members that can act as an interpreter between and within groups and networks.

Intergroup-Organizational Culture: Each organization has its own patterns of work and knowledge that ebs and flows through it. These patterns and the continual creation of knowledge needed to maintain the patterns develop a shared system of beliefs, values, meanings, and symbols (artifacts, metaphors, and organizational rituals) that make up organizational culture (Cook & Yanow). Organizational culture not only informs work patterns, but the dynamic nature of organizational work patterns inform and mold organizational culture.

While knowledge management tries to control the work patterns, organizing knowledge to maximize efficiency, organizational culture gives context to work patterns, prioritizing competing demands and aligning knowledge within the organization whenever dissonance or changes create tension between parts of the organization. Organizational culture also gives meaning to work patterns, acculturating members and stackholders of the organization. These members and stackholders, in turn, create, pass on, maintain, and modify the organization’s cultural identity through their collective practices (Cook & Yanow, Nonaka). Knowledge is embedded within the culture. It is difficult to access this organizational knowledge by those unfamiliar with the organization, nor is this organizational knowledge held by individuals. Rather, the meaning of organizational rituals, artifacts, and symbols is created collectively by the use of rituals, creation of artifacts, and use of symbols (Cook and Yanow, Nonaka).

The project map is a good example of how knowledge is situated within the organizational culture and individuals align meaning through work patterns. This document was used a roadmap for the healthcare group’s work. However, individual interpretations of the project map did not align with the organization’s cultural value of the use of traditional stand-up training curriculum. The map was reinterpreted so that the work patterns changed. The project map document itself was not changed, but the work patterns that were based on the organizational culture did change.

External-Professionalism: The main difference between community of practice and professionalism is that while community of practice is a shared understanding (professional mental model) of the profession, professionalism knowledge exists outside of the individual(s) through formation of professional alliances and networks (Nonaka, 1994). Once a person is identified as a member of the profession, they will need to understand where and how to access community resources.

Professionalism is trans-organizational which means that there needs to be interorganizational interaction for professionalism to exist. This interaction can come in the form of interaction and training with stakeholders, professional organizations, and professional institutions (e.g. professional training programs, higher education programs). The interaction creates both a shared mental model for the profession and an understanding of where and how to access resources within the profession so that it is unnecessary for an individual to know all aspects of the profession, but will have access to all professional knowledge when needed. Conferences, professional training (and retraining), and active membership in professional organizations, therefore, will take on greater meaning as a means for an individual to participate in the knowledge networks where the profession’s knowledge is embedded. Without these activities, individual members will be excluded from the ownership of professional knowledge.

Implications

Organizations that are interested in capturing the knowledge created and used by distributed groups need to recognize the importance of each type of knowledge: knowledge that can be tangibly represented, tacit knowledge and know-how, and partaged knowledge. Partaged knowledge is often overlooked in traditional models and is especially important in distributed groups. As these groups come together, they create a shared, collective knowledge that is more than one individual can possess. Among the synergy created in distributed groups is the understanding of other members’ knowledge network in which knowledge is held outside of the group. However, by nature, the knowledge of distributed groups is dynamic, as members return to their own environments to create new meaning, understanding, culture, artifacts, and knowledge networks. To maximize knowledge creation and sharing within the workplace, organizations need to optimize their understanding of discourse communities, the power structures (formal and informal), and work patterns, that affect distributed group processes.

Discourse Communities

In the study, there were four distinctive discourse communities: 1) the profession(s) to which the study participants belonged; 2) the department(s) to which the study participants belonged; 3) the organization and the power structure within which the group operated; and 4) the group itself.

Not surprisingly, the most successful participants within the group were those that could move easily between and work within multiple discourse communities. Group members who were identified as being the ones that could contribute the most to the group and project, were those that had an ability to learn and move within new discourse communities. Other participants, along with supporting personnel external to the project were identified by numerous study participants as appearing to be unable to participate in the discourse community outside of their own profession or department.

Participants with power within the organization or group would be able to contribute to the project, as their discourse community could be made the standard for discussions. Those outside of the power structure, however, became disenfranchised, frustrated, and felt that their voice was not heard (when in fact their voice was not being interpreted correctly). One option to avoid this problem was for a new working discourse community to be developed for group processes and products. However, group members needed time to create the new heuristics for the created discourse community. As a result, the better option was to create distributed groups whose members could move between the two communities, thus becoming invaluable to the project. Because of group members’ ability to interpret messages from one community to the other, work could be completed simultaneously in each community. However, when those that were acting as interpreters either left the project or pulled back into one or the other community, the success of the group working within both communities was a burden on those that could move between both groups. This may have been why one of the group members complained that she felt she was carrying the burden of the project.

This finding about the discourse communities has a number of communication, training, and management implications. First, training should recognize the role of discourse communities in any new intervention. They should be prepared for miscommunication between discourse communities, parallel discussions, and the burden of change on those who do not necessarily have the expertise, but rather can move between discourse communities.
Second, there needs to be different channels of communication available for different discourse communities. These should not be exclusive of one discourse community or another, rather they should be available to open up dialogue between discourse communities. Formal channels might need to be set up to encourage and allow interaction between the different discourse communities.

Finally, there needs to be a way to ensure that group members are all adept at moving between the discourse communities so that the burden of work does not fall to one or a small group of people. This also ensures that when one person leaves the group, the group will not be paralyzed due to lack of interpretation between discourse communities.

Power structures and ownership

In comparing the two documents, the quarterly report and the project map, there was a difference in the perceived level of ownership. The quarterly report was perceived as being owned by the organization and/or the funding agency whereas the project map was perceived as being owned by the group and/or individual members. The amount of effort and the level of knowledge sharing decreased the further ownership was perceived by the individual. Related to this was an individual’s perception of their place within a task’s power structure. The more an individual perceived they had a higher level of agency within a work task , that their work was important to those within the power structure, and/or that they held a vital spot within the power structure, the greater level of ownership they claimed over a work product or process.

Study participants that indicated a high level of efficacy, ownership, and/or position of power over a specific work task or document tended to use more partaged knowledge to accomplish that task. Participants that perceived their knowledge as less valued, an outcome as owned by others, and/or having limited power over a specific work task or document tended to rely on knowledge that could be represented tangibly.

In order to access a deeper level of worker knowledge, therefore, group members need to feel as if their knowledge is valued. Previous research on information sharing in group decision making processes concur that there needs to be an environment that creates trust within a group, allows for disagreement or contrary information and opinion, rewards (intrinsic and extrinsic) for contribution to the group, and opportunity (through management and communication style) to create knowledge through environment, dialog, communication tools, and time to negotiate meaning (Galinsky & Kray, 2004; Larson, Foster-Fishman, & Franz, 1998; Jeffrey, Maes, & Bratton-Jeffrey, 2005; Miller, Jackson, Mueller, & Schersching,1987).

It is important that employees understand that there will be some work tasks and artifacts for which they will not be able to claim ownership. Government documents, for example, are owned by the government in that they must conform to government expectations. It is important in this case that knowledge that can be tangibly represented be used in creating the document. On the other hand, planning memos or documents to which group members can claim ownership can create tacit knowledge, or access partaged knowledge. Partaged knowledge will not be evident in the document, but will be evident through the effective use of group and group member knowledge in the creation of the document. Both types of documents and collaborative writing processes are important for the organization.
Those within the power structure need to hand over ownership at appropriate times in order to maximize knowledge creation within the organization.

One way to hand the ownership over to groups or individuals is through different types of feedback. During this study, managers and group members used different types of feedback which either provided ownership or withheld ownership at different levels of the process. For example, the IT Director gave specific stylistic changes to one group member needed to make for the quarterly report which took ownership away from from the group member and gave it to the IT Director. On the other hand, the IT Director signed off on the Project Map, giving approval for the document (a form of feedback) but maintaining the group’s ownership of the document. In the first case, ownership of the quarterly report was perceived as being owned by the funding organization and the organization itself whereas the second document was perceived as being owned by the group. Study participants, with the exception of the project manager, perceived very little knowledge creation from the quarterly report, but a high level of knowledge came out of the discussions and creation of the second document. The project manager, a member of the power structure (management) was a co-owner/creator of the quarterly report, so it is understandable why he perceived a greater level of knowledge creation from the quarterly report.

Work Patterns

The study group, like many distributed groups, had competing goals and priorities within which they were working. As reported in previous research on workplace writing (Cohen & Bacdayan, 1994; Martin et al., 2003; Mason & Lefrere, 2003; Yakhlef, 2002), the collaborative writing process can create organizational memory through the conversion of tacit knowledge into knowledge that can be tangibly represented. The tangibly represented knowledge is the result of filtering tacit knowledge and converting it into a form that can be saved and accessed by the organization. Not all tacit knowledge will be recorded, and the process used to convert tacit knowledge into recorded organizational knowledge may create new tacit knowledge. For example, one participant created new processes in order to capture the explicit knowledge required by the funding organization. The quarterly report itself became a record of organizational memory (knowledge that was represented tangibly). However, the new processes created to capture this information generated new implicit knowledge that the participant then used to identify resources needed by those providing the information (stakeholders of the project).

More complex written documents such as analyses, planning documents, visual or creative products and representations of works (e.g. blueprints, advertisements, project management, PERT or Gantt charts), however, are tied into the complex environment within which a distributed group works. These writing processes of distributed groups fall into Lowery’s (2004) expanded definition of writing outlined in Chapter 2:

The potential scope of [Collaborative Writing] goes beyond the more basic act of joint composition to include the likihood of pre- and posttask activities, team formation, and planning. Furthermore, based on the desired writing task, [Collaborative Writing] includes the possibility of many different control approaches, team roles, and work modes (p. 72-74).

In the case of a distributed team, there may be competing control approaches, team member roles and goals, and work mode pressures throughout the duration of a collaborative writing task. The complex collaborative writing task generates more than a final product: it also helps to create knowledge networks and an understanding of multiple environments that impact the distributed group. The written product within these complex environments often becomes visceral as the competing work patterns require changes in the final written product. Thus, a distributed group’s writing process becomes one of drafts, feedback within the group, changes in work patterns, feedback from individual members’ environments, changes in work patterns, changes in the interpretation of the written draft, and changes (if necessary) to the final draft of the written product to align work pattern expectations within the group and their knowledge networks.
As demonstrated in the differences between the professions, group, and departments, distributed groups need both time and opportunity to interact as a means of developing shared cognition and mental models. This, in turn, will provide group members the opportunity to access/develop tacit and partaged knowledge. In addition, the choice of group members within a distributed group may impact the amount of knowledge created by a group. Members of a group with social capital outside of their departments will be able to use expertise and knowledge that is perceived as having value outside of the group. For example, some of the study participants were able to work with group members outside of their own departments because they had expertise and the ability to communicate with those outside of the group. When one member's social capital outside of the group lost value, she was no longer as effective in her work and eventually left the organization.

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Using students to keep current on research

2011-05-10T09:51:00.000-04:00

I know I have not posted anything in a while (and probably won't after this post). However, I currently am buried in grading papers from two different classes, trying to get final grades in as it is the end of the semester.

As I was reading through my student papers, I realized they had a wealth of research that I could use both in my dissertation and in my classes next semester. I have decided that texts don't have what I am looking for in my classes. I have begun to tailor the readings to my classes and assign readings from journals and academic websites. To do this, however, I need to stay current with the research. This is difficult at times, especially when I have pressing family, work, and academic responsibilities.

I have begun to cull promising articles from the resources my students used to write their final papers, an expanded reflection on a topic (or topics) of their choice within the course. I use these papers to help direct changes to the course (areas of interest to the students and areas that I might see as lacking, that perhaps I did not address in the class).

Based on my evaluation of their papers, I will then try to find new resources to address those areas I feel my course needs improvement in and come up with new activities that I can use in my class.

One area many of my students wrote about was virtual teams. Many also wrote about social loafing (always a big topic for groups used in education) and decision making. With this in mind I have decided on trying to integrate two new activities in my class next semester:

1) The virtual/online class I teach often is difficult for the students. I have been dissatisfied about the task I give them to work on. It seems unorganized and students are often confused (although that is part of the task that I want them to learn from). I have decided to expand their task from one of "introductions" to one of sharing information. After reading Jenny Luca's newest post, I decided I would have each group search for a specific item/information and then combine their findings online. This way I can have them work together using a wiki or googledocs, and hopefully see how search engines filter results depending on individual preferences. Hopefully, the groups will be diverse enough that their results will be different. If not, we can address the idea of groupthink.

2) I am going to include a peer review grade in one of the projects. The two projects I set up for my group communication are different tasks with different communication requirements. One is a very structured task in which group members are assigned specific tasks and are given an individual grade for their work within the group. The second task is ill-structured, using a student generated code of conduct, student determined project, and meeting minutes or other written form of communication to document the group work. The first is teacher directed whereas the second is student generated. The two projects overlap with the intention being that students experience two different types of groups and the communication needs that different environments require. Because the second project does not have an individual part to it, there is a lot of social loafing to the project. I have tried to get students to create a code of conduct in which they generate some form of evaluation, but students do not perceive that they have the ability to enforce their code through grades, etc... So I have decided that their code of conduct will have a peer review piece that they will then review at the end of the semester and hand it for grading individual members.

I have no qualms of using my students to do some of the leg work needed to make my classes better. This is the type of student feedback that I feel is important and much better than anonymous questionnaires asking students "how do you like the class".

An online support for the dissertation

2011-04-20T06:50:00.000-04:00

I know I have not posted anything for a while. Things have been crazy this month as I had to help my daughter get ready for a trip to China (her first time out of the country on a class trip), we traveled around and had many discussions as my son made his decision as to which college (university) he would attend, my semester is coming to a close and I have a mountain of correcting, I try to find a full-time job (my son IS going to college next year) and I am trying to finish my first draft of my dissertation.

I know I have written in the past of the loneliness of the dissertation process. However, thanks to Andy Coverdale, I have found a support group of other Ph.d.'s blogging about their dissertation process. It is not that they are doing the same research that I am, but rather, they are going through the same processes and frustrations as they write their thesis/dissertation.

I especially relate to Ailsa's blog: A musing space; a performance in progress. Her newest account had me laughing and agreeing whole-heartedly about the process. If I ever get to the point where I have my own Ph.d. students to advise, I am going to send them to this posting as a starting point.

Well, I am currently working on my conclusions/implications, so hopefully I'll have something to post in the next few days. Thank-goodness for spring/easter break.

Accessing Knowledge and Expertise

2011-03-28T11:26:00.000-04:00

This is a continuation of my dissertation:

The last two themes dealt with how the group and members accessed, created, and used knowledge and expertise. In the one theme, knowledge and expertise of perceived value often was used as currency within the power structure, with study participants sharing, accessing resources, or withholding their knowledge and expertise based on their analysis of situational factors within the environment. This could be termed as transactional knowledge. With the second theme, when expertise and perceived knowledge was shared, there was a process of negotiation in which meaning was created, sometimes at the individual, group, organizational, or professional levels, sometimes at multiple levels. This could be termed as negotiated knowledge or expertise.

Transactional knowledge could be used within the group, between departments, within the organization, and outside of the organization, either between stakeholders or within a community of practice. Expertise, in and of itself, would be difficult to define, but needed to be valued by decision makers and those within the power structure. While a person might have had an expertise to offer on the project, not all expertise was perceived as being valuable to the project. Sam, for example, explains the perceived value of the elearning department within the organization:

We’re isolated a little bit. And we…I don’t know if the other contract managers or whoever they are, um…see elearning as something that they could…they could use to their advantage when doing classroom training. You know, we’ve had experience with blended learning solutions where people may…take some elearning kind of as prerequisite before they get to the classroom training. And then get…everybody would be on the same kind of page if they had don…if they do that. You know what I mean? So things like that, I’m not sure is a…is a solution that they have in mind (Sam, interview 2).

As a result of the elearning department not perceived as having valued expertise in the registration process, for example, those in authority drew resources from the stand-up training department, rejecting the design and registration work presented by those in the elearning department.

The perception of valued knowledge and/or expertise, therefore, was dependent upon whether the knowledge or expertise was 1) in demand, 2) valued by those within the power structure, 3) was perceived as meeting the needs of others (stakeholders, group members, those with legitimate authority), and/or 4) added value to a product, project, or process. In the case of added value, because knowledge was a product for the organization in this study, the ability to convert knowledge into something tangible became an added value to the organization. The tangible knowledge, or knowledge that was represented in a format that was identifiable, could take the form of documents, models, visual representations, interviews or testimonials, assessments such as quizzes and tests, credentials such as diplomas or training credits, web or training tools, and brands. The more tangible the expertise or knowledge was perceived, the easier it was for that knowledge or expertise to be traded or used as currency.

The use and offering of valued expertise and knowledge could be banked and used as a currency for future access to resources. Phillip, for example, spoke about the importance of his work with this group for future positions in the organization, “This is where my education is, all my experience is here. I feel really comfortable, confident, you know, in this field. So I probably want to stay here and this…this ac…this would, um, compliment the experience I’d already have. So could transfer into…into moving me into some other position, maybe, in the future.” The use and offering of valued expertise and knowledge could also allow the value of an individual, group, or department to increase. The quarterly report was important to the organization because it could be used as currency for future projects with the project funder. In addition, many study participants spoke of how this project could be a model for future projects both within and outside of the organization.

