http://www.edufeedr.net/pg/edufeedr/view_educourse/1167?filter=course
1. Give some examples of the kinds of activities you are likely to find in each of the phases of knowledge maturing? What artefacts are produces or used with these activities?
The knowledge maturing process model structure uses five phases:
- Expressing ideas. For example in the Software Company the sales department produces new ideas which kind of software to develop. The ideas mainly come from the customers of the company.
- Distributing in communities. The idea should be developed further, the professional opinion of programmers, software architects, analysts etc is needed. To have the distributed knowledge, common picture about the topic, are used blogs or even company's intranet based wiki or forums for example.
- Formalizing. The needed software is programmed, by management and customer coordinated. Prototypes are programmed.
- Ad-hoc learning. The costumer has tested prototypes and given the feedback to The Software Company. Documentations, manuals for software usage are produced during this phase.
- Standardization. The real software is produced and customer is satisfied and contract of software development is closed.
Based on the previous theory can be developed additionally new theories, softwares, teaching materials etc.
2. Think of some maturing services that would support these activities?
Company based blogging, wiki or wikis, tagging services, Web 2.0 etc
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Assignment 3: Communities of Practice II
http://www.edufeedr.net/pg/edufeedr/view_educourse/1167?filter=course
1. What is the relationship between technologies and community development?
We have to ask how technology supports community development?
The main concept is to understand how communities practice is supported by technology capabilities? What can we gain from the technology in use? - This is the question we have to ask.
Technology has changed how we think about communities, and communities have changed our uses of technology. These evolving digital habitats give us the chance to reconsider what we know about communities and to rediscover fundamental ideas in new setting - to explore and, in the end, to know the place for the first time, once again.
Finally the development of technologies is affected by communities. We cannot separate technology from communities in the current context and we don`t have to.
2. What are the different strategies of integration?
a. Integration through platforms - The digital habitat becomes a source of identity for the community. It creates a boundary that delineates space, access to which can define membership, but also exclude non-members. Self-contained platforms may cut off the community from broader networks and from spontaneous interactions with the rest of the world.
In my opinion Integration through platforms cannot be very trustful beacuse of possible technical issues during usage of this kind technology. And in more reliable systems can we still face the lack of information. Risks from technical integration point of view are too high.
Benefits: Easy to use; Risks: Extendability
b. Integration through interoperability - Interoperability provides technical bridges between tools (and platforms) as opposed to consolidating them. It reflects the integration of a community`s digital habitat in the context of a broader "digital ecosystem". With this approach, communities can extend their configuration and connections, individuals can choose the tools through which they connect to their communities, and communities can interact with other communities across their respective configurations.
Benefits: Lots of tools, flexibility, Individual contributions Risks: Connectivity, updating, security
c. Integration through tools - these are separate tools for configuration. Examples include RSS integrators, NET vibe. More controllable by technology stewart(manager).This type of integration assumes a degree of competence and even "technological restlessness" on the part of the community - an interest in the tools and their posiibilities. This flexibility works better for communities that are technically adept and flexible, but less well for communities that lack a critical mass of early adopters or people willing to spend time hopping between tools.
Because this kind of integration assumes competence, simple users may not be interested. For simple users must new inventions stay as simple as possible.
Benefits: Individual (everybody can design their own config.); Multi membership - makes it easier to deal with this problem. Risks: Technical expertise of members.
d. Integration through practice - Writing down the teleconference minutes for example. Integration of tools by certain practices. Example among others also tagging (hush tags).There are limits to what we can expect directly from technology or even from the use of integrative tools. Integration also happens purely through practice. For example, the practice of producing useful notes from a face-to-face or phone meetings for publication in an online space bridges different technologies that really cannot interoperate. The need for integration through practice reflects the fact that the experience of habitat is constructed by the community in its use of technology.
Finally: Consolidating habitats through platform integration starts with a focus on the group around a common toolset, and uses interoperability and integrative tools to expand outward, increase personal tool choises, and open connections at the boundaries.
Benefits: Only way, embedded in practice.
