Collaboration and co-learning
Pat Parslow (p.parslow@reading.ac.uk)
OdinLab (odinlab@reading.ac.uk) –
Shirley Williams, Karsten Lundqvist, Richard Hussey,
Patrick Hathway, Sarah Fleming
24 March 2009

 S. Kleanthous and V. Dimitrova 2006
 Towards a Holistic Personalised Support for Knowledge
Sharing in Virtual Learning Communities
E. Tomadaki and P. Scott (Eds.): Innovative Approaches for Learning and Knowledge

Sharing, EC-TEL 2006 Workshops Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, p. 333-344, 2006.
Community/Enterprise
24 March 2009

 \"The key for a transactive memory system to function
is that the divergence of information held in members’
heads must be known to the others.\"
Community/Enterprise
24 March 2009

 Consensual reality - the agreed representation of the
environment, despite differing subjective filters
 Agreement on concepts (and the processes used to
gain agreement)
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 Members' positions within the community and the
roles they play
Community/Enterprise
24 March 2009

 TM: Search, feeds, \"missing\" ontology (relationships
between knowledge) but hyperlinks and crediting fill gap
to some degree (and build trust)
 SMM: Visualisations help build common understanding.
Missing from most SNS, but tag clouds a primitive form.
Topic maps etc. can be used. Also communal bookmarking
helps + Cohere (cohere.open.ac.uk and MeAggregator)
 CCon: Categories and tagging, ontologies and
folksonomies
 CCen: Doing some work on tool to help people recognise
their position in a community, based on feeds. Early days.
Also an aspect of DI work
24 March 2009

 Connectivism tenet - knowledge has short half-life;
not what you know but how quickly you can assimilate
and use knowledge
 perhaps the “Social Network” *is* the learning from this
viewpoint...
24 March 2009

 50% of our students report learning through using
Facebook
 It has no learning materials in it! (Facebook v
Blackboard study, 2007)
 Students appear to value a ‘safe environment’
 But for them this means not having oversight by staff
 Control of who sees what
 Open discussion in self-defined peer groups
24 March 2009

 Collaborative tools to capture the knowledge for later
use - wiki, ontology, folksonomy
 Cost effectiveness, speed of deployment, mentoring,
local experts
 These tools support learning, but also straight forward
collaboration – they enable a more distributed virtual
office than traditional means of communication and
group work permit
24 March 2009

 Static web content
 Supports Transactive memory
 Slight support for Shared mental models
 No real support for cognitive consensus
 No support for cognitive centrality
 Also true of content management systems (generally)
24 March 2009

 Forums
 Slight support for Transactive memory
 Support for Shared mental models
 Slight support for cognitive consensus
 Slight support for cognitive centrality
 Also true, to a degree, for email lists
24 March 2009

 Wikis
 Support for Transactive memory
 Support for Shared mental models
 Support for cognitive consensus
 No real support for cognitive centrality
 Mode of use tends to imply a ‘correct’ view decided by
consensus, with majority drowning out ‘fringe’ views
24 March 2009

 Blogs
 Slight support for Transactive memory
 If you have an aggregated view
 Slight support for Shared mental models
 No real support for cognitive consensus
 Some support for cognitive centrality
 With aggregation – blogs emphasise the individual view over
the consensual view
24 March 2009

 Social Bookmarking
 E.g. Delicious, clipmarks, amplify, citeulike
 Slight support for Transactive memory
 More of an index into TM than a form of TM itself
 Slight support for Shared mental models
 Tagging provides a slight insight into others mental models
 No support for cognitive consensus
 Some support for cognitive centrality
 You can build a view of where you ‘sit’ within the
bookmarking community
24 March 2009

 Online office tools
 Such as Google Docs, Office Online, Zoho et al
 Supports Transactive Memory
 Though in a fragmented way
 No real support for Shared mental models
 Without ‘meta’ level documents being generated
 Support for cognitive consensus
 No real support for cognitive centrality
 Most documents are private to small groups (though, see
scribd)
24 March 2009

 Concept mapping tools
 Such as Mindmeister, Cmaptools, Cohere
 Supports Transactive Memory
 Though as a ‘high level view’
 Support for Shared mental models
 Almost by definition!
 Support for cognitive consensus
 Though generally not for the processes involved in achieving
it
 No real support for cognitive centrality
 Individual maps possible + community maps, but seeing a
view of how yours fits into the whole is ‘missing’
24 March 2009

 SNS
 Some support for Transactive memory
 Depending on use, but shared files for groups etc.
 Some support for Shared mental models
 But would be improved by having mind
mapping/concept/topic/ontology tools built in
 Some support for cognitive consensus
 Embedded forums (including ‘wall’ and comments)
 Groups which can have ‘rules’ defining behavioural norms
 Some support for cognitive centrality
 View of group memberships
 Lists of interests
24 March 2009

 Corporate culture - does it clash?
 If “yes” then
 Change_culture! || do_things_your_own_way
 End if
 Accreditation - how do you prove soft-knowledge
gained through SNS use? (trust networks, ePortfolios)
 Open - can staff/students take their ePortfolio with
them?
 One size fits all?
 ‘wiki-wars’ etc
 People prefer different systems for valid reasons
24 March 2009

 When using any collaborative system
 Your use says something about you
 Most require an ‘account’
 To benefit from ‘network effect’ you need to be findable
 Profiles convey information about you
 What do you want to portray?
 How persistent is information about you?
 Can you create a good impression without a DI?
 This Is Me – http://thisisme.reading.ac.uk
 Funded by Eduserv
24 March 2009

 Diversity is not a bad thing
 But keeping track of materials used in different systems
is hard work
 Re-using content is not as easy as it should be
 MeAggregator is a service oriented, agent based system
based on a folksonomical file system
 Tag your resources
 Tag your friends/colleagues
 Apply permissions to resources
 Aggregate and re-publish content
 Funded by JISC
24 March 2009

 open-learner models (OLM) + domain ontologies ->
difference engines -> individual learning plans
 Topic/concept maps + domain ontologies -> differece
engines -> work-flow, research plans etc.
 OLM aggregation + behaviour logs -> recommender
systems
 Recommend learning styles
 Recommend learning resources
 Recommend mentors
24 March 2009

24 March 2009