The use and offering of valued expertise and knowledge could also create a community of practice within a socially based work network. Within this network, trust, status, and the identification of valued knowledge was developed. The network then could provide access to information, resources, and expertise for future work. However, access within the network was not always reciprocal. If the expertise or knowledge being offered the network was not perceived as being useful or valuable to others within the network, than a member or members may not have had reciprocal access. As a result, the relationship within the community moved away from collaboration and moved towards direction, or even dictating from those with a perceived position of power.

Within the group, for example, the elearning group’s expertise became less and less valued. By the end of the study, the elearning group would withhold their expertise as the stand-up training department began to control the flow of knowledge for the group. This created a situation in which the elearning group used their expertise to do their part of the project, but withheld that knowledge and expertise from the stand-up training department until the elearning piece was complete. As Phillip explains it:

it’s not so…it’s not so much…making concessions or, you know, be willing to give stuff up, it’s, “ I don’t think we’re collaborating in the best way that we can to get this product done.” (Phillip, interview 2).

The elearning group perceived the stand-up training group as dictating the way in which they completed their work. As a result, to maintain ownership over their work and expertise, the elearning department did not consult the stand-up training group until the elearning piece was completed. The elearning group would then make any necessary changes, but did not share their expertise as they were completing their task.

The video group withheld their expertise in a different way. As Olivia explains,
I think a function of that too is I’m not involved in all of the planning sessions for the classroom training or the online training, so they, decisions are made that I don’t know about or they decide that they want this objective. Ah, I don’t think that I need to be a part of that? As long as I know exactly what they want out of that. (Olivia, interview 1).

Olivia did not offer her expertise because she believed decision makers and those in position of authority did not value that expertise. She only did the work that was dictated to her by those higher up in the organizational power structure. Any value that she could have added to the group’s work was withheld if not requested by the group or the organizational power structure. In this way, she maintained ownership of her expertise, withholding it rather than giving it away when it would not be valued.

Members of the group also managed access to their knowledge network. Olivia, for example, seemed to be a strong gatekeeper to her network, partly because of her perception that the group and those in authority did not value her expertise, but also because she was unsure of her place within the project and organization. In other words, she maintained her network outside of the organization and group so that it would not be corrupted should she have to leave the organization. On the other hand, other group members protected their networks from specific members, again so their network was not corrupted (lack of trust, poor reputation, associations with undesirable experts, ideas, or policies).

While transactional knowledge and expertise was based on perceived value, with knowledge identified as something tangible or the ability to be made tangible (through documentation, visuals, processes, etc…), knowledge that created meaning was dependent upon discussion and interaction. This interaction could include communication between coworkers, resources, documentation, the environment, and/or communication tools.

When interviewing study participants, they spoke much more about discussions and trying to develop a shared understanding of the project in the first set of interviews than in the second. The participants used terms such as “being on the same page”, “understanding where they [other group members] were coming from”, and “they (don’t) get it” when they were initially interviewed, which were not as common in the second set of interviews.

There are a couple of possible reasons to explain this. First, in the initial stages of the study, the group seemed to work at getting a shared mental model of their work, project goals, and understanding the perspective of their group members. According to research on group formation (Tuckman,1967; Gersick, 1988) and communication (Jeffrey, Maes, & Bratton-Jeffrey, 2005), this is a natural function of newly formed groups. Once the group has developed a shared mental model, the knowledge and expertise will then be partiaged throughout the group (shared cognition). This partiaged knowledge will be accessed when needed with the renegotiation of the group mental model taking place when internal and external factors demand it.

The lack of discussion and focus on shared meaning and meaning making in the second half of the project might also be explained by the change in management midway through the study. The new management was not perceived as valuing a shared vision or ownership of group projects. They used a management style in which all decisions and project direction came from management rather than from the group itself. As a result, the management changed the project communication structure in which the group members no longer had the opportunity or environment in which to create shared meaning. Weekly group meetings were discontinued and the conversations online were monitored by the Project Director. If she felt the conversation had lasted too long, she would stop discussion online.

Some of the factors participants identified as being important for creating shared meaning included: 1) an openness to ideas, 2) feedback, 3) a sense of trust from those with whom the meaning would be negotiated, 4) awareness of where the starting point should be, 5) a sense of relationship of those involved or perspective taking abilities, and 6) cognitive dissonance or the awareness that there is a difference in understanding. The problem with negotiation meaning on the part of the management, as the group members perceived it, was that creating shared meaning was time consuming, often without results or identifiable (transactional) valued knowledge.

Group members used a number of communication modalities to create shared meanings. These included:

• Face-to-face communication in the form of formal discussions (e.g. regular “check-ins” and updates), working meetings (e.g. planning, departmental, content), weekly meetings, and informal discussions (e.g. breaks, “water cooler” or hallway conversations);

• Written communication in the form of scripts, online postings, programming codes, work approvals, reports, emails, writing planning documents, project task checklists, and feedback solicitations;

• Visuals in the form of write board diagrams, maps that represent content; flow charts, powerpoint slides, video footage, and representative photos.

These different modalities helped to transform implicit knowledge into a tangible, identifiable form which sometimes triggered cognitive dissonance and helped participants discover differences both within and outside of the group.

The cognitive dissonance, once identified, then was the basis for negotiated meaning, with participants defining the boundaries of their understanding. Each participant creates new boundaries, sometimes redefining vision, ideas and/or meaning. For example, Phillip described the process the group went through in adapting content for elearning:

So we kind of, like, arrived at some middle position. So it’s kind of a neat…ah, you know working relationship. And what it does is gives you o…other ways to think about things that you just wouldn’t have thought of. You know, you…you don’t know to think of those…things if you don’t know. (Phillip, interview 1).

At other times, participants maintain their vision, schema or individual beliefs, but are able to understand the perspectives of other group members. This new understanding, a result of perspective taking, would allow group members the ability to discuss their work using negotiated meaning for shared common terms, language, symbols, and formats.

The interaction group members had in negotiating meaning also created relationships both within and extending outside of the group. Group members could act as translators of knowledge for resources within their own knowledge networks. Specifically, each group member had their own knowledge network which they accessed when they needed to find intellectual and cognitive resources (e.g. answers to questions, feedback, information, expertise or specialization). When the individual member was unable to find the resources through their own network, they then turned to group members.

However, because the group members’ cognitive boundaries might not allow them to communicate and/or understand other group members’ knowledge networks, the group would need to rely on its members to mediate understanding between the various knowledge networks and group members. A good example of this was Ronda visiting healthcare provider students with Helen. Helen was able to speak to the students, many of which were also healthcare service recipients and then translate that knowledge into concepts and terminology that Ronda was familiar with. Ronda then incorporated this information into her elearning designs. Without Helen, however, Ronda might have had difficulty in interacting with the students, asking the correct questions for identifying their needs, and/or understanding the information the students provided as Ronda did not have first hand experience or knowledge about the subject matter.

The collaborative writing process and the use of written forms such as meeting minutes and online postings documented the negotiation of meaning and dialogues that created shared mental models. These written communications then became both currency and a basis for continued negotiation of meaning.

For example, the map document was the result of a written roadmap on a whiteboard developed by the core group (Robert, Helen, Paul, Phillip, and Ronda). This whiteboard roadmap was then used as a basis for the Top 10 List learning object outline. Moving between the core group (which members acted as translators) and the elearning department, the Top 10 List became the Map. The Map was the tangible result of the dialogue between the core group and the elearning group. The Map then continued to be revised as those in the various departments began to use it. The project decision makers (Project Director, Project Manager, and Director of IT) began to reconceptualize the project based on the vision outlined in the Map. Each draft of the Map became a documented dialogue that negotiated meaning both inside and outside the group.

Related to this negotiated meaning is the choice of language in collaborative writing which reflects the cultural underpinnings of the discourse community of the profession, department, and/or group. This is knowledge which is difficult to identify. As a result, group members would use other group members and their knowledge networks to check understanding and meaning. As Helen explained about Ronda’s work:

So sh…you have to be able…if you’re going to be writing about it, theoretically, she’s going to write all this, you have to understand disease, how it’s treated, you know, the modalities. I mean, she didn’t know… what do you mean when you say modalities? Ahhh! Inpatient, outpatient, long term care, you know, medication, but…all that kind of stuff. So, she would sit there and ask…she asked us lots of questions so that she could understand it so she could write about it. (Helen, interview 2).

Ronda confirmed this view:

Well, mostly I’m looking for factual corrections, just to make sure that I’ve said the things…I’ve made the point and I’ve captured the information correctly. Cause I’m not an expert on disease interventions. So for example, if I’m doing a…eh, a learning object on medication, ah, understanding the range of medication and the contra indications from medication. Um, there’s a lot of detail there about, you know, milligrams and dosages and, ah, contra indications and answers and stuff. Ah, I would turn to Philip and Helen and Paul to make sure that I’m correct. That I haven’t said anything incorrectly. (Ronda, Interview 1).

It was not necessary for Ronda to have expertise in the field as long as she was able to build her understanding of the healthcare profession’s culture and discourse community by accessing the expertise and experience of the face-to-face training group. Each time Ronda received feedback from Helen, Paul, or Phillip, she developed a deeper understanding of the cultural underpinnings of the healthcare field, even without direct professional experience. Those within the face-to-face training department developed a deeper understanding of the elearning culture and discourse community by accessing the knowledge network of Ronda, David, and Sam. However, the group members did not perceive to have access to Olivia’s knowledge network, either because Olivia was unable or unwilling to translate the culture and discourse needed to access knowledge within her network. While Robert offered access to his knowledge network, the group members perceived their own networks as more valuable sources of insight and knowledge than Robert’s. As a result, they did not access his knowledge network unless they were forced to.

Resources:

Galanes, G. & Adams, K. (2007). Effective Group Discussion: Theory and Practice. Boston: McGraw Hill.

Gersick, Connie (1988). Time and transition in work teams: Toward a new model of group development. Academy of Management Journal, 31 (1), 9-31.

Jeffrey, A., Maes, J., and Bratton-Jeffrey, M. (2005) Improving team decision-making performance with collaborative modeling. Team Performance Management 11 (1/2), p. 40-50.

Tuckman, Bruce (1965) Developmental sequence in small groups. In Classics for Group Facilitators.

Twitter vs. Blogging

2011-03-24T16:06:00.000-04:00

As I have mentioned before, I am in the middle of writing my dissertation, so I don't have much time to write blog posts. However, this is a topic that has been peculating in my mind since Karyn Romeis announced the end of her Karyn's Erratic Learning Journey blog.

This caught many readers off guard. However, I have noticed that many of the blogs I have been following have given up blogging over the last year. I have addressed this in previous blogs, so I won't do so now. But I wanted to address the rising popularity of twitter.

Honestly, for my personal web based habits, I don't see the importance of Twitter. One thing that has been needling me over the last couple of months was a blog report I read that said the African Americans are more apt to use twitter, while the majority of Americans use facebook. Finally, I received the answer from one of my student groups in a presentation they gave on group technology use.

In the presentation they mentioned that twitter was especially effective on mobile technology. Just looking at the access to the internet that my students use, I would say that the majority of my African American students access the internet through their phones, while the other students access it through their labtops. As they say in Costa Rica, the coin dropped (I made the connection). Those linked to the internet (and whose main form of communication) via smart phones, cell phones, or pda's would prefer twitter. Those linked to the internet via labtops, macs, and other pc's have the luxury of seeing and posting a longer reflection.

So as technology gets increasingly more mobile, I predict there will be less blogging.

But wait!

What about the ebook devices, ipad, and netbooks? Perhaps blogging isn't passe, but rather for more "academic" purposes. What do you think?

The Power of Failure

2011-03-09T07:43:00.000-05:00

Karyn Romeis had an interesting post in which she spoke about taking the perfect photo (which was on this post) quite by accident.

I commented:

This actually reminds me of something I've been thinking of lately as my students expect me to "teach them how" rather than giving them opportunities to learn.

Many times, because of our inner critic, we are afraid to just let the situation go where it will, using a gut feeling. The difference between my husband's photos and mine, for example, is that I will take dozens with the hope that one or two will come out "perfect". I don't wait, but just DO. He tries to set up his perception of what perfect would be so he misses that odd photo where someone has such glee on their face. I'm looking at a picture I took when my son was 18 months old where he is smelling the flowers. It is perfect. It only took me about 10 different shots to capture.

So my question to you is, how to you get students to just let go and try things, knowing they may end up being total disasters? How do you get them to quiet their inner critic until AFTER they've experienced something they will learn from?

With that in mind, I went out to capture the recent winter storm we had which ended up in everything being iced over (the French word "glacee" comes to mind). Beautiful to look at (not so nice to drive in). The first picture is one of the ones I would term as "fail". It didn't capture the light and reflection the way I thought it might. I also was too close so it ended up being blurry.

The second one came out just as I would want it. There is contrast between the beautiful blue sky and the basketball net. The icicles coming off the net are unexpected. It only took me 10 photos before I came up with one that conveyed what I wanted to convey.

This was achieved with a combination of a set goal in mind (conveying the beauty of the ice, but also the "coldness") and trial and error. It also required that I keep checking, getting feedback (from the camera) and making changes until I achieved what I wanted.

Karyn's response gives further insight into this process:

Ah, the 64 million dollar question! That mindset is the result of generations of a results-focused education system, where getting it right is what counts, not the process by which we achieve that rightness. Or so I believe anyway. We have become so fixated on results that we have lost the courage to experiment.

I attended a presentation recently where the speaker said something along the lines of "the fear of failure is the enemy of success." We learn so much from failure. That presentation was part of the Learning Technologies conference and a key theme that emerged was how grossly undervalued failure is in our current culture.

I think we are limited in the extent to which we can make a difference, but we could do worse than praise students for trying, even (especially?) when they fail.

There is more to her comment and it is worth it to read her entire response. The gist is, if we don't try we won't fail, nor will really grow.

So what do you think? How do we get people to open up to failure? How do we support them as they fail to learn from those failures?

YouTube as a PLE

2011-03-04T09:19:00.000-05:00

Now, you're probably wondering how YouTube could possibly be used to capture your learning in a Personal Learning Environment (PLE). This idea came to me after my daughter explained how she was using her YouTube Channel.

Her school does not have a formal music program. However, she is very musically inclined, having sung before she could speak. She studied piano outside of school for 4 years. Recently, she has pursued her interest in music (as did my son) via YouTube videos that give piano, guitar, and singing lessons.

Without our knowing, she opened up a YouTube Channel in August. At first, I was a bit wary. However, after she showed me how she was using the channel and the security measures she was taking, I allowed her to keep the Channel open.

Lately, she has begun to update some of the original pieces she originally put up, looking at the feedback she has received and trying to improve these original pieces. Her intention is to keep a record of her progress. Not bad for a teenager.

Integrating YouTube into the curriculum as a PLE

This got me to wondering: 1) what other tools primary and secondary schools are using to record student progress, especially in behavioral changes, 2) how schools are preparing students to become aware of their own learning, 3) other ways to analyze non-formal learning or learning outside of the classroom, and 4) how people use feedback in social networking sites such as YouTube, facebook, and blogs.

YouTube is interesting because it can capture a person's performance and get feedback on it. Imagine using it for work performance at different times of a person's career, to demonstrate skills as an auxiliary to a resume, to make a person aware of their strengths and weaknesses in performing a task, and keeping a record for them to reflect on their progress in learning.

Knowledge as currency

2011-02-28T13:04:00.001-05:00

I currently am working on the theme that knowledge and expertise is used as currency within the workplace (as part of my dissertation). As I have been analyzing the data from my study, I realized that knowledge and expertise used as currency needs to be identifiable.

This got me to thinking about "identifiable knowledge." Notice I don't say tacit or explicit knowledge. The reason is that knowledge that can be turned into currency might be explicit, but expertise can be identifiable, yet be based upon tacit knowledge. So, by identifiable, knowledge and expertise needs to be identified by both those who have and don't have the knowledge or expertise, need to take a form (finished product, process, written documentation, behavior) that both tracks and measures the knowledge and expertise, and needs to be located in a central place or depository (i.e. computer, file cabinet, employee, group, or department) where it can be accessed.

The value of knowledge

As I mentioned before, I am still thinking through many of these ideas for my dissertation. One factor that keeps coming up in my analysis of this theme is the value of expertise and knowledge. There might be expertise, there might be knowledge. However, when knowledge and expertise is being used as currency, then there needs to be value attached to it by the "consumers" of knowledge and expertise. In the US, that currency has become even more important as the current intellectual property laws place a great economic focus on expertise and knowledge.

Who values the knowledge and expertise? According to Friere, that would be those in position of power. And as long as they are able to devalue knowledge and expertise that might threaten their authority, valued knowledge and expertise will be the currency of education.

What does this mean? It means that concrete knowledge, concrete processes, and knowledge and expertise that is sanctioned by those in power will be the basis for someone to be successful in our culture. Thus, welcome the testing and standardized educational system. As much as the media, policy makers, and politicians extort the "new skills" businesses need for our country to continue to improve in the world economy, what they are really saying is that they need a different currency (different knowledge and expertise than what is already out there). That currency will constantly be changing depending on the needs of the economy. But the system will still be the same in which those with valued expertise and knowledge (at the time) will have the ability to use that currency while those with devalued knowledge and expertise (outdated, undervalued by those in power) will need to follow the dictates of those in power (the market).

New educational model

So as I play the currency game and get credentials that I hoped would be valued, I now find that (as has happened my whole life), my expertise now is no longer valued in our economy/culture. There are no jobs for those who have an understanding of the international knowledge economy, that can teach foreign language and cross cultural communication skills, that can improve team management skills, no jobs for those that can teach better communication or writing skills, no jobs for those in adult and online instructional design (as opposed to technical jobs for elearning of which there are many jobs), and no jobs to create a new educational system.