Risks: There is too much work.
3. Give some concrete examples of how technologies are used in communities. How do they impact the duality of participation and reification?
Blogs and wikis are different from each other, but both combine participation and reification in innovative ways by moving from a centralized to a distributed publishing model and including a participative structure around documents.
The hybrid nature of blogs and wikis is reflected in their location halfway between participation and reification. While similar in this respect, wikis and blogs address the group/individual polarity in opposite directions, hence their locations on opposite sides of the diagram`s donut. Wikis represent the voice of the group and the identity of the community. Open, shared editing means that the text produced by the community is the community`s property, with individual contributions melding into one product. After readers stop editing, one can assume the text represents the voice of the community. By contrast, blogs emphasize the voice of authors (individuals and subgroups).
Technology affords new ways to combine participation and reification. For instance, augmenting a phone conversation with a web-based whiteboard supports new forms of co-authorship that casually mix conversations with written words, images and sounds. Similarly the ability to comment on a document adds a conversational dimension to the storage of artifacts.
1. What is the relationship between technologies and community development?
We have to ask how technology supports community development?
The main concept is to understand how communities practice is supported by technology capabilities? What can we gain from the technology in use? - This is the question we have to ask.
Technology has changed how we think about communities, and communities have changed our uses of technology. These evolving digital habitats give us the chance to reconsider what we know about communities and to rediscover fundamental ideas in new setting - to explore and, in the end, to know the place for the first time, once again.
Finally the development of technologies is affected by communities. We cannot separate technology from communities in the current context and we don`t have to.
2. What are the different strategies of integration?
a. Integration through platforms - The digital habitat becomes a source of identity for the community. It creates a boundary that delineates space, access to which can define membership, but also exclude non-members. Self-contained platforms may cut off the community from broader networks and from spontaneous interactions with the rest of the world.
In my opinion Integration through platforms cannot be very trustful beacuse of possible technical issues during usage of this kind technology. And in more reliable systems can we still face the lack of information. Risks from technical integration point of view are too high.
Benefits: Easy to use; Risks: Extendability
b. Integration through interoperability - Interoperability provides technical bridges between tools (and platforms) as opposed to consolidating them. It reflects the integration of a community`s digital habitat in the context of a broader "digital ecosystem". With this approach, communities can extend their configuration and connections, individuals can choose the tools through which they connect to their communities, and communities can interact with other communities across their respective configurations.
Benefits: Lots of tools, flexibility, Individual contributions Risks: Connectivity, updating, security
c. Integration through tools - these are separate tools for configuration. Examples include RSS integrators, NET vibe. More controllable by technology stewart(manager).This type of integration assumes a degree of competence and even "technological restlessness" on the part of the community - an interest in the tools and their posiibilities. This flexibility works better for communities that are technically adept and flexible, but less well for communities that lack a critical mass of early adopters or people willing to spend time hopping between tools.
Because this kind of integration assumes competence, simple users may not be interested. For simple users must new inventions stay as simple as possible.
Benefits: Individual (everybody can design their own config.); Multi membership - makes it easier to deal with this problem. Risks: Technical expertise of members.
d. Integration through practice - Writing down the teleconference minutes for example. Integration of tools by certain practices. Example among others also tagging (hush tags).There are limits to what we can expect directly from technology or even from the use of integrative tools. Integration also happens purely through practice. For example, the practice of producing useful notes from a face-to-face or phone meetings for publication in an online space bridges different technologies that really cannot interoperate. The need for integration through practice reflects the fact that the experience of habitat is constructed by the community in its use of technology.
Finally: Consolidating habitats through platform integration starts with a focus on the group around a common toolset, and uses interoperability and integrative tools to expand outward, increase personal tool choises, and open connections at the boundaries.
Benefits: Only way, embedded in practice.
Risks: There is too much work.
3. Give some concrete examples of how technologies are used in communities. How do they impact the duality of participation and reification?
Blogs and wikis are different from each other, but both combine participation and reification in innovative ways by moving from a centralized to a distributed publishing model and including a participative structure around documents.
