Collaboration and co-learning

Pat Parslow p.parslow@reading.ac.uk

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

"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

Consensual reality - the agreed representation of the environment, despite differing subjective filters

Agreement on concepts (and the processes used to gain agreement)

Members' positions within the community and the roles they play

Community/Enterprise

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

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...

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

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 take their ePortfolio with them?

open-learner models (OLM) + domain ontologies -> difference engines -> individual learning plans

OLM aggregation + behaviour logs -> recommender systems Recommend learning styles Recommend learning resources Recommend mentors