Whereas my expertise 7 years ago when I started the Ph.D program was in demand, now it is assumed that all faculty are able to integrate technology into their teaching.

But here is the rub: there is a lot of knowledge and expertise that 1)cannot be measured, 2) is lost when it is made into something identifiable, 3) does not ad value, 4) exists but has yet to find value, and 5) is distributed.

This means that the classes that I planned for this week (as I do every week) does not have perceived value, especially in this point in time. My students don't see the amount of preparation I put into the planning of the class, aligning learning goals with class activities. It is hard to measure the amount of time I take thinking about my course and how I can teach it so the students may be able to use the skill and their experience in the future when they are faced with a similar situation.

I have also found that those within my study group who are the most successful are those that know how to identify valued knowledge to multiple groups, how to access resources, knowledge, and expertise when needed, and are flexible in the way in which they align their work with others goals. These are the skills we should be teaching our students. If we continue to focus on the currency of their future rather than how to create currency and use it, then we will end up with a stagnant economy. We will also continue to lose expertise and new knowledge as has happened throughout the ages to those with ideas before their time.

The politics of workplace collaboration

2011-02-21T09:56:00.001-05:00

I have finished another section of my dissertation. This section deals with the politics that affect workplace collaboration, especially the development of workplace knowledge and access to workplace resources during collaborative writing processes.

Knowledge Embedded within the Project Power Structure

While professional, group, and departmental expertise and knowledge appears to be the result of embedded practices that group members may not be aware of, the knowledge embedded with the power structures of the project appeared to be more explicit, tangible, and intentional. The power structure consists of expectations by those who have organizational power, those within the group who have expert power (as opposed to authority), and stakeholders within the profession and the fancying agency and the perceived authority of the official hierarchy within the group and departments. Some of the study participants, such as Robert and Olivia, perceived power as equal to the hierarchy laid out by official organizational charts and job titles. Others, such as Sam and Paul, perceived those in power as those that were able to influence work, decisions, and group members based on access to resources, expertise, and organizational placement. This second perception of power is referred to as expert power, in which a person (or people) have power that is acknowledged by peers and those in positions of authority by virtue of being able to contribute, not solely because they have been granted power by those in positions of authority (Engleberg & Wynn, 2007; Galanes & Adams, 2007).

In the study, individual members felt empowered or powerless dependent upon their perceptions of how their ideas, contributions, and expertise are valued. The greater empowered they felt, the greater sense of ownership they felt towards their work. For example, Helen discussed how they rewrote the curriculum after the curriculum that was handed them to use for stand-up training was deemed insufficient. “But all of this, in my opinion, has been driven by the stand up curriculum that we’ve been writing that has changed this innumerable times…[later]…Like I said, we were looking at the old curriculum, what their outline was, what their content was, how this field delivers services, you know. And we totally restructured it.” Notice how she distinguishes between the two curriculums: she uses the pronoun of their when referring to the curriculum that was originally imposed on the group and uses the pronoun we when referring to the revised curriculum. This implies a greater level of ownership that they were permitted to exercise by developing their own (the stand up training department in the project group) curriculum.

On the other hand, formats, work processes, and visions imposed on the group or individual group members from the authorities within the perceived power structure often resulted in a distancing from the work and a lack of personal or group ownership of the product. An example of this was the quarterly report. Helen’s description of her process for the writing the quarterly report was similar to the other group members:
It has the same format every quarter. I mean it’s…it’s…you know, there is a…[pause]…outline that… that’s followed and it’s a report on each segment of…the project. Classroom training, technical assistance, elearning progress. The video people get reported in on the IT stuff. It’s…I mean, I’ll be honest with you. I contribute my part and I’ve never read anyb…I’ve never read a quarterly report. (Helen, interview 2).

There was a certain amount of apathy towards the quarterly report in which each group member wrote a contribution, but Robert was the owner of the final report. Many of the group members, like Helen, never read the final version. As Helen implies, the format was imposed on the group members from the sponsor (through an outline of required information in the project contract) and the organizational hierarchy. The hierarchy imposed the report format through a series of approvals required before the final report was sent to the sponsor.

One common problem with the collaborative process that the group had was that the work did not always align with the expectations of those that had authority within the power structure at various levels in the organization and project. This happened on the individual, group, departmental, organizational and professional levels. One way conflict was resolved was for those who perceived themselves as powerless in a given workplace circumstance to distance themselves from their work, giving ownership to those that they perceived as having authority. They also withheld their expertise, tacit knowledge, skills, and identifiable knowledge that they did perceived those within the power structure did not value. This was what members of the elearning department did after the new Project Director took over.

Originally, the content objects were designed to be stand alone related lessons. Project members from the elearning department worked closely with those in the stand-up training department to create a shared vision of the content objects. However, there was a different project vision between the group and the organizational hierarchy. This resulted in some members leaving the organization (thus withholding their expertise from the organization), while the remaining members simply coded the content rather than adding creative elements and other expertise on online learning to the finished product. In analyzing the supporting project documents, documents created after the new Project Director took over were more uniform between departments than those created before the new Project Director arrived.

If, however, the group members had a greater sense of ownership towards their work, they were more likely to circumvent or ignore the preferences of those in authority. This is what happened in the planning stages of the Top Ten/ Subway document. The project group were using basecamp to allow access to the document’s various drafts and solicit feedback. The Project Director approved a draft and ordered the group to discontinue further discussion on the document. However, the project group continued discussions using an alternative space within basecamp in order to circumvent the notice of the Project Director. This document had value for the group, so the group continued to develop it. The document had such value, in fact, that numerous group members claimed ownership of the final subway map and its content.

From an ethnomethodological perspective, there was a reciprocal relationship between the group and those outside of the organization, especially the funding agency, the trainees, and the profession. The power structure, in fact, was perceived differently by individual group members at different stages of the project, for different project tasks, different work environments, and different levels of access to resources. In other words, the perceived power structure was situated and dynamic. Those perceived as having power over the group and the project were solicited for feedback and approval for activities that impacted the group’s work processes, formats and products. This feedback was then used to create group work norms which could impact the group, the departments, or even the organization. If the feedback from those within the perceived power structure was ignored, group members feared that resources would be withheld and ownership may be taken away. While there may not be explicit threats or repercussions, group members would react to the potential threat they perceived from those in positions of authorities in the power structure.

For example, Ronda spoke about trying to access resources for video production, which those in authority did not value. They would use the excuse that there was no money for video, and yet video was cheaper than other resources they would recommend.

In this case, Ronda believed that those with authority within the power structure did not want to use video, so they would withhold resources to create video. Paul, also spoke of the effect that the Project Director’s potential feedback and approval had on his workplace writing process:
I’m, like, well, how irritated is the Director going to be? Will seeing these….you know, which to me, I mean certainly I have put a lot of time and effort into…but, you know, I see them as rough draft kinds of things. And usually you want the…the, you know, the top leadership person who is looking at these things to have just final say and you really want to have, um, really high quality products go to them before…You know, really have things really worked on strongly before they go to basically, you know, like an executive level person for final approval. (Paul, interview 1).

Those with authority within the power structure used funding, access to resources (including interdepartmental expertise), training, standards, formats, and communication tools (basecamp, website, word processing templates) to maintain approved organizational culture, hierarchy, and relationships that created the power structure. Throughout the study, the hierarchy of the power structure shifted from the group to the stand-up training department and from the external clients and healthcare profession to the funding agency and organization. As a result, knowledge and expertise that was valued shifted resulting in group members constantly trying to identify their place within the power structure. As the importance of their knowledge and expertise was repositioned, their perceived ownership of the project was also repositioned. This was especially evident within the elearning department in which they perceived their expertise to be increasingly undervalued by the organizational hierarchy. They therefore felt less and less ownership for the final products that the elearning department was creating for the project.

While those in positions of authority used resources to control the work processes and enforce the use of power structure formats, others in the group were able to improve their place within the power structure by knowing how to access resources, develop a network of expertise, and disseminate or deliver knowledge that was perceived as valuable within a network of knowledge.

As Paul explains it, expertise is held outside of the group and group members. Accessing the knowledge that the experts have means the group and its members needed to understand where that knowledge might be, what form the knowledge might take, how the network can be developed and accessed, the key players to accessing the network, and how to overcome barriers to creating and accessing networks within and outside of the project power structure. The development of these knowledge networks may be dependent upon an understanding of the political nature of the power structure, social networking skills, cultural (organizational, professional, and departmental cultures) awareness, and the ability to link ideas, information and resources across a social system or network.

There were two approaches study participants used to access knowledge networks within the power structure:

1. Identify valued information within the power structure and present that knowledge for use by those in authority. In this strategy, information would be complied, structured, and sequenced using a format those within the power structure expected. In presenting the information using the power structure’s format, members supported the type of knowledge and expertise that the power structure valued, thus reinforcing the perceived value of the knowledge and expertise for those who had legitimate power. Information was often unfiltered and analysis was conducted by those perceived to have power. This strategy used knowledge that took an identifiable form such as reports, design plans, meeting minutes, and written feedback.

2. Filter, analyze, and highlight information to present a point of view that may or may not be aligned with the power structure. This information then would be used to try to change culture (organizational, departmental, professional), create a new mental model, develop shared cognition, change the project vision or processes, or realign some aspect(s) of the project perception. This strategy often used more tacit and less identifiable knowledge, relying on social and knowledge networks.
The first strategy was often used when there was a product in which the group or a group member did not feel a strong sense of ownership, the group or group member felt powerless within the power structure, and/or there was a group or group member perception of alignment of project goals and vision(s) with those who posed authority within the power structure.

Olivia, Paul, and Robert used this strategy. Olivia was influenced by her supervisor who she perceived had authority over her work. She often commented on how it was not her place to make decisions on her work, but rather her supervisor’s, especially after her department was newly absorbed into the training organization. Robert perceived that he was part of the power structure within the organization and as such, it was necessary for him to maintain the formats and processes that he and others he perceived as having authority developed. Paul’s work was often influenced by feedback from those he identified as having legitimate authority with the group, organization, and profession. Using the power structure as a framework, he developed a network of social contacts and sources of information that he could access when those he perceived as having authority needed to access knowledge they deemed as valuable. Paul himself tried to maintain a neutral perception of the information, expertise and resources he had access to within his knowledge network, doing very little filtering. Instead, he would use different highlighting standards dependent upon his analysis of what those within the power structure valued as knowledge for a given situation. In other words, he would find information and expertise that would support the power structure’s view point, ignoring information and expertise that might refute the goals and vision of those with perceived power.

The second strategy was often used by those who felt a strong sense of agency or ownership over their work and/or perceived there was a misalignment of goals, vision, or work processes between themselves, the group, or those within the power structure. The use of this strategy had the potential of creating conflict. Helen and Ronda often used this approach. They would filter or withhold information or work processes to convince those within the power structure towards a certain action, decision, or approach.

A great way to capture life where your live

2011-02-03T14:23:00.000-05:00

Over the last two days we had constant snow (actually the whole month of January and it looks like February is on its way). The Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences has begun to keep a blog (which it started a few years ago but abandoned until this semester). As part of their blog, they included a time lapse of 52 hours of the various storms we had passing through. It is really impressive to watch.

The educational value of the blog is interesting to me. The school connects to the community and community is able to use the knowledge and understanding the school is creating.

What happens when no one recognizes your genius?

2011-01-28T09:41:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I'm not claiming to be a genius. Let's start there. However, two things happened yesterday to trigger this post.

First, I met with my dissertation adviser. He is very good in terms of focusing my work. However, I'm always so depressed after speaking with him as I feel I will never complete this process. I had sent him drafts of chapters (one of which I found out later was the wrong file...not the 71 page completed draft but rather a 3 page draft).

What is difficult is that I have a lot of ideas running around in my head which are very difficult to articulate. I don't write in the traditional way (linear), and as I told my adviser, many times I just want to get the thought down on paper. I had sent to him a work in progress, the findings chapter (many pieces of which I have posted on this blog over the past few months). They were bits and pieces just so he could get a feeling of what I was working on. But it is hard to link all of these ideas together.

This type of knowledge is something I'm still trying to label for my dissertation. However, I'm leading towards the term of Partaged Knowledge. This is the ability to link together ideas and understanding both internally and externally to an individual. I derived the term from the French word of "partager" which means both to share and to divide. Partaged knowledge is knowledge that one would need to be able to access and link to other knowledge (i.e. linking ideas, putting into context). This might be internal like when I am writing. Many of my ideas are separate initially, seemingly without any correlation (divided). However, through the writing process, I must link together those ideas into one cohesive whole (thus the sharing or putting together through interaction of ideas).

The same can happen with group processes in which group members come into the group (especially a distributed group) with different expertise, access to resources, cultural influences, and experience/mental models of the work (divided resources and expertise). Through their work processes, their knowledge is partaged (yes, there is an English work which means share) throughout the group and beyond through knowledge networks.

Where do the ideas go?

While I might have good ideas, or even brilliant, my meeting with my adviser made me realize that it means nothing if you can't communicate those ideas in such a way that others will understand them. As my adviser apologized for what he thought was the harshness of his written comments (i.e. I'm totally confused as to what you are trying to say here), I could only appreciate his comments...The fact was, I was confused and I had written it!

For the most part, I have a thick skin about my writing. I look at the process as a means of negotiating meaning. This means I never look at a paper or something I have written as a final product in a process. Rather part of the process of understanding. But I do get frustrated as the length of time that it takes to complete a major project such as an article or a thesis/dissertation. Likewise, my family does not understand this process and why it is taking so long. I walked out with a hole in my stomach as the amount of work that I still need to do began to weigh me down.

Leonardo diVinci's lost genius

Last night, I watched a program (on PBS) about Leonardo DiVinci's Dream Machines (produced by Channel 4 in Britain). What struck me was the ending in which they spoke about the large number of notebooks DiVinci left behind, hoping his assistant would disseminate the knowledge once DiVinci died. Instead, DiVinci's notebooks were divided up, some being destroyed, some kept by a Cardinal who presumably withheld the notebooks because they were deemed dangerous (as many new ideas are), others passed on to individuals. While DiVinci's art was made public, his scientific and non-art observations and analyses were kept private as the world he lived in was not ready for his ideas.

These ideas have now been revisited and align with what we know today. What would be considered fantasy and impossible to believe back in diVinci's day, now are considered genius.

So what is the difference? Well, for one thing, we now have ideas that can be linked to diVinci's. In other words, partaged knowledge can be distributed across time as well as space and people. However, more than anything, diVinci was unable to communicate his ideas to his contemporaries (for many reasons). Now, others are taking his notes and "making sense" of them in new contexts. Had diVinci been a better communicator for his time, perhaps he would have had many of his ideas implemented. My guess was that he was hoping this was something his assistant would do. But perhaps his assistant did not have the ability to understand the copious notes his "master" had made.

So like the dissertation process, it is just as important for those with multiple ideas to be able to link those ideas together and communicate them outside of one's own head. Otherwise, it is a very frustrating process.

Social networking: the hope of someone finding your genius

Blogging, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are all ways that people are trying to communicate their ideas and "genius." I watch as my children and their friends use social networks to broadcast their ideas and work. They are hoping that someone will recognize their genius which may not be recognized in a more provincial community. Ideas that are out of the box may find acceptance outside of the hegemony of a person's own culture. Likewise, other people's ideas will push the boundaries of cultures.

So perhaps social networking could be considered the ultimate tool in critical pedagogy. Perhaps that is why so many people are scared by its use, especially in primary and secondary education.

Disconnect with the "little people"

2011-01-21T13:39:00.000-05:00

Yet again the President was in our neck of the woods. And yet again, as I watched the live feed, one would think that this area is composed of just white, middle aged, male politicians. What about the number of working women? What about the rather large Asian population that works at the GE plant in Schenectady? What about the rather large Guyanese population that moved into vacant building a decade ago in Schenectady? But most importantly, what about the youth who are our future for tomorrow (and elected the Democrats and Obama in 2008)? Is there any doubt why all these groups feel disenfranchised?

It seems to me, in teaching communication, that those images that surround the President help to communicate who his target market is. Perhaps it is easier to get a security clearance for Politicians than the general population. However, there were other groups that were at the speech (they were interviewed AFTER his live speech). It was just they were not surrounding the President.

I hope that should he ever visit this area again that he is surrounded by a younger generation. I would love to see school children and high school students get the opportunity to attend these events. It would definitely get them involved in the political system.

Intuitive hunches in doing primary research

2011-01-19T10:42:00.001-05:00

There was a new study that came out in the Journal of Psychology supporting that there might be something to ESP (Extra Sensory Perception). They found that some people have predictive powers that may be more than just pattern recognition which then helps to make a "best choice." They also found that people that have this ability also tend to be risk takers. It could be that they are risk takers because they trust their instincts (although the commentator suggested that those with a risk taking personality are more apt to have the "gift"...i.e. ESP goes hand in hand with risk taking personalities).

At any rate, as I am working on writing up my findings for my dissertation today, I keep coming up against a road block. While I can write on my blog those patterns I see without having to support them with others ideas, and scads of documentation, I do need to do so with my dissertation. As a result, I often find myself with writer's block. My family often complains that my explanations are convoluted and long winded, and I blame my academic training for this. Rather than going with intuition and a hunch, I have to be careful that I can support every sentence of every paragraph of every section that I write. As a result, there are many ideas that I can't include in the dissertation. This makes the process even longer as I try to skillfully craft rhetoric which will support my findings, and present it in such a way that ANYONE can understand it.

