At the heart of collaboration and learning lies social interaction
around artifacts, annotation, models, language and core documents.
Wandering around cyberspace, dabbling in forums and contributing to discussions
around collaborative design, are leading me to pay more attention to
annotation, situatedness, presence detection and interaction affordances.
Facile annotation:
Annotation / feedback is indeed a timely topic and close to the heart of a
new conceptualization around learning. Delivery of content, even interactivity
does not allow deep learning and the complete transfer of cognition, that comes
from social interaction, shared spaces, critique, thinking together and
collaboration around an artifact.
Annotation (in the widest sense) is emerging as the forgotten
stepchild of eLearning and knowledge creation. This goes way beyond appending
posit notes, writing in the margin or sequential replies to the editor; to
collaborative writing & editing, refractoring, annealing text,
notification and joint work at the artifactual level. Annotation is as much
about continual 'access to edit your words', i.e., changing from serial static
publication to continual revisiting and revising the script, as it is about
telling your cohorts to come and 'see', comment, change and interact. These two
aspects,:
- empowerment to change
another's text,
- unobtrusive / non-intrusive
notification (or presence detection) join the dance together
- This takes discussion
'about' text to the next level, it allows interaction with the text
itself!
The Wiki paradigm is an interesting development here. Open source web code,
that allows everyone edit access and enables publishing on the web with minimum
fuss. Here you can change, append, intersperse, link-to, link-from, reformat
and more. The text is always morphing & emerging, settling one hopes to a
form than represents the group meaning!
Situatedness:
is ubiquitous, subtle and mostly represents context that is 'below our radar'.
- Could this be about tacit
affordances when we interact in the same virtual space? a landscape or
territory we come to know and navigate without conscious thought - the
drive home.
- Is there leverage for distributed
cognition and shared meaning in situatedness that we do not fully
comprehend or appreciate in knowledge work right now? My own experiences
with Wiki switchyards point to this I believe, the categories are almost
intuitive they have lost most of their 'signboard' qualities, I just know
and feel where to look next - intuitive navigation?
Affordance:
Have been collecting and reflecting on the 'affordances' that go with shared
space:
- A linked personal profile:
template for contact information learning desires and photo
- Privacy gradients: ability to
spawn new spaces and determine who has access rights
- Personal journals: separate
space for reflections, notes and individual summaries - aka blog
- Web presence: ability to see
who is on-line with you, who has read what and who has been where
- Collaborative writing: area
where everyone has edit rights to anneal and refactor joint works
- File upload: links to or
within post upload of multimedia materials
- Group e-mailer: sending
back-channel notices to all subscribers and the ability to receive posts
by subscription
- Survey, polling and rating
system: finding out where participants stand on issues, what they wish to
do and providing a measure of consensus
- Macros: for easy
cross-linking of posts, simple formatting and auto-parsing of URLs
Evolution:
There may be a evolution going on here. Most folks start with push, but the
mail box and (shared) folder is a poor way to organize, remember and retrieve
things. I point to how I use the medium, the advantages of intuitive navigation
rather than search, the evidence from cognitive studies of situatedness, e.g.
writing an exam in the same room you learn in raises scores. I try and
articulate the leverage from persistent conversations
Check the writings of Ed Hutchins, John Seely Brown on situated
cognition.
My experiment with a collaborative
wiki
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