Tag: knowledge-management

  • Designing Social Media Platforms For Online Learning

    Designing Social Media Platforms For Online Learning

    Recently, I have been using a new social media platform to run one of my classes. The idea was, that as we are studying social informatics, we could study the effect of using social media on our own workflows first hand. I also thought that – in these days of daily Facebook and Twitter use – a social media site would add some relevance to the class. My thinking was that the “right-brain” expression that Daniel Pink  extolls as critical to motivation in the 21st Century – the design, narrative, synthesis, empathy, play and sensemaking skills – would be enabled by the use of social media (Pink, 2005). The site has a WIKI, blogs, discussion forums, and an interactive chat facility. I was proposing that we used Google+ hangout for short class discussions by video. For the first week, I set students the task to post to the WIKI, to post to their own blog, to locate some web readings, and to join Google+ if they had not already done so.

    By Thursday (from a Monday start), almost all of the students had posted to the discussion forum. Several had asked me questions by email. But no-one had posted to the Blog or the WIKI. By Friday, two of the more technologically-literate students had made blog posts. But most of the activity was still on the discussion forums – and only three students had provided me with Google+ contact details. Then I started to question my own assumptions. All of the students had used Blackboard for their online course access, which revolves around an asynchronous discussion board. So they were used to interacting via an asynchronous forum. I had assumed that they would be excited to use more “social” media for class interactions or for sharing what they had discovered about the topic. But how did this fit into their idea of how they would behave in an online class? Very badly. Most students sign up for online courses because this provides them with choices about what to do, when. They have a low learning-curve for using a discussion forum. Anything else is hard work.

    Clay Shirky talks about the cognitive surplus that is available from zillions of digitally-literate people with mundane jobs and untapped creativity. He argues that this expresses itself in the groundswell of free, open source software initiatives and in the crowdsourcing phenomenon (Shirky, 2010). But graduate students with a full-time job are already using their cognitive surplus in grappling with new areas of learning. My assumption that they may have some left over for experimenting with social media may be false. The problem is that the learning curve gets in the way of the “right-brain” expression that I wanted to encourage. I may need to rethink how far experimenting with social media is constraining people’s’ ability to express themselves.

    References
    Daniel Pink  (2005) A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Berkely Publishing: New York.
    Pink (2005) Revenge Of The Right Brain, Wired Magazine, Feb. 2005.
    Clay Shirky (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Penguin Press: New York.
    Clay SHirky (2010) An Extract From Cognitive Surplus. Wired Magazine, Business Video, June 16, 2010.
    Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink  (2010) Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution. Wired Magazine, June 2010.

  • Organizational Coordination

    Organizational Coordination

    I have been working for a while on comparing the results from some very complex research studies of collaborative design in groups that span disciplines or knowledge domains. I was stunned to realize that I had different types of group activity depending on the sort of organization.

    By “organization,” I mean the way in which work is organized, not the sort of business they are in. I noted three types or organization, that seem to respond to collaboration in different ways:

    • Tightly-coupled work organizations rely on well-defined work roles and responsibilities to coordinate tasks across group members. When people in this sort of group have to make decisions, they partition these decisions, based on expertise. Because they all know each others’ capabilities and roles, they don’t have to think about who-knows-what: this is just obvious. This type of organization falls down when people don’t perform their role reliably. For example, if the whole system relies on accurate information coming into the group, someone who misinterprets what they observed can undermine the whole group system.
    • Event-driven organizations rely on external crises and pressures to coordinate group action. People in this sort of group have strongly-defined roles in the wider organization that take precedence over their role in the group — for example in management taskforce groups, business managers tend to prioritize their other work over problems that the group needs to fix. When people in this sort of group make decisions, they partition these decisions according to who-claims-to-know-what, who has time to do the work, and who knows people connected to the problem. They get to know each others’ capabilities over time, but this is a slow process as priorities and decisions are driven by external events, rather than a shared perception of what needs to be done. This type of organization falls down when decisions or actions that were put on a back burner because of another crisis inevitably become a crisis themselves because they were not followed through.
    • Loosely-coupled organizations rely on ad hoc work roles and cooperation among group members. This type of group is commonest in business process change groups, professional work-groups, and community groups, where people are there because they share an interest in the outcome.  When people in this sort of group make decisions, they partition these decisions according to who can leverage external connections to find things out and who has an interest in exploring what is involved. People often share responsibilities in these groups, comparing notes to learn about the situation. This type of organization falls down because it is hard to coordinate. So shared tasks are performed badly because someone knew something vital that they failed to communicate back to the group.
    Why would we care about these different types of organization? Well these structures affect how we approach problem-solving and design. If we (process and IS analysts) need to work with one of the tightly-coupled work-groups, we need to identify who has the decision-making capability for what. It would not occur to a tightly-coupled group member that anyone would not realize who to go to for what. If we need to work with an event-driven group, we have to realize that our work will not be a priority for them -- it must be made a priority by gaining an influential sponsor who can kick a$$ within the group(!).  If we work with a loosely-coupled group, we need to engage the interest of the group as a whole. Working with individuals can lead to failure, as this type of group makes decisions collaboratively, not on the basis of knowledge or expertise.
    Coordinating group work can be like taming wild horses

    Why would we care about these different types of organization? Well these structures affect how we approach problem-solving and design. If we (process and IS analysts) need to work with one of the tightly-coupled work-groups, we need to identify who has the decision-making capability for what. It would not occur to a tightly-coupled group member that anyone would not realize who to go to for what. If we need to work with an event-driven group, we have to realize that our work will not be a priority for them — it must be made a priority by gaining an influential sponsor who can kick a$$ within the group(!).  If we work with a loosely-coupled group, we need to engage the interest of the group as a whole. Working with individuals can lead to failure, as this type of group makes decisions collaboratively, not on the basis of knowledge or expertise.

    I have a fair amount of evidence for this line of thought and I am pursuing other factors that make these groups different. More to follow …