Now you know why I have had a headache on and off for the past 2 years!

More on discourse communities: community "vision"

2011-01-10T08:27:00.001-05:00

After my last post, I read an article by Charles Goodwin on professional vision. Goodwin looked at professionalism through an anthropological lens, but it fits well with the idea of discourse community (which is a term used more in language learning and communication).

Goodwin looked at how professionalism is both created, developed, and maintained through coding, highlighting, and "producing and articulating material representations. (p. 606)." All of this combined creates what Goodwin calls a "professional vision" within which members of the profession are able to work and converse.

Expanding on his idea, I would say that these three factors (coding, highlighting, and producing and articulating material representations) are aspects of a discourse community. Goodwin's coding is the use of language, jargon, and articulation of shared understanding that is the foundation of the profession.

Highlighting is a more complex concept. As Goodwin describes it, within a community of practice certain ideas, information, and expertise is highlighted between members. This creates a shared vision as to what knowledge is important and the boundaries that help form professional values.

Goodwin's framework, knowledge, and discourse communities

Like a profession, discourse communities create their own codes (including jargon, rules of discourse, syntax, and symbols), highlights, and material representations. This helps to create the vision (often not articulated) of the discourse community. This is often articulated through formats, processes, and interaction about practices.

Formats and other tangible artifacts (material representations), help to record, categorize, and structure knowledge both within and outside of the discourse community.

Processes and skills are used to filter and highlight knowledge and structure interaction in order to develop and maintain the parameters of the community. It is also a way to identify membership and to negotiate situated knowledge within a dynamic environment. Because community knowledge is situated, the processes and skills creates a framework within which cognition can be developed by the discourse community. When the skills or processes no longer meet the needs of the community, the community may:

1) disband and members move into a new discourse community;
2) change its skills and processes (retool); or
3) try to eliminate the situational factors that are creating the pressure to change (i.e. limit membership, try to stop outside influences, codify all aspects of discourse through rules, etc...)

Note: see the comment by Luisa Migual on Andy Coverdale's blog. It is an example of how a discourse community meets the needs (or doesn't) of its members.

Spatial knowledge in a discourse community includes the understanding of the networks within the community, the shared agreement of what (implicit) knowledge is important, and knowing who has what abilities within the community and how to access the discourse community resources and expertise. The discourse community vision is based on spatial knowledge of the discourse analysis. In turn, the discourse community vision is the basis for culture, articulating values, interaction, and shared cognition.

Goodwin, C. (1994) Professional Vision. American Anthropologist, New Series, 96 (3), 606-633.

Differing discourse communities: a major source of tension in distributed teams

2011-01-05T11:06:00.000-05:00

I have been away from my work on my dissertation for the last month in order to prepare for next semester. However, at 3:00AM this morning, an insight into the current analysis I am doing for three of the themes I've identified (1. expertise is defined by the profession, 2. expertise is defined by the department, and 3. Expertise is defined within the organizational power structure) came to mind. So I got up and began to write.

This is still in the development stage, and I need to pull specific examples out (which I have, but the most relevant need to be chosen still) to support my analysis. However, each of these themes can be explained by discourse communities and how these communities affect communication within distributed groups.

Defining discourse communities

Discourse communities are similar to communities of practice in that who belongs to the community, how the community functions and its rules and values, is all dependent on the perspective of the individual members. Like community of practice, there are rarely explicit rules for membership and membership behavior. Some individuals, in fact, may believe they are a member of a certain discourse community while others might not perceive that person is an actual member.

For example, Eminem's use of language puts him in the urban African-American culture. However, many urban African Americans do not accept him as a legitimate member. Other white Americans perceive him as a "want-to-be" who mimics urban African American discourse. Having grown up within an urban community surrounded by the urban African American discourse community, he probably is part of that discourse community, especially around friends and others he has grown up with. However, there are no clear cut rules or membership requirements for a discourse community.

A discourse community has to do with the way in which those within the community communicate. Most recent research on discourse communities have come out of the research from those advocating a genre approach to teaching writing (i.e. Gee, Swalyes). Discourse includes shared values in communication, shared formats and rules of communication, shared lexicography (not just terms but a shared understanding of how those terms and combination of terms are interpreted and used), grammar and language structure use, and even ways to identify who is "part" of the community and who is not.

Discourse communities in distributed teams in the workplace

In my study, I identified four distinctive discourse communities: the profession(s) to which the study participants belonged; the department(s) to which the study participants belonged; the organization and the power structure within which the group operated; and the group itself.

Not surprisingly, the most successful participants within the group were those that could move easily between and work within multiple discourse communities. Group members such as Paul, Sam, Helen, and Ronda, who were identified as being the ones that could contribute the most to the group and project were those that had an ability to learn and move within new discourse communities. Olivia and Robert, along with supporting personnel external to the project were identified by numerous study participants as appearing to be unable to participate in the discourse community outside of their own profession or department.

This supports those researchers in the "Genre School" in learning how to dissect the "genre" in order to be successful in society. However, these findings would also suggest that it is not enough to know and understand the mainstream genre. It is also important to be able to learn and work within multiple genres, especially when working with distributed teams as the new knowledge economy requires.

Much of the tension on the project, in fact, appeared to be caused by the clashing of 2 or more discourse communities. When this happened, the study participants either

1. retreated to work only with those within their discourse community,

2. tried to create new meaning and/or understanding that would bridge the two discourse communities; or

3. create different communication channels to maintain the conversation in both discourse communities (parallel discussions).

In the first case, participants with power within the organization or group would be able to contribute to the project, as their discourse community could be made the standard for discussions. Those outside of the power structure, however, became disenfranchised, frustrated, and felt that their voice was not heard (when in fact their voice was not being interpreted correctly).

In the second case, a new working discourse community was developed within the group for group processes and products. In order for this to work, however, it would take some time to create the new heuristics for the created discourse community. This process was both useful, but also time consuming.

In the third case, it those that could move between the two communities became invaluable to the project. Because of their ability to interpret messages from one community to the other, work could be completed simultaneously in each community. However, when those that were acting as interpreters either left the project (Ronda) or pulled back into one or the other community (Paul and Sam), the success of the group working within both communities was a burden on those that could move between both groups. This may have been why Helen complained that she felt she was carrying the burden of the project.

Implications

This has a number of communication, training, and management implications. First, training should recognize the role of discourse communities in any new intervention. They should be prepared for miscommunication between discourse communities, parallel discussions, and the burden on change coming on those who do not necessarily have the expertise, but rather can move between discourse communities.

Second, there needs to be different channels of communication available for different discourse communities. These should not be exclusive of one discourse community or another, rather they should be available to open up dialogue BETWEEN discourse communities. Formal channels might need to be set up that encourage and allow interaction between the different discourse analysis.

Finally, there needs to be a way to ensure that group members are all adept at moving between the discourse communities so that the burden of work does not fall to one or a small group of people. This also ensures that when one person leaves the group, the group will not be paralyzed due to lack of interpretation between discourse communities.

Blogs that I read regularly (top blog list for 2011)

2010-12-31T11:20:00.001-05:00

About twice a year, I review my igoogle home page, editing out those blogs that I don't read and adding blogs that I may find myself accessing more often. I decided that others might want to see who I read on a regular basis and perhaps find new sources of information (which I do on a regular basis).

Daily reads

These blogs are ones that I read as soon as they are posted. While the authors may not post on a daily basis, I look for any new posts almost daily. In reviewing these posts, the reason I look for them daily is because I feel a "kindred spirit" with them (as Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables would say).

Karyn Romeis (Karyn's erratic learning journal) : Her blog deals not only with learning issues, but many times she includes cultural observations and family issues that I can connect with (especially as I also have two teens). I like the way she integrates her personal life into the blog and the honesty in which she writes about any issue. I like to think I do the same with my own blog

Andy Coverdale (Phd blog (dot) net) Like me, Andy is working on his Ph.d. In addition, I'm very interested in the visual communication aspect of his research. I connect with many of the academic issues he discusses in his blog including how the university works, the process of research, collaborating with colleagues, and emerging ideas (especially in academia).

Ken Allen (Blogger in middle earth). I have been a fan of Ken's blog for a long time as, like Karyn, there is a high level of integrity in his postings that cover a wide range of topics that he is interested in. Unfortunately, this year he has only posted sporadically ( I am afraid that he is being held hostage in Second Life as when he began to dabble in that program was when he stopped posting regularly). Hopefully, he will pick up the blog posts again this year.

Weekly perusals

The next group of blogs are those that I skim at least once a week (sometimes more often if I have extra time) because of the quality of information in their posts.

Jenny Luca: Lucacept-Intercepting the Web. Although she is half way around the world, it is amazing how relevant her blog is to what happens in k-12 (primary and secondary school) here in the US. Her School's out Friday are must reads for me (although I usually read them on Mondays). Many of her posts deal with integrating technology into primary and secondary education on a practical, practitioner's view point.

Quinn Clark: Learnlet's and Harold Jarche often have related content. Both are educational technology consultants, mostly in professional and/or organizational training. Quinn also has posts dealing with some of the issues for other levels of education. Both of these blogs have theoretical models, research related links, and frameworks for learning that are very educational. I usually skim through and find the most relevant issues to read as just keeping up with their posts would require too much of my time (this is the richness of their posts).

Tom Haskins: growing changing learning creating Tom deals with issues at both the university level and those in the field of business (especially management, marketing, and communication education). Reading his posts helps me stay current with the field in which I am teaching. For a business professor, his posts are remarkably insightful educationally (my experience with business professors is that they are grounded in old fashioned teaching methods, usually in the behaviorist tradition).

Michael Hanley: Elearning Curve As basically a non-techy in the area of computer mediated communication, I find Michael's blog an invaluable source of information. Each post is well thought out, grounded in current research, but also easily accessible to the basic novice. His series study an area in-depth which makes it easy to search past postings when there is a topic I may need help on.

Sahana Chattopadhyay: ID and other reflections. Like Jenny Luca, Sahana's blog (geared towards adult learning) is very relevant, although she lives and works in a totally different culture than my own. There are times when I have gone back to check her location, because the issues she discusses are so relevant to issues in instructional design I face here. Her posts always have good supporting resources. She does more than regurgitates interesting resources, she puts theories into practice with good analyses and examples.

Old Stand-bys

There are some sites that I check in on when I have the time as I know the posts will be interesting (as well as the conversation). I don't have as much time to participate in these blogs as I used to as I work on my dissertation, but I access these blogs, especially if there is a specific area I want to investigate.

Tony Karrer: eLearning Technology A popular elearning blog which allows readers to get a pulse of trends in elearning and organizational training.

Jane Hart: Jane's E-Learning Pick of the day. Still the best site to look for new technolgy.

Nancy White: Nancy White's Full Circle Blog. For anyone doing research on collaboration or communities of practice, this is an invaluable resource. I just wish she would post more frequently than she did this year.

Christine Martell: Exploring with Images Christine repositioned her business and her blog last year. She now includes many of her own original artwork. I love to just sign on and look through her images as it always makes me smile. Her art has such a soothing, happy spirit to it.

New Blogs for me this year

Mark Berthelemy: Learning Conversations Although I had visited his blog sporadically over the past few years, this year I finally added Mark's blog onto my igoogle page. He has a number of interesting insights, especially into learning and learning with technology.

cv harquail: Authentic Organizations This is a hard one to describe. This blog aligns with my dissertation research and addresses organizational behavior, but from a critical literacy perspective. It includes posts on organizational behavior, culture, and a feminist perspective. At the very least, it is always interesting in its perspective; at its best it is very enlightening.

So what are you reading?

I'm always looking for new blogs. What blogs would you recommend?

Prezi, a new way of thinking about presentations

2010-12-22T14:58:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I gave my first presentation using Prezi. I had heard about the software and had even registered for the educational version, but then had promptly forgotten about it. Then one of my students used it in a class assignment. So giving a presentation on Presentations to my daughter's class, I decided to try it out. As this is the first presentation I've given using Prezi, it is still in the basic mode. Also, I'm not sure what the difference is between the educational version and the commercial version. So here is my review of Prezi's EDUCATIONAL version (this is free to educators and students...other users will need to pay for it).

Advantages

What I particularly like about using Prezi in a presentation is that I don't have to present linearly. For example, yesterday, I found that many of the students were much further along in some aspects of presentation skills and needed a lot of help in other aspects. Also, as this was a classroom presentation, certain questions and issues came up "out of sequence." Students would ask questions for which I had planned to cover later in the workshop. However, because of the none linear nature of Prezi, I was able to go to that part of the prepared presentation that addressed the issue or question. This made my presentation much more flexible.

Likewise, Prezi was very easy to use, especially as they had a basic interactive video pop up each time you use Prezi (you can override this) which helped instruct on how to use Prezi. Their supporting videos and resources were really excellent. Some of the most useful features included an automatic YouTube link which makes it easy to embed YouTube clips right into the video...no having to go outside of the presentation like PowerPoint requires.

Shortcomings

There are some features that I think Prezi can work on. The first would be the ability to embed any video link as easily as You Tube is. In order to embed other sites, you must first cut and paste the URL address into the Edit mode of Prezi, then leave the site, click on the link, then go back to edit mode and click on the site again. This is very cumbersome. You must also remember what the URL address goes to whereas the YouTube clip comes up on the Prezi presentation.

I also found the show part of the presentation a bit difficult to work with. I feel this would probably be easy to learn, and it would be a good alternative to self directed training as a click will focus on those areas of the presentation that you want someone to see in sequence. However, it is also possible for someone to take control of their own learning and override the "show" function.

Another problem was that the program was very easy to use with a mouse. But the computer I used for the presentation used a finger pad. Now, I'm the first to admit that I don't like finger pads and am not the best in using them. However, it was next to impossible to use Prezi with the finger pad. I ended up borrowing a mouse.

One final minor problem was that whenever I clicked a certain way on the presentation (I'm not sure what that was though), the presentation would rotate. Fortunately, there was a rotate icon which I used to straighten out the format. But this was very irritating.

Global voices

2010-12-14T11:26:00.001-05:00

I am always interested in looking at the perspective of those outside of the US. I happened upon a clip of Ethan Zuckerman's presentation at TED, a series of speeches of important ideas. I rarely embed speeches because it slows down my readers downloading time. However, this was a really fascinating speech on the role of social media, breaking down the cultural uses.

In the presentation, he confirms some of the principles I have written about earlier in terms of culture and technology, namely that it is not the tools used, but how they are used. He uses graphics that demonstrate the depth of internet use; not just accessibility, but also HOW technology is being used and for what topics. As he says, "many places can GET media, it is just an enormous amount of work to do so." He advocates rewiring the system we have, going outside of the "flocks" (or what I would call discourse communities) to find new ideas and connections.

Zuckerman is one of the cofounders of Global Voices. This site creates these new pathways by finding media and blogs from around the world, translating them, and making them available for anyone interested in knowing what others in other parts of the world are discussing. Each area has translators and "curators" who who choose articles, blogs, and internet media that represent the issues of a certain region. The translators are listed on the blog, so anyone can see what their background (and bias) might be. This is going to be one of my new favorite sites, I think, as I will be able to get a perspective outside of the US on global issues.

Three models for a new higher ed economic model (part 2)

2010-12-07T12:26:00.001-05:00

This has been some time in coming. I wanted to think through some of the options based on my earlier post on this issue.

In reviewing all the factors, I wanted to develop an economic or funding model that could be implemented sooner, rather than later. However, I realized that I have seen at least 3 models in use that have been effective over the last decade. So why reinvent the wheel? Two of the models are based on a large component of instruction being distance learning based, the third is more traditional.

Pure distance learning and assessment based higher education

The first model is based on a local university that was developed out of the New York state civil service training department. Often civil service workers, who did not have higher ed degrees, received training that was equivalent to a university course. Recognizing that those that received this training should be able to receive college credit, a system of testing and granting college credit for the training was established.

Approximately 10 years ago, a Swiss university bought out this service, adding there own model on to the established service. Currently, the university identifies online courses, creates its own courses, and creates a standard curriculum, all of which are based on a examination process. Students actually pay for exams rather than the courses themselves. This means that a student may not take any course, as long as they can demonstrate knowledge through the exams. Students that opt to take instruction through the university will pay for those courses. Students can also submit courses, training, and instruction to receive credit. However, they will need to pass the exam for the criteria laid out for their degree.

This allows a standard learning outcome to be used, with several options by the student (depending on their circumstances including access to courses, resources, location, learning needs) to fulfill the curriculum requirements. This also means that there is a minimal instructional staff, with most of the staff working on assessment and curriculum development. There are some area specialists who help in the curriculum development, but they are only used on an as needed basis. An instructor does not have to be a Ph.d. in the area in which they are teaching, but rather need to be effective instructors. This is because the subject matter is already developed by specialists in the form of assessment tools and curriculum. This also always the university to be more flexible based on the students' learning needs and goals.

One disadvantage to this model is that most of the students are learning in isolation. This also requires a great deal of motivation on the part of the learner to arrange for those courses/learning that will best help them pass the assessments. In addition, a great deal of resources go into the monitoring and revision of curriculum and assessment tools.

Individualized learning plans

Another local university in which I have worked uses an individual learning plan. The first course a student takes is a three credit course in which students sit down with a "mentor" and outline their learning objectives. They then plan how they will achieve these objectives academically. There are usually three options: test out, small group tutorials (face to face at learning centers), or online courses. A fourth option is an independent study, but that is used rarely. Unlike the model above, there are set courses which students must complete. Only a certain percentage of those courses can be assessments (either CLEF or assessment of real life experience).