The hybrid nature of blogs and wikis is reflected in their location halfway between participation and reification. While similar in this respect, wikis and blogs address the group/individual polarity in opposite directions, hence their locations on opposite sides of the diagram`s donut. Wikis represent the voice of the group and the identity of the community. Open, shared editing means that the text produced by the community is the community`s property, with individual contributions melding into one product. After readers stop editing, one can assume the text represents the voice of the community. By contrast, blogs emphasize the voice of authors (individuals and subgroups).
Technology affords new ways to combine participation and reification. For instance, augmenting a phone conversation with a web-based whiteboard supports new forms of co-authorship that casually mix conversations with written words, images and sounds. Similarly the ability to comment on a document adds a conversational dimension to the storage of artifacts.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Assignment 2: Communities of Practice I
http://www.edufeedr.net/pg/edufeedr/view_educourse/1167?filter=course
1. What is the difference between a community and a team?
The community creates the social fabric of learning. A striong community fosters interactions and relationships based on mutual respect and trust. It encourages willingness to share ideas, expose one`s ignorance, ask difficult questions, and listen carefully. The essence of a team is a set of independent tasks that contribute to a predefined, shared object. The team makes a commitment to this goal and ensures that individual commitments are kept. The team leader keeps the team focused on its deliverable and coordinates individual contributions to the overall objectives.
Members of Community are connected by independent knowledge, not by independent subtasks.
Classical structure based organisation (in this contexts could be named as teams) fullfills its positions, some positions may be left even unfilled. Organisation doesn`t use its full competence. Effective organisation uses tasks based structure (there is not any waste of persons) and it is community based and not too restrictly managed, but more flexible. The most of the knowledge comes from community members, not from management. The management only coordinates and makes plans. The community finds its direction by itself. Negotiation of Meaning is actively in use.
2. What is meant with participation and reification?
Participation referes to a process of taking part and also to the relations with others that reflect this process. It suggests both action and connection.
Reification is less common than participation, but in conjunction with participation, reification is a very useful concept to describe our engagement with the world as productive of meaning. Reification can take a great vriety of forms, for example an age-old pyramid - This object is only the tip of an iceberg, which indicates larger contexts of significance realized in human practices. Prperly speaking, the products of reification are not simply concrete, material objects. Rather, they are reflections of these practices, tokens of vast expanses of human meanings.
Important is, that partification and reification cannot be considered in isolation: they come as a pair.
Participation is something we do as persons and reification is suggests precisely that, in terms of meaning, people and things cannot be defined independently of each other.
3. How does this relate to the Distributed Cognition wiew of things?
In my opinion Communities of Practice are made possible with help of specific technology usage in early stages of technology development. With help of technology with specific capability in later stages of technology development. You need to know what kind of software to use based on your communities orientation (problems, goals etc.).
In Distributed Cognition we have to think, that we are not using our mind, but it`s tool we are using. We are providing our DC tools with help of technology in the current context.
1. What is the difference between a community and a team?
The community creates the social fabric of learning. A striong community fosters interactions and relationships based on mutual respect and trust. It encourages willingness to share ideas, expose one`s ignorance, ask difficult questions, and listen carefully. The essence of a team is a set of independent tasks that contribute to a predefined, shared object. The team makes a commitment to this goal and ensures that individual commitments are kept. The team leader keeps the team focused on its deliverable and coordinates individual contributions to the overall objectives.
Members of Community are connected by independent knowledge, not by independent subtasks.
Classical structure based organisation (in this contexts could be named as teams) fullfills its positions, some positions may be left even unfilled. Organisation doesn`t use its full competence. Effective organisation uses tasks based structure (there is not any waste of persons) and it is community based and not too restrictly managed, but more flexible. The most of the knowledge comes from community members, not from management. The management only coordinates and makes plans. The community finds its direction by itself. Negotiation of Meaning is actively in use.
2. What is meant with participation and reification?
Participation referes to a process of taking part and also to the relations with others that reflect this process. It suggests both action and connection.