Unlike a traditional university, there are no "departments". Rather there are designated "Area Specialists" who are in charge of a group of faculty (tenured and part-time). These specialists often are part of programs such as labor relations, healthcare, nursing, teaching, and humanities. In other words, they are more profession oriented and broader than a traditional university department. Because this is a state university, there are general education core courses that students must have to be granted a degree. However, if enough students are interested in a specific area, the mentors can ask the area specialists to develop a tutorial in that topic.

In this model, new specialties can be developed within an "area" that a traditional department might have difficulty with. In addition, students can flow in and out of the university as needed (an open university model). Most of the students work full time. One disadvantage of this model, like the one above, is that there is not a single "campus". Unlike the model above, however, students can develop a sense of "college" at their college centers, having tutorials with other students, and establishing a close relationship with their mentors.

Another disadvantage of this model is that it is very labor intensive. For the model to work, the mentors need to be knowledgeable about course options, adult learning, and have constant contact with their mentees. In fact, one reason I don't teach there anymore is that the pay scale was ridiculously low, with faculty being paid by the size of their student load (i.e. a class of 5 had a pay scale much lower than a class of 25. Someone that taught 5 classes to 5 students would make the same as person who taught 25 students in one class, even thought there was more time commitment for the 5 classes).

Traditional model

The fact is that many who go to school full time do so as much for the social aspects of being part of a campus as for the academics. In order to change the traditional model of education, there would have to be a cultural change, which could be difficult at universities that have been steeped in their culture for many years.

My current university used a very successful model to change this culture and cross disciplines and departments in order to integrate technology into its instruction. Basically, it was structured by creating a pool of funding to hire faculty who were adept in instructional technology. Each department was required to either train a current faculty member, identify a current faculty member with a technology specialty, or hire a new faculty member who had expertise in educational technology. Once this core group of faculty were established, they received tenure within the technology group (not their department, per se). This meant that if there was a need for one of these faculty in a certain department, they might be reassigned to that department or courses within that department. For example, one of the faculty members in the dept of communication also had expertise in information technology. As there were two within the communication department who were part of the technology group, one of them went over to information technology when one of the designated faculty members left the university. This same person also taught some courses in the school of business when the designated technology person in business took his sabbatical.

Imagine, for example, if this same model were used for Communication Skills, Creativity, Critical thinking, scientific inquiry, or writing (often the areas of core courses). This would allow a university to have tenure track faculty who could teach interdisciplinary courses without fear of cannibalizing a department. Smaller departments could go to the "centers" to find faculty that could teach courses in their department. General Education courses could be offered through the "centers" so that there would be a guarantee of having a pool of faculty to draw on for these courses, which may not be money producers, but are vital to the degrees. However, outside of the "centers", faculty expertise (specialties) could be offered within the departments. In addition, new areas of study, which might not fall neatly into a department, could be developed within the centers.

Unfortunately, with a new administration, the traditional culture and departmental structures proved to have to strong an influence and we have now moved back to the traditional departmental structures where departments fight for resources and/or are pitted against each other to keep "tenure track lines" for their department. For any of these models to work, faculty, administrators, students, and stakeholders (including employees and alumni) need to be open to a new way of funding higher education. Using a "business" model will never work as "knowledge" is becoming less and less a commodity that is possessed and more and more a necessity that everyone is working with.

Classifying feedback

2010-12-01T13:57:00.003-05:00

My laptop battery is not working, so lately I have been hand writing all of my perceptions as I analyze my data. However, my work yesterday resulted in an insight I wanted to share. This is still a work in progress, so I am open to any research that someone might be able to point my way.

In describing the collaborative process, many of the participants (members of the distributed group) used the word "feedback" often. However, I soon began to see that feedback could be a source of tension, a helpful tool, or something that was ignored. Sometimes it was solicited, other times it was given without any prodding.

Now, most of the previous literature on feedback has divided it into positive or negative, summative or formative, or oral, written, or non-verbal. However, none of these classification systems really fit the types of feedback I am seeing in the collaborative writing process.

Defining feedback

To understand these classifications, it is important that I define the term "feedback". I am using a communicative definition. In the communicative act, there is sender and a receiver. The Sender initiates the communicative act and the receiver decodes the message as they receive it. However, the communicative act does not end there. The receiver gives feedback based on his or her interpretation (decoding) or the message. That feedback could be as simple as silence (or withdrawal from the conversation) or much more complex.

Based on this definition, I see feedback as the communication between the "giver" of feedback and the "receiver" of the feedback. The feedback could be verbal or non-verbal, formally requested or the natural result of the communication process.

Four types of feedback

I have (so far) identified 4 different types of feedback within a distributed workplace group or team. The type of feedback depended on the amount of ownership or the level of agency the feedback giver perceived. It also was effected by whether the feedback was formally solicited (as part of the work process) or was given in response to an informal communication act (written or oral).

1) Creative feedback. This makes the feedback giver a co-creator. In other words, there is a high level of perceived ownership and agency from the feedback giver.

2) Editorial. This is usually the result of a formal feedback mechanism within the work process or a heuristic created at the group, organizational, or professional levels. The feedback giver often has more distance between his or herself and the feedback receiver, and has less ownership of the task/process or product. As a result, feedback might be accepted or not by the feedback receiver without any influence between the feedback giver and feedback receiver.

3) Confirmative. There usually is a power distance between feedback giver and receiver when confirmative feedback is given (for example, a team leader and a team member). The feedback giver, as a result, will have a greater sense of agency, and by giving approval or confirmative feedback, he or she takes partial ownership (whether the feedback receiver wants to give it or not).

4) Political. While the feedback giver might have thought that they had agency, the feedback receiver holds all the cards and could decide to take ownership, give it to the feedback receiver (or force it on to the receiver) or become co-creator. Political feedback is often used to document the communication process, identify responsibility for work, tasks, or products, and to make the work transparent to those outside of the process/task.

These different types of feedback can be used to unify a group and make the work processes more efficient. Using the correct type of feedback can also improve the final product, expedite the group process, and create a sense of trust within a group (especially important with a distributed group). However, in my study, when there was a difference in the perception of the type of feedback being solicited, tension was created between the giver and receiver, which could result in resentment (especially if the giver or receiver did not recognize the difference in the feedback being solicited).

For example, two of the study participants had the following discussion during the group interview:

Ronda: Well, exactly that. And I think it’s that…there’s two things that are sort of complating that…that problem. This notion that have sort of too many cooks looking at your project. And then that there’s no level of authority assigned to, um, whatever you put up there. Like when s….when I put something up for review and people send me editorial comments, I personally, because I’m arrogant and snotty about this stuff [everyone laughs], don’t feel like because he said this or he said that or he said that or he said that, that I have to change it. You know. That’s not their job, in my opinion is not to tell me how to change it. Because this is my expertise. I’m putting it up there for a different kind of review. And…I don’t always feel obligated to take that feedback. But somebody else might put something up and say, “Well, you know, what do you think of this design?” And then there’ll be c…comments from Helen and Robert and Phillip and… Make one change. Then the next person comes and says, “Do this.” Then they’ve changed it back. Or change it this way. And it’s…just turns into this huge morass of inexpert opinion shaping products that shouldn’t be doing that. So there is this level of disrespect for people’s expertise, which you subject yourself to by putting stuff on basecamp. On the other hand.
Phillip: You know, Ronda, it’s interesting that you say that, cause sometimes the process is, eww, should I comment on it or is that going to [anger] her?
[Everyone laughs}
Ronda: Yeah, and I don’t ever feel like that!
Phillip: I don’t know.

And later:

Phillip: When you take my sentences and change them, I go, “Wow, that’s…that’s a better sentence.”
Ronda: And that’s…that’s…that’s my j… That’s not personal. It’s not, you’re not a good writer…
Phillip: Right.
Ronda: It’s not any of that. It’s my skill.

In the first case, Ronda is asking for editorial or confirmative feedback, but she gets angry when she gets creative or political feedback. On the other hand, Phillip is reluctant to give creative or confirmative feedback because he does not feel that it is his place in the group to do so. As a result, he tends not to give feedback very often, referring to others to give feedback even when he has the expertise.

Note: See the post by Karyn Romeis on workplace collaboration. This framework for feedback might explain the problem she describes in her post.

We just want a chance to try and to be heard

2010-11-23T10:35:00.002-05:00

Next week I'll post about my new economic model for Higher Ed. That post is going to require some deep thinking, which can't be accomplished this week as it is Thanksgiving on Thursday. As I posted last year, Thanksgiving is a very important holiday in the US. This week we have relatives visiting from across the country (Seattle), down south (Georgia), and nieces and nephews coming home from college.

I have also been very busy with work, volunteering with my daughter's school, and just life in general as the mother of two teens, one of which is in the middle of his search for universities to attend next year.

Over the last week, I had a few insights into my own kids, education, and young adults in general.

1) My daughter tried out for two plays this past month. She went in with a positive outlook, confident in her abilities (she has a spectacular voice if I do say so myself), willing to take any part. Her resume is very good and she is willing to take any part, including chorus, when required.

However, it has been very difficult for her to go through the two auditions she had. In both cases, it was obvious that most of the parts were already pre-cast. As she said, she would have felt better had she known, "we only are casting part X and part Y, looking for this certain look." Instead, she went through one casting call, waited for 3 weeks during which they announced 3 additional casting calls. Then they changed the play and made everyone try out again. It became very obvious during the next audition that the play had already been cast as some people were told by the director what to sing. She also was given a 30 second audition and then told nothing. Others waiting for the audition, however, already knew when call backs would be, and the implication was that they had a time BEFORE the audition as to when they should return.

The second audition she had was not to obviously fixed. However, before going to the audition, she was told who would be getting the leads. It is demoralizing for those trying out to know that they have no chance, though. One girl, in particular, my daughter can relate to. Her older sister is a very talented singer (she is the other lead). My daughter, like this girl, has always felt that she has lived in the shadow of her sibling.

This leads me to the conclusion that most students just want a chance to show their abilities in a fair and equitable process. This is especially true when they might not have been heard within our system of education. A student that does not test well wants to be able to show that they KNOW things that don't fit into the process. Students feel powerless when they walk into a class with certain expectations because of siblings or records that as often as not are based on politics or a system in which those who know how to work the system come out on top. I can hear students' silent screams when they come into my class with an attitude that says, "I don't care if I do well or not. I'm not going to try so you can prove I can't." This is why I try to permit them to have as much choice as possible to prove to me (and themselves) that they can.

2) Related to this was work that I did with my daughter's school. My daughter took on an unbelievable task in putting together a musical review, the first for her "Science/Math/Technology" based school (I put this in quotes because the fact is, the majority of the students are incredibly creative and much more artistic, rather than STEM mentality). She was allowed to do so as long as she accepted all of the students who auditioned. She took up the challenge, put together a series of broadway songs, worked with those students who had never preformed before, put together and taught group numbers/harmonies, and taught acting skills she had learned over the past two years doing community theatre. I did mostly supervisory tasks, although I did identify those areas in which her colleagues might have not understood her.

I was very impressed with how she handled those in the review. She made each of them feel as if they were vitally important to the show. She also knew when to get on their case when they did not focus in rehearsal, or they would give up or not practice. At one point, when she had to come to rehearsal late, they invoked her name, afraid that she would be angry if they didn't buckle down and do what she had directed them to do. I was told by a theatre professional who attended the review, that she had done a wonderful job in putting the show together, highlighting the students strengths, ensuring that the weaker performers did not follow very strong performers.

I did work with three of the performers that had little to no experience. One of my strengths, I have found, is to create confidence in my students to try new things, and to continue on when they perceive they have failed (or to reset their standards).

Students often just want a chance to try things and to feel as good in trying and failing as when they try and do a spectacular job. So when my son and two of his classmates, their last year in high school, played for the football team for the first time in their life, they felt great about it, even though they did not get a lot of play time. Why? Because their coach made them feel that he respected them just for trying something new. At the end of the season, he presented each one of them at a football banquet with over a hundred players and their families, pointing out how each had worked hard to learn the new skill and contributed to the team. It was amazing to see the pride that each had, even though most played only about 1-2 minutes each game (out of a possible hour).

My son and his classmate just asked if they could sit in on an advanced French class in December. Their college classes don't start again until January and both are interested in French (they completed their requirements in Spanish). Their teacher was more than happy to have them come to the class, although he warned them that they probably would not understand very much as neither has studied French. My daughter is taking Art in her free time as an independent study. In both cases, the teachers could have denied them, but they encouraged them to try something new.

Good teachers want their students to try and are proud of their journey and development more than the final accomplishment (test grade). Unfortunately, in the current educational climate in the US, this is not recognized. Low test scores equates to ineffective teaching. This loses the lifelong learning skills often developed by these teachers.

3. Young adults are works in progress until their early 20's. My son, a fairly intelligent, responsible teenager, still has his moments of total stupidity. Yesterday, while horsing around, he ended up with a face full of glass when one of his friends (also usually responsible) put his hand through a window (he thought is was plexy glass). When his mother, the school nurse, the dean of academics, and I asked the same question, "what were you thinking?", their answers were the same, "we didn't know it was glass."

I think we expect too much of young adults: that they know what they are doing is bullying, inappropriate, dangerous, etc..., that they know what they want to do with the rest of their life, that they are not going to make mistakes. Of course, they also like to exert their independence. What is important is that we allow them to make mistakes that won't impact their lives, that we allow them to crawl out of the messes they have made, that we are there, not to "save" them or take on their problems, but to support them as they work through the problems that everyone must face as part of life, and that we teach them the skills to deal with life that sometimes might be overwhelming for them.

I see many of my students who have no one to say, " you know, you're doing a good job coping, life sucks sometimes, but you have to keep going, there IS a light at the end of the tunnel, keep a positive out look." I also remind my students of those that have it worse than themselves (although sometimes it is hard when I hear some of their stories). One way to help students help is to have them help others.

4. Finally, I think we in the US have to recognize that ultimately, most teachers get into teaching because they really care about their students. While we may not always agree with their styles and not all teachers' styles will be effective with all students, teachers DO NOT get into education because they will have their summers off (the fact is, most states require that teachers have additional training during their "time off."). They truly believe they can teach. Most education programs weed out those that don't like or are unable to connect to students. I always have to catch myself when my daughter or son has a problem with a teacher. They may not be "good teachers" as I would define them, but for the most part, they do care about the students.

A new economic model for Higher Education: Part 1 history

2010-11-16T09:55:00.001-05:00

More and more people have recently been writing about a new economic model for higher education (Andy Coverdale, Clark Quinn, and Tom Haskins, just to name a few). However, as we grapple around the world with how higher education should be structured and funded, we aren't willing to reexamine the underlying beliefs upon which the funding and academic structures were created. Now is the time to begin to look at the basis of the traditional structures and how they have changed, and the current needs in a new structure that will fit Higher Education's needs.

The History of Higher Education in the West

Higher education came out of a belief that only those within power should have access to knowledge. The knowledge included philosophy, history, stories (literature), music, etc... In other words, the humanities. This made sense as only those who were rich and powerful would have the time to study subjects that did not necessarily contribute to every day economics of that time: agriculture, warfare, trade skills. Often, those that were educated were the spare sons. This allowed powerful families to control what knowledge was passed down and how that knowledge would be perpetuated.

The advent of the printing press allowed for knowledge to be transferred from location to location in greater amounts. Still, higher education was only for those who were "scholars". The economic reasons for this was that the serf system allowed powerful families to maintain their power, and knowledge was perceived as a commodity to be controlled by those families who had power, land (thus resources), and a means to control their serfs.

Adam Smith developed the principles of Capitalism as the economy, in the form of the industrial revolution and the age of mercantilism, changed the need for knowledge within the economy. No longer was a person's wealth tied to family (birth), but also know how, skills, and the ability to understand the complex systems outside of the local environs. People were "human capital" and became mobile, something that was not possible under a serfdom. More importantly, a person could go to a university, if they were clever enough, and "gain" the knowledge that was originally set aside for children of the wealthy and powerful landowners.

There was also a shift towards science and the creation (think industrial revolution) of products, tools, and technology as people moved away from their sources of substance (food, water). Soon, in places like the US, there was the recognition that knowledge was a commodity that, when invested, could lead to power, riches, and opportunities. In other words, the university was one means to "acquire" the knowledge that could be used to participate in the economy. However, up until the end of the 20th century, higher education was still perceived as something that could be withheld or distributed, thus allowing some to "possess" the knowledge and then use that to be successful in the economy.

During this period of time, knowledge was also perceived as being individual. An individual could pass knowledge on to other individuals. If an individual did not do well in a class, it was because that individual, even though they had access to knowledge, was not able to use it because he or she was lacking in some way (not smart enough, not motivated enough, looking for the wrong type of knowledge that would be useful for that individual). The university was a way to train future leaders in the economy, and as a result, universities decided on who would have the most potential, which subjects to study, and what would be the most useful for the economy. This is one reason why so many universities eventually became government run. The university was a means to implement public policy.

However, also during this time period, the economy changed to one in which corporations, not individuals became the structure within which the economic decisions were being made. While there has been a lot written and criticized about corporations, they have had an impact on how business is done and who controls resources. Adam Smith's theories included an explanation of motivations based on the serfdom model in which the individual landowner would have a self interest in making sure that those within his or her community were taken care of. However, as communities became mobile, and companies no longer had individuals, but rather a collective making decisions, his theories no longer are true.

New Basis for Economic Model for Higher Education

Much work has been done in the last two decades on the knowledge economy. In addition, during the 20th century, there was a realization that the economic principles of the past were not fitting the economic realities on the present. With this in mind, any new economic model for higher education will have to take the following premises in mind:

1) Knowledge is no longer just in individual "thing" possessed internally. Knowledge can be collective (within an organization for example), be located externally (via the web for example), and time dated (it can be irrelevant the moment it is created).

2) Humans are no longer "capital" that can be or are expected to be moved around to take advantage of opportunities. When they do move, often it is based on many factors, most of which may not be quantifiable. Humans don't always make "rational" decisions. And societies in the 21st century have (for the most part) recognized that individuals have the right to make decisions about their education, work, where they live, and what they do with their free time.

3) Every individual has the right to education and literacy. It no longer (for the most part) should be limited to just those born into power and privilege.

4) Knowledge and services are major contributors to the economy. The basis of many of our jobs is the ability to learn new skills and apply both individual and collective knowledge to a situation.

As a result, it is clear to me that the current capitalistic model used currently to decide what we should be doing with higher education is no longer relevant. My next post, I will try to present some of my ideas on what a new economic model should include.

Culture and Technology

2010-11-09T10:48:00.000-05:00

This post is as much a work in progress to help me understand some of what I am seeing in my dissertation. So I apologize for the lack of specific references at this point. I am hoping to find some to support some of the ideas I have uncovered.

Defining Culture and Technology

There has been a lot written over the last 2 decades on the impact of culture on technology and the impact of technology on culture. Betty Collis and Catherine McLoughlin have written extensively on this issue. Rather than reiterate what they have written, I would like to look at a framework for further research in culture and technology.

To begin with, the interaction of culture and technology often looks at the influence of one on the other. However, I feel that culture is the unseen basis of technology. Technology can be a process, a tool, and/or the use of a tool or process. As a result, knowledge is at the basis of what technology is. Epistemology (the belief of what knowledge is) is grounded in our cultures. This becomes evident when someone changes cultures or is introduced to a culture other than the one in which they grew up.

For example, when children first go to school, suddenly they are aware that there are differences between what the school believes is knowledge, what their classmates believe is knowledge, and what their families believe is knowledge (thus, I was told I "didn't know how to write my name" when I began school because it was not my given name I had learned--Virginia--but rather my nickname--Gin).

So our understanding of what a technology is and how it can be used may change if there is a cultural challenge to our understanding of that technology. At that point, we can either adapt the technology, change the technology we are using, or require that others use our technology.

Considerations for culture and technology research

In my current research, I have seen how organizational, departmental, personal, or professional cultures influence the understanding, use, and acceptance of technology for a given situation. In this section I will identify some of the factors that influence the impact of culture on and by technology.

1) Affordances: An affordance is the use of a technology for a given situation. It is the ability for a process, tool, or use of the process or tool to allow us to accomplish something. Many times, what we look for in an affordance for a specific situation is based on how that technology has been used in the past and what we understand its capabilities are. If the technology does not allow us to accomplish what we used it for, then we either did not use it correctly or the technology does not work. Rarely to we look at whether our expectations in the use of the technology differed from others expectations.

For example, my sister currently lives in the Midwest and has embraced a midwestern, protestant, rural culture. However, her New York, small town, Catholic culture in which she was raised comes out when she uses technology. Unlike her husband (who was raised in the culture where she lives), she wants to be able to individualize the technology she uses and expects to work with ITS personnel to help her to modify the technology or be given new tools when she finds the technology lacking. A case in point was her use of a LMS that she did not feel met the needs for her class. Her colleagues just adapted what they were given to their own teaching, while my sister demanded that the ITS look for modifications in order for her to accomplish the learning and communication goals she had set up for her class. She expected better affordances to monitor student progress, for students to be able to interact with content, and for better teacher student communication outside of the class.

2) Design: The spacial relationship with processes, tools, and the uses of those tools and processes differ depending on the cultural epistemology and context. In high context cultures, I feel there will be less variety in the understanding and expectations for a given technology (within that culture) whereas in a low context culture, there will be more variety. In addition, many western cultures will use a linear relationship within the technology while eastern cultures may be more apt to use a spatial relationship with the technology. There will also be differences in the relationship in the human/technology interaction and the human/technology/human interaction. This makes sense given the differences between cultures in the way they organize information, communicate ideas, and validate knowledge.

3)Visual and language differences How a tool looks, how a process is communicated, the terms and symbols that are integrated into technology will differ between cultures because these are all at the heart of culture differences. For example, many Asian languages read from right to left and their writing is based on symbols for ideas rather than phonetic symbols. Many cultures value oral traditions over written, written over visual, or equally value oral, visual, and written traditions. As a result, different technologies might be valued differently within one culture than another culture.

Future research

I feel it is important that we begin to look at the culture that is embedded in technology in order to understand how people decide what technologies to use and how to use them. This would also help us to identify what factors we need to consider when choosing appropriate technology for use with or in other cultures and the impact that that technology would have on its implementation and on the use by the culture.

A new model for Higher Education

2010-11-02T13:29:00.000-04:00

I recently read two good blog posts about higher education: one by Clark Quinn and the other by Andy Cloverdale. In both posts they point out the need for change in the way that education is provided at the University and the way instructors/professors are trained to teach in the University.

This and the extreme budget cuts to our university in the face of rising enrollments got me thinking about the call for "reform" in how our universities are run in the US today.

Current system in the US

To understand what we are up against in the US, it is important to understand the model of education as it currently stands in the US. Our current system is based on a belief that the ultimate goal of education is to become an expert (which was redefined as "specialist" in the 1980's) in a specific field of study. In other words, the Ph.d. holds all knowledge about a content area, thus making them an "expert".

After a broad basic education at high school (secondary school), a person is expected to learn the basic requirements of functioning in our society (through understanding our culture through the study of history, literature, and social studies, to basic written communication skills through the study of language arts, to basic calculation skills through the study of math, to the understanding of our environment, health. and work processes through the study of science). This is the ideal.

What used to be called Junior College but is now called Community College has developed into two tracks: the first is vocational and advanced technical training to meet the needs of an educated workforce (but not management), especially those in manufacturing and the service industry, whereas the second is the preparation for those underprepared or not able to afford a university or college education. In the second case, students are expected to take a broad range of courses across disciplines. In the first case, students are expected to become proficient in a given skill or discipline. However, in our current model of community college education, those that finish community college (usually with an associate's degree) do not hold expertise even if they have specialized in an area. Rather, they are able to work with the experts and/or gain expertise as they work within the discipline.

The current model for undergraduate education is 2 years of general education courses (also known as gen ed or core courses) from categories of disciplines (i.e. quantitative studies, language and arts, culture, social sciences, man and environment, etc...). Then a student will specialize or "major" or "minor" in a field. The traditional majors and minors normally fall into humanities, social sciences, applied sciences, natural sciences, liberal arts, or professional schools (pre-law, pre-med, education, accounting, etc...). Each major normally has a dedicated faculty consisting of tenured and/or full-time professors and adjunct, part-time, or student instructors. In the last two decades, "interdisciplinary" majors consist of faculty drawn from different majors. Tuition flows into the traditional majors to sustain faculty positions and support staff. The interdisciplinary major ends up being "gravy" (extra money) as there is no support staff or dedicated instructors for these majors.

One problem with the interdisciplinary majors (which I suffered at both the undergraduate and graduate level since both of my degrees were interdisciplinary) is that many of the required courses for these interdisciplinary majors are cut during budget crisis because they are perceived as "electives" within the traditional majors. The result is that required courses for interdisciplinary majors are cut and students in these majors are unable to complete their course work in a timely manor. This has just happened with a course I have taught in our major. It now is a part of Public Policy, an interdisciplinary major. Normally the course is offered either every 2 or 3 semesters, depending on the faculty interest. But now that it is part of another major, the demand for the course has increased. It is possible that I will need to teach it more often or if I leave, it won't be offered at all (we are short staffed within the Communication Dept. for our department's required courses as it is).

Once students leave with a Bachelor's degree, at the end of their college experience, they are expected to have a certain cache of skills and abilities that will make them employable. As a result, more and more colleges are basing their curriculum on employer needs (i.e. computer program specific, accounting law specific, ability to be licensed or certified in a field). The college graduate, in other words, will bring away from the college, the content they will need in the work place.

At the Master and Ph.d. level, students are expected to drill down to one area of expertise, that area being specific to the field of study they are pursuing. Graduate studies are based on the expertise of the faculty in a program/ field of study. In our department (Communication), for example our programs focus on Healthcare communication, political communication, and interpersonal communication. Other schools of communication might focus on mass communication, written communication, speech communication and disorders, intercultural communication, communication strategy, organizational communication, communication technology, etc... Many graduate schools try to build up a reputation in a marketable area. They will hire new faculty to reflect trends in specialties and encourage tenured faculty to change their expertise through grant writing support and research funding. A department that does not bring in funding (either through research, grants, or student tuition) usually will have programs or entire departments cut from the university.

Impact of this model on the Current Higher Ed System

This business model of Higher Education does not connect with the educational needs of the 21st century. As our economy and society moves into the knowledge economy, CONTENT is not as important as understanding how to find, interpret, analyze, and update content/expertise. Companies may be looking for specific content from their graduates, but what they need are employees that have critical thinking and reading, communication, analytic, information literacy, technology literacy, creativity, and collaboration skills. These skills might manifest themselves in different ways within different disciplines, but for the most part they can be found in all fields. As a result, it is important that those at the upper end of higher education (Master, Ph.d.), be prepared to cross the traditional disciplines to understand how each functions within a certain field of study.

Likewise, the internet has made content available on a mass basis, whereas it was limited to the university, publishing houses, depositories (such as libraries), and management before social networking. Access to information is not as important as knowing how to find that information and what to do with it when it is found. "Expertise" can be found outside of those trained and educated in the discipline, thus making the expert professor obsolete. The result is a need for professors that can teach, mentor, and develop life-long learning skills, something that was limited to graduate students in the past.

With the focus on new skills over content and access to expertise and content outside of the university, the current system of testing for content and expertise is lacking. There needs to be a deeper level of assessment that objective tests don't access.

Finally, the current process of appropriating funding based on a major or program will limit education to those areas dictated by market needs and tradition. New ideas will not be funded nor will more imaginative, ground breaking approaches to learning and application of student learning. As education becomes more costly, students and stakeholders expect more with less resources, and education is in greater demand from populations that would not have thought of higher education a generation ago, the current system is not meeting the needs (economically or educationally) of the US society.

A new model

With this in mind, I'd like to propose a new model for higher education in the US.

1) The curriculum of higher ed should change focus from general to specific to one of having students work on a specific area they are interested in in order to learn life long learning skills such as critical reading, self-direction, information literacy, technology literacy, communication skills, and collaboration skills. What if freshman were to start their education with a research project, rather than waiting at the end of their 4 years to bring everything together. They would learn the basic skills needed to learn in any profession. This would allow them to work in smaller groups, to be mentored by an educational specialist, and given the ability to work on those areas where they might be lacking. At the Master and Ph.d level, students would be expected to move in and out of various disciplines, learning in a complex system rather than limiting their learning to just one area. There would not be Ph.d. departments but rather one Ph.d. program in which students worked with faculty in multiple settings doing research in multiple disciplines. This would require a much higher level of thinking and abstraction, creating Ph.d's that could work solving society's problems outside of the unnatural boundaries of academic departments. Many are already doing this.

2) Funding would be a combination of educational professionals (with Ph.d's in a variety of disciplines, but training in learning theory for adults), learning centers, research centers, and learning support services (i.e. collaboration, written and spoken communication, critical reading and writing skills, quantitative research methodology and analysis, project based learning and scientific problem solving, etc...).

3) Learning and degree granting would be based on a portfolio of work and oral examinations rather than a testing of "content". In fact, the use of computers to identify content would be encouraged for the assessment tests rather than excluded from the process. My Ph.d. program does this now. We are given some articles to analyze and then given an oral exam based on our analysis. The topic can be anything related to education whether we are interested in it or not, have learned about it or not. We are given 3 weeks to prepare a paper and then defend it to a committee. Not only are they testing our understanding of the field, they are testing our ability to learn something new in a short time, to find resources to support this learning, to collaborate with colleagues when we don't understand something, and then to present a view point and support it appropriately.

These are just some ideas I have been kicking around. I am sure there are others who have better and more creative ideas. But one thing is for sure, the system will need to change if we are going to keep up with the changes and needs of society.

Free speech, free will, and will you say no?

2010-10-28T14:06:00.000-04:00

Three issues have made national headlines in the US this month: the bullying problem that has resulted in adolescent suicides, the question of free speech currently being decided by the US Supreme Court, and, today, the case of the University of Notre Dame student videographer who was killed while taping the ND football team's practice in 60 mph (90kph)winds.

On the surface, it appears that these have nothing in common. However, looking deeper into it, they all have a common thread: civil discourse and communication.

In the case of bullying, the problem has become worse due to social media. Don't get me wrong, I am a strong advocate of social media. However, it also has the potential to create an environment in which bullying (either intentional or unintentional) occurs. There are two parts to bullying that many in the media fail to recognize: the bully and the person being bullied. In some cases, the person receiving a message may ignore the message; may feel hurt and confront the "bully"; may feel hurt and internalize the hurt, keeping it secret until they can't stand the pain and take their own life; or work in creating a social atmosphere in which perceived bullying is socially unacceptable. The other half is often over looked, however. It is assumed that the bully KNOWS that he or she is bullying. But sometimes it is just that the bully does not know how to engage in civil discourse. Name calling, teasing, put downs are all images they see on TV, in sports, and on the internet. Often, I will read something written to my kids on facebook and be outraged, my perception being that this is bullying. However, they do not perceive it in the same way. This divide between what is appropriate and what is not appropriate to say is magnified when someone misinterprets the intention of another person.

So does this mean that some people need to "toughen up" and that bullying is not taking place? No, it means that the way to overcome "bullying" is to create an environment in which there are clear communication standards and rules so there is not a divide between perception between people. And if there is a difference, there is a way to resolve the problem before it is unmanageable.

Another aspect of civil discourse has to do with taking responsibility for what you say. In the US, freedom of speech is a basic right. However, over the years, some citizens have wanted the right to speak without having to pay the price should what they say be hurtful, cause pain, cause damages to a person's reputation, job, or business, or be inaccurate, an outright lie, or a distortion of the truth. Just as someone has a right to free speech, the listener has the right to be upset, angry, or not agree with the speaker. Likewise, the listener then has the right to speak back.

There are those in our country who use the label "politically correct" as an insult, thus limiting the voice (and right of free speech) of the listener. A person who self proclaimed as being "not politically correct", is often saying, "I don't want to hear your anger because I have already told you I am not concerned with other opinions than my own." Related to this are those that must place blame or, in essence, say "whatever" or (the phrase I HATE, agree to disagree...in other words, I'm right and will not listen or try to understand your position). The current Supreme Court case is case in point. A group's protest outside of the funeral of a soldier killed in action (the protest was allowed as a right of free speech) resulted in psychological problems for the father. He sued group. This is not a question of free speech; the group was granted it. It is a question as to whether those that exercise free speech must be accountable. There are many more examples of this including the firing of Dr. Laura, a talk show host.

So what we need to do is go back to the notion that with freedoms, come responsibility for what you say. It is not enough to say, "I hear you. I take full responsibility." (Although this is a good first step). Rather, we need to teach children AND adults that what they say may have repercussions for which the speaker must take responsibility for. In other words, freedom of speech does not mean freedom of speaking before you think or considering the impact of your words on those that may hear or read them.

Finally, the death of the Notre Dame student yesterday is especially worrisome to me as I see my children develop into adults. In this current economy, many people feel powerless to say no to something that instinctively they feel they must. When a person in power asks them to do something, they feel that they do not have a voice to contradict someone that has power over their school, job, or even community. As a result, they may post their misgivings on facebook, or complain to coworkers/classmates about their environment, but they never tell the person in power that they have misgivings, and ultimately "no". This is a conversation I have had for a long time with my students. The fact is, our educational system rewards those that will do what they are asked. The best students, the best athletes, the best children are those that are "respectful" and those that "conform". For many, "respectful" is synonymous with agreeable.

But there is a difference. It is important that we teach our children to be civil, but to also disagree (respectfully) especially if their instincts are telling them what they are being asked to do is not right. Heaven knows, if the student had just listened to his instincts (his tweets indicated he was scared) he might be living today.

American Politics: a study in frustration and poor communication

2010-10-26T13:29:00.001-04:00

We have one more week until the general elections and I'm totally disgusted. So much so that for the first time in almost 30 years, I don't want to cast my ballot. Why? Because I don't see much difference between the extreme voices that I must vote for. If I could, I would attend the Rally to restore Sanity in Washington, DC this week.

I see this current situation as a breakdown in communication in the US society. One thing that Americans always prided themselves on was the right to debate and discuss various issues. However, the "you're either with us or against us" attitude of many politicians (on both side of the aisles) and the vilifying of anyone whose position might hurt those in power or the media (which is big business in the US) has made it possible for the discussion to be squelched in the US.

I had had great hopes at the beginning of the Obama administration. Here was an administration that was elected by communicating using new media. However, over the last two years more and more voices are being quieted as people become afraid to express their opinions.