Reification is less common than participation, but in conjunction with participation, reification is a very useful concept to describe our engagement with the world as productive of meaning. Reification can take a great vriety of forms, for example an age-old pyramid - This object is only the tip of an iceberg, which indicates larger contexts of significance realized in human practices. Prperly speaking, the products of reification are not simply concrete, material objects. Rather, they are reflections of these practices, tokens of vast expanses of human meanings.
Important is, that partification and reification cannot be considered in isolation: they come as a pair.
Participation is something we do as persons and reification is suggests precisely that, in terms of meaning, people and things cannot be defined independently of each other.
3. How does this relate to the Distributed Cognition wiew of things?
In my opinion Communities of Practice are made possible with help of specific technology usage in early stages of technology development. With help of technology with specific capability in later stages of technology development. You need to know what kind of software to use based on your communities orientation (problems, goals etc.).
In Distributed Cognition we have to think, that we are not using our mind, but it`s tool we are using. We are providing our DC tools with help of technology in the current context.
Assignment 1: Distributed Cognition
http://www.edufeedr.net/pg/edufeedr/view_educourse/1167?filter=course
The theory of distributed cognition has a special role to play in understanding interactions between people and technologies.
We are interested not only in what people know, but in how they go about using what they know to do what they do.
This means that in order to understand situated human cognition, it is not enough to know how the mind processes information. It is also necessary to know how the information to be processed is arranged in the material and social world.
And now the answers to the questions:
1. Give some examples from the text of how people create affordances in the physical world and on a computer display to facilitate their work.
EXAMPLE 1: Screen space often has no natural correlate in physical space. Thus when we rearrange the layout of directory windows, it makes no sense to ask whether we have brought those directories closer on the hard drive. The screen as desktop allows us to interpret such actions as analogous to shifting folders about on a flat desk, but folders can be made to pop in and out of existence, or to change in size, which again has no easy counterpart in the real world. The same applies when one changes the way files in a directory are displayed. It is certainly conceivable that alphabetizing, sorting by recency, or sorting by size are actions that change the order in which files are written on a disk. But it is more plausible to think of these as actions on the labels of files, not as actions on the files themselves.
Because we manipulate icons in icon space it is possible to take advan- tage of the way they are displayed to help us further simplify our activity. We can opportunistically exploit structural possibilities of the interface. Files may be left near the trash can to remind us that we need to delete them. Files that are to be used for a single project can be bunched together, or aliased so that they appear to be in two folders at once.
EXAMPLE 2: By combining observations of pilots in flight with study of operations manuals, interviews with pilots, and participation in the train- ing programs for two modern airliners, Hutchins was able to establish that pilots use the airspeed indicator dial as a material anchor for a conceptual space of meaningful airspeeds. They only rarely think of the speed as a number. Instead, they use the spatial structure of the display to make perceptual inferences about relations among actual and desired speeds.
EXAMPLE 3: In direct-manipulation interfaces the objects on-screen are meant to be so closely coupled to the actual computational objects we are dealing with that we are supposed to feel as if we are manipulating the real objects themselves and not just their stand-ins. To achieve this feeling of immediacy [Hutchins et al. 1985], it is essential that meaningful interface actions have meaningful counterparts in the system. Thus, in dragging an icon of a file from one folder to another we are not to think we are just moving icons, but rather moving the actual folders and all their contents.
2. Give some examples of how people offload cognitive activity to the environment.
EXAMPLE 1: Cockpit episode in which the flight engineer explains to the captain and first officer that they have a fuel leak. He interacts with the panel both as if it is the fuel system it depicts, and, at other times, as if it is just a representation of the fuel system (when he flicks a gauge with his finger to get the needle to move, for example).
EXAMPLE 2: By combining observations of pilots in flight with study of operations manuals, interviews with pilots, and participation in the training programs for two modern airliners, Hutchins was able to establish that pilots use the airspeed indicator dial as a material anchor for a conceptual space of meaningful airspeeds. They only rarely think of the speed as a number. Instead, they use the spatial structure of the display to make perceptual inferences about relations among actual and desired speeds.