The White House, who had online live conferences in which the average person was able to participate, changed its media strategy and these conferences are almost non-existent now. In fact, last year when the President came to our area, those on the "invitation" list were politicians and those who held local power, rather than the common man who supposedly would benefit from the programs the president was speaking about. On the White House website, there was a video that explained how the president's 10 letters from the public (which he reads daily) was chosen. The letters are filtered through his staff, who choose the letters "most representative" of the letters coming in. This filtering, however, ensures that the present will only see the views that the staff feel are relevant. Why do the staff have to filter the letters? Don't they report on the issues they read about in the letters? Think of the variety of issues (come of which may not be covered by organizations sending in mass mailings or covered in the press) if 10 letters were chosen randomly. The farmer in Kansas struggling to make it, would have the same possibility of being heard as the unemployed single mother being thrown out of her house in Florida, or the prosperous rancher in Montana, or the factory worker in Michigan.

Most importantly, however, is that the issues would not be predetermined. Those issues that many of my friends and I feel are important are not being discussed. No one talks about the widening gap in income in the US between the very rich and the middle class. No one speaks about the tripling of prices of pharmaceuticals in the last 10 years, or the monopoly that 6 oil producers have in the US which allows for the price of oil to increase even though the supply in the US is the highest it's been for a number of years. No one speaks of the two United States: one in which a person's housing, education, health care, access to services, child care, and retirement are guaranteed and the other where any of these basic rights can be taken away at any moment.

So my hope for the US is to create an environment where civil dialog was acceptable, neighbors could live next door to each other even though they had differing views on how society should function, and a person was not afraid to express their ideas on various topics. Finally, communication is two way. This means there needs to be an honest dialog between those speaking and those listening. Listening does not mean agreeing with the speaker and speaking does not mean making your ideas known without determining if your message was received the way you wanted it to. Then I would feel as if my vote was one of many in a civil democracy.

Update: Of course, today there was a live online conference and there are more planned for the next week. Let's hope they continue to do so AFTER the elections.

How mobile technology and facebook is changing how we communicate

2010-10-15T10:18:00.000-04:00

I have noticed lately that the emails I get from my students are shorter and much more direct. I have also noticed that some of the comments on my kids' facebook seem almost cruel in their brevity, communicating something that can be misunderstood. After doing some quick analysis, I realized that those messages that stood out as being "different" were sent from mobile technology. After a little more investigation, I realized that the way in which facebook is being used is changing as more and more people have mobile devises that interact with the internet.

My nephew just got a droid. He is a teacher in his late 20's, not a teen. However, if I want to get a hold of him quickly, I have found facebook as the most effective tool. Facebook is becoming the format of choice for informal communication. As a result, companies using facebook who are formal or spamming (I'm sure it's called something else, I'm just not up to date with the jargon) may turn off potential customers (just as people don't answer the telephone at dinner time any more due to telemarketers).

As younger people get used to being informal on facebook delivered via mobile technology and as they develop their own protocols in communicating via mobile texting, they may not make the register change when sending a message via the internet (which will show up as an email)by mobile phone. This might be why recent emails I'm receiving from my students are very direct and to the point. Sometimes, it almost resembles an order; other times they provide me with very little information (including their name!).

The biggest concern is that this style of writing can be brutal (for lack of a better word), lacking in any empathy. Received by the wrong person, these messages can cause hard feelings. Surprisingly, my own children seem to be immune to this (they don't seem to be as insulted as I am about things written about them on facebook). When I pointed out to them that they would probably be upset if someone said that to them face-to-face, they did not see the similarities in the intention. However, as I remind them on a regular basis, not all people are immune to the change in language, register, and communication mode, so they are often having to modify what they would write. My son got a kick out of the Saturday Night Live skit last week on the facebook filter ap "Damn, my mom's on facebook."

Standard vs. flexible: reconceptualizing the efficiency of "standardization of tools"

2010-10-08T15:46:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I spent 2 hours in total frustration dealing with the administration of my daughter's education. Her schooling has been outstanding the last year and a half, but the administration of that schooling is complex to say the least. Her school district sends her to a regional high school that is funded by 31 different school districts. The high school is really just an alternative education program. They provide the instruction, technology, and building, but her school district provides the transportation, administration of the degree, and interface with the state (i.e. regents exams, graduation requirements, granting of the degree, health records). This is unusual for the district, our state, and the educational system in the US. So needless to say, many in the school district are not informed of my daughter's status. The result is that she was told she would need to buy a ticket to the school district's semi-formal high school dance as a guest since "she isn't a student there." This is the second year we have gone through this.

So yesterday, I decided that I would speak face to face to the administration at the high school to ensure that we were all on the same page. After, I spoke with the guidance counselor at the high school program where the actual instruction takes place. Between the two conversations, some of the problems and the sources of the problems began to finally come clear.

Standardizing processes and tools for efficiency

In the case of the school district, there is a standard system within the school district. All processes are set up to capture standard statistics required by New York state. The problem? When a situation or problem occurs that does not fit the "standard", the system is difficult to adjust. Thus, my daughter's friend was assigned to two different homerooms (the first classroom where each student goes in the morning to ensure school attendence). Last year my daughter was assigned to a home room, even though she did not go into the high school building. For 4 weeks her name was called while they looked for the errant student. For two weeks, her friend's mother was notified that her daughter was not in school.

While the administration was told repeatedly that my daughter did not attend classes in the main building and that her friend WAS in all of her other classes, they could not tell the computer. Eventually the computer program was modified. However, the school processes were tied to the computer program and standards, so until it was changed there was, in fact, administrative inefficiencies.

My daughter's program guidance counselor related how difficult it was to work with 31 different reporting systems so that all of the administrative requirements for the students in the program would be accurate when they went to graduate later this year. Having 31 different systems would have been too difficult for the program to handle. And yet, the 31 systems needed to be able to conform to the programs reporting and administrative needs.

The effect of distributed knowledge on administrative systems

The old school of management based on the assembly line had specialists so that a product (or service) could be standardized, thus creating a uniform product and quality. For this to work, however, the production line needed to be linear and sequential. Much of our educational system still focuses on this linear, sequential format for instruction. Much of our management systems also look at the linear logic in production, distribution, and monitoring of products and services.

But this model does not work any more with distributed knowledge. Karyn Romeis has a good example of how this DOES NOT work in a recent blog post. What we used to have in terms of planning, now will need to be changed to something that allows more flexibility. This also requires upper management to have faith in their workers, put resources into training, and allow users to adjust computer programs and applications to meet individual needs.

Rather than the standardized industrial model that focuses on setting and measuring standards, we need to start integrating multiple approaches to problems and development of ways to measure needs, abilities, and performance that is not quantifiable. We also need to teach students how to go outside of their own abilities where knowledge might be contained by external groups. And our tools (which the next generation has already figured out) needs to be adaptable, but within a general framework which gives us boundaries within which to work and communicate.

Distributed knowledge in the workplace

2010-10-07T13:13:00.000-04:00

I'm still working on this idea, but both Michael Hanley and Karyn Romeis have blogged about knowledge recently so I decided to post what I currently am grappling with. There are still a lot of questions to answer.

Three types of knowledge

In analyzing the data, knowledge could be placed into three categories: tangible representation of knowledge which could be found in policies, forms, formats, curriculum, degrees or credentials, records, and other artifacts at the individual, group, departmental, organizational, and/or professional level; procedural and tacit knowledge, which would include an understanding of work processes and the knowledge created as a result of those processes; and spatial knowledge, which was created through the linking of ideas, social relationships, cognitive interaction, and/or cultural interaction. Each type of knowledge was manifested, accessed, created, and valued differently at the individual, group, and organizational level.

Spatial knowledge is the most valuable for knowledge based organizations. Knowledge can be part of the network internal to the group, external to the group, within the profession, internal to the organization and external to the organization.

However, spatial knowledge is difficult to quantify, control, and capture. Spatial knowledge is created through creative practices (writing, design, problem solving) rather than through the imposition of formats or processes. The imposition of formats helps to create organizational boundaries and impose organizational expectations that may lead to a change culture. But there will be no cultural change if the individuals do not perceive ownership to a document, work artifact or product, or process. In other words, they will confom to the imposed format, process, and/or culture, but they will not claim ownership to it.

This creates a tension between values imposed through authority and personal values. As the AIM model theorizes (Skitka, L., 2003), a group member has three choices: 1) live with the imposed values while maintaining personal values, try to change imposed values, or leave the environment (in the case of this study, quit) in order to maintain individual or group values. In this study, a fourth option developed, create a parallel structure so both individual/group values are maintained, while fulfilling the requirements of the imposed culture.

Implications

1) If there is a difference in epistemology which leads to a breakdown in the group knowledge creation process, it might help to use a strategy in which acceptable content rather than knowledge is defined and negotiated at the individual, group, and organizational level. (What are the other components of “knowledge” which might need to be negotiated initially or will affect the collaborative writing process? Start the collaborative writing process with a common “content”.)

2)This brings up questions as to the role of “know-how” in the group collaborative process. If it is considered an individual attribute, can a group have “know-how”? Is there such a thing as collective “know-how”? Would it be developed or used in the same way as individual know how? Is this why knowledge management is unable to capture group implicit knowledge? Is the continuation of the communication a way to develop collective know-how which is important to the group and not to the power structure? Because it is more difficult to measure, is it possible that collective know-how is in fact knowledge that is not important to those in power or within a group, but is important to the individual?

3) Who owns the knowledge? This is especially important in a distributed group in which knowledge is culled from multiple sources (profession, personal experience, the group, the department, the organization, and other stackholders). What if no one takes ownership? What happens to the work process, the end product, group dynamics, organizational culture? This can be seen in corporations where everyone, yet no one owns the knowledge.

Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5-21.

Skitka, L. (2003). Of different minds: An accessible identity model of justice reasoning. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7(4), 286-297.

New technology demands for the 21st century classroom

2010-09-30T14:29:00.000-04:00

Let me begin by defining the 21st century classroom. It is not the stagnent classroom of my childhood or university. Rather it crosses grades, generations, locations, and cultures. And yet, walk into any classroom today and it will physically look like the classroom my father sat in over 70 years ago.

Education today is life long, formal and informal, and dynamic. Likewise, educational technology is constantly changing from one tool to another based on teaching goals and needs, access to tools, government privacy policy, societal norms both in terms of social norms and acceptance of technology, and infrastructure.

Over the last year I have seen a movement from a computer based technology environment to mobile technology. In fact, I predicted this as one of the major trends in education last year. My students use their cell phones now in new ways not even thought of 2 years ago. With that in mind, I forsee the following technologies being used in the classroom within the next two years:

1) mobile technology. This may take a few forms: ipads, e-readers, cell phones, pda's, and mini-lap tops. The implication for teaching is that students will have access to the internet whether a teacher wants them to or not. I suggest that teachers focus on the use of the internet with the understanding that it is here to stay.

2) Interactive aps. As mobile technology allows for more interactivity including the ability to scan, gps's, and internet access the interacts with software. The implications are that there can be greater individualized learning plans and pin pointed learning. It also creates the opportunity for greater levels of cheating, academic dishonesty, and learning outside of the established curriculum. This could also be a nightmare for teachers who would be expected to provide a greater level of individualized learning plans requiring a constant retooling of their skills. In terms of the educational system, administrators will need to be able to provide their faculty with the resources to upgrade their skills, parents training to understand the tools their children are using in schools, and students with responsibilities and expectations for the use of technology.

3) E-readers. I heard a report on the news yesterday that the youth of today are much more likely to use an ereader than the older generations. In fact, Fisher Price now has an ereader for tottlers. The implication for the classroom (and publishers) is that there will be more choice in sources, using chapters from multiple resources. These resources will need to include multi-media sources including videos, audio, and interactive reading. Students will be able to highlight, download highlighted sections, and reformulate them to create new meaning. This is going to require a deeper level of learning and interactivity with the written and spoken word. Focus will be on organization rather than content per se. And teachers will not be able to rely on a text to meet an individual student's need. This means teachers and instructors will need to understand how to design learning, above and beyond a cookbook style of design.

4) Multi-media. Music, video, animation, and games are all part of the new generation. Not only will teachers and instructors need to know how to integrate these into their teaching, they will need to learn how to use these modialities in their evaluation of student learning. This is probably the biggest stretch for k-12 teachers, where the "test" or "exam" is the preferred mode of evaluation and assessment. However, higher ed and professional education will need to start developing new formats and means of assessing learning using these new modialities.

We need to start preparing educators for the 21st century changes in education. At the university level, there needs to be a new way of preparing and developing professors. Content knowledge is no longer sufficient. Of course, my biggest concern is that universities will have a check list approach to hiring, excluding those of an advanced age (like myself) who would be perceived as not having understanding or knowledge of the 21st technology learning tools.

The discussion about US education

2010-09-28T10:11:00.001-04:00

Recently, there has been a national discussion of education in the US within our media. NBC and the Oprah Winfrey Show both had programs about education in the last two weeks. The final verdict: tenure is the reason our schools are failing and the responsibility of education is in the teachers' hands alone (they must be accountable for failing schools).

I look at part of this as a result of the charter school movement and a movement to break up teachers unions to bring down costs of education. After watching programs on NBC and the Oprah Winfrey school, I think it is important that misinformation that was spouted by such experts as Bill Gates and Mayor Bloomberg (both businessmen first) need to be addressed.

1) Tenure is NOT automatically given to teachers, as both of these men contended on TV. First, tenure requirements vary from state to state and even school district to school district. In New York State, a board of education needs to grant tenure to a teacher. Some school districts won't look at tenure until someone has worked for 4 years. Others will grant tenure after a year. Many of us know of teachers that have not been granted tenure, sometimes even for just political reasons. The purpose of the tenure system is to ensure academic integrity. I find it ironic that Oprah's program discussed with horror the difficulty of firing a teacher who was incompetent (who was eventually fired once she went through a set out process, but that took about a year) while about 10 years ago she had a program about a teacher who was forced to change a failing grade to students who had blatantly plagiarized. The threat of being fired because someone in power has his or her own agenda means that a teacher could be forced to teach something that might be scientifically unbased. This happened to teachers who refused to teach a curriculum they believed was religiously based rather than scientifically based. Because of tenure, these teachers had the ability to keep their jobs and fight a small group of powerful people in their community.

2) Charter schools vary from state to state. I am actually a supporter of charter schools, as long as they must follow the same rules as the public schools and they offer something different to a population that cannot be met in a traditional public school. There is research that some states have a very effective charter school system that has improved the overall state education system (Wisconsin and Oregon). However, I do not believe that ANY company should be profiting from the government (charter schools should be non-for-profit). Also, charter schools should not have a religious or political agenda (they need to follow the same rules as a traditional public school). On Oprah, charter schools were touted as THE cure for education. However, I see this as throwing out the baby with the bath water. There are some good schools and some bad. We need a variety of models that will fit different communities, cultures, resources, and values.

3) The fact is that a smaller class size will result in more effective learning. Likewise, students who do not live in poverty and/or have literate parents do better in school. The current No Child Left Behind "accountability" focus on standardized testing in which a teacher is responsible if a child does not pass a test is an inaccurate measure of effectiveness.

In a report by Al Roker on Elementary Schools, the school that was highlighted had the average class increase from 20 students per class a decade ago to 32 students per class today. I know of a kindergarten teacher (1st year of school in New York State) who is expected to teach 25 5-6 year olds (usually with no previous education such as pre-school or even at home help from parents) how to read by the end of this school year. All without help in the classroom. Last year she was successful as she only had 16 students.

We need to look at student improvement from their starting point to their ending point (rather than measuring them against students from more privileged backgrounds). We need to put resources into the needs of the school based on their community, not a standard formula. And we need to find new ways (besides testing) to measure student performance.

4) We are not China, Switzerland, Japan, or South Africa. What works in their countries might work here in the US, but perhaps not. We need to develop an educational system that works with our communities, culture, and values. To do this, we need to move away from the industrial military complex attitude towards education that we are developing workers. When I went to school, schools were developing citizens that could make informed decisions. However, even as a student that began to change and we were told that education was to prepare us for a job of the future. This streamlining was used in France up until the 60's at which time Europe began to see that education was more than creating workers.

The current focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) has wiped out what made the US successful: creativity. A colleague of mine from Hong Kong was disappointed in her University Program in the US because there was no creativity allowed. My daughter's school, which was designed with STEM in mind, ended up being more important as a school that allows students with creative minds to succeed in STEM courses. A project based curriculum based on group work develops communication, problem solving, and creative skills for students that normally would have difficulty in learning math and science. What is interesting is that students that were especially gifted in math and science, in fact left the school or had the hardest time to adapt to this style of learning.

The fact is the US is loosing its place in the world because of lack of innovation. Innovation comes from creativity, not fitting a static mold set out by standards.

5) Finally, education is a joint process between the administrators, teachers, students, community, and parents. All are equally important and responsible. Until we use a model of community education building rather than competitive education, we will not have an effective educational system in the US.

I applaud the media for at least discussing education in the US. I just wish they would present a more informed and balanced discussion. The fact is that in some places, the educational system is working. In others, people are working hard to improve the process (but with mixed results) and in still other places the system has broken down. The biggest mistake we could make is to fix that which is working well, not giving those working on change the time and resources to succeed, and trying the same old policies in those areas where those policies have not worked and probably will never work.

New Collaborative Virtual Spaces: Sending a forwarding address

2010-09-20T10:31:00.000-04:00

Over the last few years, I have collaborated with a number of people that I either have never met face to face or who live too far away to meet on a regular basis face to face. I moved from listservs to discussion boards to blogs and now to facebook. What I have noticed is an initial period in which I participate as a spectator (i.e. a member of the listserv receiving updates but not posting), then I move on as an active member. I then begin to build a trusting relationship in which I feel there are good conversations and a safe area to disagree and resolve intellectual disagreements.

My experience fits fairly closely with online community research (See Ruth Brown's research, for example). However, after a while, a new technology will come online and members of the community (not all) will begin to emigrate to the new format, leaving the one community to help develop and become part of a new community. As this happens, however, suddenly, a virtual colleague is now missing with no forwarding address.

I often wonder, where are they? Where did everyone go? How do I contact them again and stay in touch? what makes things even more difficult is that different members will gravitate to different technologies (and thus different communities). It is impossible to stay in touch with all new technologies, so we choose those technologies that meet our needs at that time.

I think that there needs to be a protocol for disbanding a community and/or migrating it to a new technology. In the snailmail, we have a forwarding address. It might be good if we began to use the same mechanisms as we leave communities. Perhaps someone will develop a directory in which the most commonly accessed addresses are listed for an individual. I currently do this by googling people's names. However, if there was an interactive directory that you could use to identify where people are posting and where you are most apt to contact them, it would be helpful to follow your community through cyberspace.

Dissertation: Analysis of the Impact of the Environment on the Group

2010-09-16T13:39:00.001-04:00

In order to understand the interaction between the distributed group, individual group members, and the organization and its departments within this study, it is important to understand the various working environments and perceived power structures.

There were numerous environments that an individual might have to work with as a member of the project under study. In addition, there were multiple layers of authority and vested interests (share-holders) that influenced individual members and the group itself at any given time.

From an ethnomethological stand point, this group influenced and was influenced by the complex environment that a distributed group creates. Distributed groups create multi-layered power structures, multiple cultures which workers need to traverse, and intricate social relationships, both internal and external to the group. These complexities are both created through the new power structures, work processes, and cultures that are established when bringing together group members from various departments and locations. However, distributed groups also create complexity for the departments and organizations where they are located as group members try to align goals, work processes, priorities, and even the image of the group and departments where they work. As a result, a distributed group may be working within a much more dynamic environment than that of a single department within a common location.

In looking at this group, some conclusions about the impact of this more complex environment on the group could be drawn:

• There were differing interpretations of perceived authority within the group, the departments, the project, and the organization especially when there was no clear authority structure imposed on the group.

• According to the group, there was very little perceived cultural change within departments and the professions that group members identified with. However, the group’s culture appeared to fluctuate to align with the perceived power structure’s culture. Some group members were able to adapt; but for others, they either left the organization or tried to change the culture within the perceived power structure to meet their own comfort level. This was dependent upon their perception of their own empowerment and importance within the group, their department, and the training and home organizations.

• The greater percentage of the group member’s time that was dedicated to the project, the greater perception that they had a vested interest in the project and its outcome. This also lead to those with a vested interest feeling more entitled to contribute to the project, which then lead to them having a greater role with in the group’s power structure. In other words, those that did not have additional duties outside of the project, believed that they should have the greatest influence on the project direction and decisions.

• The complexity of the environment made it difficult for group members and the management team to determine who exactly was part of the group (intragroup identification) and what an individual member’s role was within the group. Related to the previous point, those with the greater percentage of time dedicated to the project were closely identified with the Healthcare Counseling group. However, other factors such as acceptance by the group members, recognition by the management team and departmental power structure, and perceived expertise within an area the group and individual members identified as important also had an impact on whether others within the group recognized someone as a member or not. Those that individual members recognized as being part of the group, were included in project work processes and communications. Although, not everyone recognized by individual members was recognized by the group as a whole as being part of the group.

• The power structures, both internal and external to the group, were dynamic and not static. As a result, there was continuous realignment of goals, work processes, perceptions and expectations to maintain balance both within and outside the group. This sometimes required changes in the group culture, channels of communication, project formats and tools, and management (power) structures.

• The writing projects were both informed by and influenced communication, work processes group identity and member roles, and project goals and standards. The formats, physical layout, and virtual tools created both physical and psychological boundaries within which the group functioned. At times, these boundaries had to be renegotiated, either intragroup or between external power structures (stakeholders, departments, management). There were four strategies that were used: 1) accept a boundary (process, expectations, format, standard, etc…) as it was imposed on the group without any changes or comment, 2) adopt a process or format from one of the departments as is or making minimal changes to align with the group’s beliefs and processes, 3) maintain multiple processes or formats as long as they could be compatible with boundaries imposed externally, modifying those that were outside of the imposed boundaries, or 4) create new formats and processes from scratch to fit within the boundaries imposed externally. The strategy used depended on time constraints, the degree of perceived difference outside of the group, the level of ownership both to the project and the work task/product, the support (or lack) by the group members and/or power structure, the affect on personal, professional, or departmental image, and level of personal investment to certain aspects of the project.

• Related to this was the consistent tension between work processes established at the various levels of the power structures within the work environment. These tensions were often resolved either by 1) collaboration, 2) compromise, 3) subversion, or 4) withdrawal from the organization or project.

Start of a new semester

2010-08-30T10:28:00.000-04:00

Well, last month was especially busy as we start looking for colleges for next year for my son and he registered to take a couple of college courses while he is in high school. I'll blog about that experience later.

Today, though, was the first day of classes for me. I'm excited as I'm trying out 3 new things:

1) I've created a facebook group in place of the Ning. Since Ning went commercial and I don't have time to test out the new mechanisms for educators, I decided to try facebook. Many of my students are already on facebook, so I thought I'd give it a try. They can upload their video assignments, ask questions about the class, and/or get updated information about the class. The only thing I have been unable to figure out is how to upload documents (I think I'll end up just emailing them).

2) I've decided to include a real audience for my students. For their group presentation assignment, they will either go into an actual classroom and give a presentation on college life or they will create a vodcast which will then be viewed by a real life class.

3) I have included the original Shirley Sherrod speech to view as one of the class assignments. For those that may be unfamiliar with her, she was the Department of Agriculture employee who was fired (or asked to resign) because of an "inflammatory speech." A section of the speech was uploaded as a clip on a conservative blog and the clip, which was taken out of context from the entire speech, accused Ms. Sherrod of discrimination. However, when you watch the entire speech, Ms. Sherrod's message was the complete opposite, advocating reaching out and giving support across races so that the poor of our country can be lifted out of poverty. In fact, it is a very inspirational speech in which she breaks many stereotypes (i.e. all people of color are powerless, all poor people are people of color, if you are white, you have access to power and privilege). My objective in using this speech is to discuss how to craft a speech without having portions lifted to be used against the speaker and/or give an unintended message. I feel this is especially important in the electronic age of sound bites.

Are Forums obsolete?

2010-07-23T10:51:00.001-04:00

Tony Karrer posted a query for suggestions of how a financial institution can replicate an online forum which they had previously been successful in creating.

This was my comment:

Part of the problem in financial institutions today (as opposed to two years ago) is that they are under the scrutiny of regulators. I have been an employee in an atmosphere of high government regulation (I was an internal auditor) and learned never to put anything in writing that I was not absolutely sure of. It could come back to bite you. This sounds like a similar climate.

It seems to me that first there needs to be a sense of connection with the other members of forum outside of the forum. Once this has been established, the community needs to feel that they need the online forum. How has the forum been set up? How will they use it? Will there be a moderator? Will it be private? Anonymous? How will you insure the group's privacy? How will you remind them that the forum is there? Often, having a forum that is linked to a vital website is more useful than one in which they receive email updates.

To get them to use the forum, you will need to have "events" that will bring them back to the community (i.e. online training events, important updates from those in authority, interviews or guest "appearances" by key decision makers or stake holders). I think if you were to look at the previous forum, you will find that there was some hook that got them going and/or key personnel that maintained the forum. My experience is that there are some groups that just won't share and others that won't do it online.

Finally, I would look to the tools being used. With twitter and other "shortened" tools being used today, a forum is outdated and not useful. A social network such as facebook or ning gives a more informal feeling, but also requires a moderator to update information. This person, from the concerns you have identified, should be someone in a position of authority so the information provided is validated and filtered.

Tony then posed the question as to whether I thought there was no role for forums in the corporate any more. This was my answer:

I wouldn't say that a classic forum won't ever work. It depends on the community. I think older workers would prefer the forum format (i.e. upper management). However, I think as workers are being squeezed for time, attention, and accountability, they need tools that will fit their community's "personality". If they are facebook users (which more and more people are), they will want to access information through facebook. If they have all received training through a ning or other tool, they are familiar with that tool so are more apt to use it. If they are following each other on twitter, they are more apt to want to share information using that format. But the tool should come from the community rather than the training or IT department forcing them to use something. The ideal would be to negotiate between the two groups what would work.

What do you think?

Help with my new blog format

2010-07-14T12:23:00.001-04:00

As you can see, I decided to change my blog a bit, use a new template, update the blog list, include my tags. It looks great on the design page, but I can't get the design page to match up how it looks on the web. I'm trying to figure out how to make the blog page smaller, but so far haven't figured out how to do so. So if any of you can give me help on this, I'd appreciate it.

Meanwhile, at least those of you who prefer the larger font will appreciate it (my husband loves it as he can read it without glasses!).

The line between beginner and expert and all that other grey area

2010-07-13T19:11:00.002-04:00

One of the reasons I haven't written as much on my blog is that my son was preparing to take his driving test (for the second time). An editorial in Parade magazine says it all about how stressful this is.

Yesterday, as my son drove about 40 minutes away to the driving test site, I could actually sit pretty relaxed without feeling the constant adrenaline rush that curses through my body as he makes a mistake such as missing the red light or stop sign as he drives through the intersection, or leaning down to see what was brushing his leg while forgetting to steer (almost ending us in a ditch) or forgetting to slow down as he made the turn. In fact, I felt pretty confident that he would pass the test this time, which he did.

However, as I drove off from the site and he began to talk about all of his driving plans, I suddenly got that adrenaline rush of fear. Yes, now he has his license and he can drive by himself. But who will help him when he meets a situation he has never faced before. Will he panic, as he has tended to do while learning to drive? Now I will be scared for at least another year every time he goes out by himself.

"You will not be driving by yourself except for a few places that I know you are comfortable with," I announced. He rolled his eyes and reminded me he now had his license and in 12 days, when he turns 17, his senior license.

Moving into the intermediate grey zone

As we negotiated his driving privileges, he commented, "You know, mom, I know I still have a lot to learn. I consider myself an intermediate and I still will need to drive with you in the winter until I learn how to drive in the winter or at night. But you have to let me drive by myself, because I'm not a beginner any more."

This got me to thinking about when it is safe to allow someone to do a dangerous task or work that might have serious results without any direct supervision. I think, for example about drawing blood, creating a pharmaceutical IV, cutting lunch meat, or conducting a biotech experiment. In all of these cases, workers eventually will be expected to be on their own with some minimal supervision (periodic check-ins, paperwork, performance review). However, in each of these professions there is a tipping point when the task becomes second nature and the person can handle any unexpected occurrence that is thrown their way. Up until that point, however, the risk of danger is the greatest.

Why? Because the worker will not necessarily look to others for help, feeling that they should know how to do something. In my experience, an expert is more apt to ask for help if he or she feels there might be dangerous results, in part because they recognize the dangerous environment. However, intermediates don't know enough to see the potential danger in all of their actions. Rarely do you hear about the rookie policeman being injured or killed, because he or she has backup to take over, usually a very experienced police officer who has had multiple experiences to draw on. It is the officer on the job 3-7 years who will be injured, because they know enough about the situation to be part of it, but not enough to anticipate all the potential problems.

So how do we support these intermediate workers to help keep them safe or from creating a dangerous situation for others or the organization?

The following are some ideas based on research, based on my own experience:

1. Have multi-experienced teams that intermediate level knowledge workers can access for help and advice.

2. Create an atmosphere of disclosure so workers of intermediate level skills don't feel afraid to tell others when they are overwhelmed with a situation.

3. Create protocols for workers to access in problem situations. Make sure the workers know how to handle any situation using problem solving skills (rather than having a check list of "what to dos", none of which might fit the situation).

This is just a start of the list. I'm wondering how others handle these intermediate levels that can be quite terrifying for a manager AND a parent!

Writing for learning: deep learning vs. skimming

2010-06-30T11:01:00.000-04:00

My process for writing my dissertation coincides with some of the findings I have for my study. This is especially true as my children are now home for summer vacation and I am constantly being interrupted. I try to write at least two hours a day. Often, this is early morning as typical teens, my kids don't get up until 9 or 10 in the morning. I might be in the middle of a significant idea when they come down, speak to me (I can't complain that I actually have teens that speak to me!), trips I need to make, giving a list of things to do for the day, burps/arguements between siblings...you name it.

As a result, I find I have to continually read what I have written and try to capture the thought I had. However, as I am creating the knowledge, what happens if it is lost? Was it truely an important thought? Upon rereading what I have written so as to recapture an idea I might have lost, might I not create a deeper understanding of what I am writing? And where does that idea go that was lost? Is that lost knowledge? Or is it just part of the process of idea generation and knowledge building?

I occasionally see this with my own students, who have created a speech using powerpoint. In their presentations, they will sometimes forget to mention something and may go back to it. I am continually asking them however, how important that piece of information is for the audience to understand them. If they have forgotten it, perhaps it is not really necessary for the audience. However, they may still have that knowledge in their head which allows them to understand what they are saying. That specific piece of information was a building block as they were creating their speech (and a basis for their speech as a whole) but it may not be necessary for others to have that piece for their (the audience's) understanding.

I think of it like a building that is built on the ruins of others. The original building creates a foundation and even a shape upon which a new building can be constructed. However, it is not necessary that the new building be constructed exactly the same as the original. More often than not it is improved upon, creating its own flavor or style. It is a unique creation in the end, which also can be built upon.

It is difficult to let go of the lost ideas, just as it is difficult to create something new rather than going back to the original design. The process as we discard, change, and/or create something new helps us to have a deeper understanding in general of the topic. Writing helps us document our thinking, although not all thoughts will be put down. This might be the underlying reason for why project based learning creates a deeper level of learning, much more than the finished product or even a test could measure.

A Generation of Teachers

2010-06-24T18:22:00.000-04:00

I realized yesterday as my son was teaching me how to text (yes, I couldn't figure out how to text on my phone!) that not only is this a generation of learners, but also a generation of teachers. I see this all the time in my class (online and face to face) and with my children and their friends.

So how are they different from my generation? My generation looked to the teacher for answers. Ultimately, the teacher was the expert who would "teach" us how to do things. If we don't know how to do something, we go to an "expert" who will know how to "teach" us how to do something.

What I noticed about my children's generation is that they take direction from the person who wants to know how to do something, asking a lot of information. I was impressed with the fact that my son asked me if I knew how to do "X", then showed me how to do it, then had me do it. He didn't always have the patience to let me make mistakes and have me try it again. Rather, being a typical teen, he looked at me in disgust and showed me again how to do "X". I find this is the same process my students use (with out the disgust) when showing something to their classmates.

Sports and culture: the case of the World Cup

2010-06-13T11:36:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, my son watched the England vs. USA soccer world cup game. As I am sure there was a different vibe in England, this was actually well watched by many of my son's friends...even those that don't play soccer.

Throughout the game, my son was texting one of his best friends from grade school. "What are they thinking??" (The US). "They should be playing the Latin American game. They can't beat the Brits playing a European game.""Where are the middies?."

At the same time, I heard the commentators, "He's doing what a striker should do." "The D needs to mark his man. That's why they made that goal."

So I asked my son, "Do you think they use the same terminology to describe the game as they do in the US?"

His answer was that he once had watched one of the British league games on line and didn't understand a single thing the commentators were saying.

So this tells me a few things about the cultural differences in sports:

There are cultural differences in strategies. HOW a country plays the game depends on the cultural values they have on winning, "fair play", the team, individual team member responsibilities, and the role of the sport in that country.
Even in the same language, different terminology develops which reflects the region and country's values. Sports terminology is one of the most culturally ingrained specialty language. Study the sports terminology and its philology and you'll get a good idea of the culture's values.
Sports has always been perceived as a uniting activity. However, it can also be a dividing activity.
Look to other cultures and their strategies to improve your own play and understanding of the sport. This could then be used to advantage in other parts of your life (i.e. business, education).

Finally, a heartfelt thanks goes out to Andy Cloverdale for posting the link to the World Cup interactive calendar. We've bookmarked it on delicious and access it daily as this is not a high priority for American Sports (although the US vs. England game was shown on US network TV).

Unofficial first day of summer

2010-05-31T08:45:00.000-04:00

Memorial Day in the US (the last Monday of May) is the unofficial start to summer. Most of the country will have already finished up school last week and will be finishing school this week. But New York state doesn't end until the end of June.

Growing up, this was always the toughest time of year as we were expected to keep focused on the end of the school year, tests, and finishing up the last bits that we did not yet cover. Most universities (like my own) are out of school and college students are looking for summer jobs. However, High School sports are just finishing up, and between studying for exams and finishing up the sports year, it is hard to find time to look for a summer job, especially when the unemployment rate for teens under 20 is at 40%.

For me, however, this is when I get all of my work (writing, research, next year's courses) done as the kids are still not home bugging me. So as we enter June, for those in the northern hemisphere, happy Summer (I know it doesn't officially start for three weeks) and for those in the southern hemisphere, hunker down for the coming winter ahead!

A Switch in Comment policy

2010-05-26T07:56:00.000-04:00

Lately, I've had a lot of spam on my comment function. So I have decided to moderate ALL comments in the future. This is as much for my readers as for my own blog.

I still invite anyone to post a comment. I may not get your comment posted immediately as I work on my dissertation. However, I will be able to show your comment and respond at the same time now as I don't think I'll be missing a comment that might have been posted but that I didn't see.