3. Give some examples of internal and external representational states, and of how they are coordinated.
Yvonne Rogers: The Distributed Cognition approach emphasises the distributed nature of cognitive phenomena across individuals, artefacts and internal and external representations in terms of a common language of 'representational states' and 'media'.
EXAMPLE 1: Ideas of the architect are composed in the computer software and distributed back to the company.
EXAMPLE 2: The Knowledge about our plant`s geography is printed to the globe.
EXAMPLE 3: My knowledge about specific topic is inserted into my blog.
The theory of distributed cognition has a special role to play in understanding interactions between people and technologies.
We are interested not only in what people know, but in how they go about using what they know to do what they do.
This means that in order to understand situated human cognition, it is not enough to know how the mind processes information. It is also necessary to know how the information to be processed is arranged in the material and social world.
And now the answers to the questions:
1. Give some examples from the text of how people create affordances in the physical world and on a computer display to facilitate their work.
EXAMPLE 1: Screen space often has no natural correlate in physical space. Thus when we rearrange the layout of directory windows, it makes no sense to ask whether we have brought those directories closer on the hard drive. The screen as desktop allows us to interpret such actions as analogous to shifting folders about on a flat desk, but folders can be made to pop in and out of existence, or to change in size, which again has no easy counterpart in the real world. The same applies when one changes the way files in a directory are displayed. It is certainly conceivable that alphabetizing, sorting by recency, or sorting by size are actions that change the order in which files are written on a disk. But it is more plausible to think of these as actions on the labels of files, not as actions on the files themselves.
Because we manipulate icons in icon space it is possible to take advan- tage of the way they are displayed to help us further simplify our activity. We can opportunistically exploit structural possibilities of the interface. Files may be left near the trash can to remind us that we need to delete them. Files that are to be used for a single project can be bunched together, or aliased so that they appear to be in two folders at once.
EXAMPLE 2: By combining observations of pilots in flight with study of operations manuals, interviews with pilots, and participation in the train- ing programs for two modern airliners, Hutchins was able to establish that pilots use the airspeed indicator dial as a material anchor for a conceptual space of meaningful airspeeds. They only rarely think of the speed as a number. Instead, they use the spatial structure of the display to make perceptual inferences about relations among actual and desired speeds.
EXAMPLE 3: In direct-manipulation interfaces the objects on-screen are meant to be so closely coupled to the actual computational objects we are dealing with that we are supposed to feel as if we are manipulating the real objects themselves and not just their stand-ins. To achieve this feeling of immediacy [Hutchins et al. 1985], it is essential that meaningful interface actions have meaningful counterparts in the system. Thus, in dragging an icon of a file from one folder to another we are not to think we are just moving icons, but rather moving the actual folders and all their contents.
2. Give some examples of how people offload cognitive activity to the environment.
EXAMPLE 1: Cockpit episode in which the flight engineer explains to the captain and first officer that they have a fuel leak. He interacts with the panel both as if it is the fuel system it depicts, and, at other times, as if it is just a representation of the fuel system (when he flicks a gauge with his finger to get the needle to move, for example).
EXAMPLE 2: By combining observations of pilots in flight with study of operations manuals, interviews with pilots, and participation in the training programs for two modern airliners, Hutchins was able to establish that pilots use the airspeed indicator dial as a material anchor for a conceptual space of meaningful airspeeds. They only rarely think of the speed as a number. Instead, they use the spatial structure of the display to make perceptual inferences about relations among actual and desired speeds.
3. Give some examples of internal and external representational states, and of how they are coordinated.
Yvonne Rogers: The Distributed Cognition approach emphasises the distributed nature of cognitive phenomena across individuals, artefacts and internal and external representations in terms of a common language of 'representational states' and 'media'.
EXAMPLE 1: Ideas of the architect are composed in the computer software and distributed back to the company.
EXAMPLE 2: The Knowledge about our plant`s geography is printed to the globe.
EXAMPLE 3: My knowledge about specific topic is inserted into my blog.
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