Birth and sharing of learning objects through the use of collaborative tools
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NLII’s Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice (LOVCOP) is undertaking several research projects within the framework of the ANGEL (hosted by CyberLearning Labs) site. The projects will explore how to use some of the new collaborative or knowledge management technologies to capture, store, and retrieve insights from a group of like-minded practitioners studying the same things: knowledge creation, creativity, and collaboration. A pretty tall order!
The first experiment will focus on the potential of a collaborative blog to produce new knowledge about possible academic uses of the blog as a knowledge creation tool. Each experiment will be tightly controlled in terms of time frame, process, and products.
The LOVCOP’s re-framed mission for 2004 includes three active research projects which focus on the potential of three relatively new tools for collaborative work and knowledge management. The tools we hope to explore include the blog, wiki, and RSS feed.
Because that is an ambitious agenda, I propose what I hope will be an efficient way to use the talents and time of our participants. I would like to offer a compressed schedule and a carefully framed project that will make the most of people’s knowledge-generating contributions to the VCoP.
Each tool will become our focus for a one-month period.
Week One:
3-5 introductory emails, setting out framework of the topic (blog, wiki, RSS); sort of a step-by-step guide/background to the field
Weeks Two and Three:
Five to ten volunteers will agree to visit the collaborative blog site on a daily basis and contribute to the ongoing discussion. The topic will be established in the blog description which should remain visible at the top of the blog page.
Week Four:
We will create a discussion forum where all participants share thoughts, ideas, critiques, and proposals for the future use of the tool being examined. With regard to the knowledge management component, each of us needs to reflect on how it “felt” to contribute to a group blog, how much time it took, how did the “voices” appear.
Product:
The co-facilitators will then compile a report, based on our experiences and a careful reading of the discussion forum. We will submit this report to the volunteer group for feedback. We will directly address this collaborative tool and its potential to support NLII’s mission and to advance the field of teaching and learning.
The next project, the wiki, will directly follow the first project and follow the same pattern.
How Do Learning Objects and Knowledge Management Meet Here?
One of the distinctions that helped me understand knowledge management and CoPs the best is the one between tacit and explicit knowledge. When a community of practice, virtual or not, works together, the insights and the new knowledge that arise from collaboration must be captured, stored and somehow made available to the larger community.
Discussion Forums perform that function well, which is why that feature of ANGEL will be the capture tool for the three mini-research projects. In the case of the blog project, the discussion forum will capture and “tag” the reflections, the metacognitive processing, and the new ideas about the blog as a collaborative tool.
The blog is the experimental space itself. By its very structure it captures and archives individual contributions. My office mate uses the archives feature to be able to locate specific items which can then be re-purposed in articles, book chapters, or other ongoing academic projects. By titling each blog entry carefully, by writing to one idea at a time (a form of modularizing), you can automatically structure the knowledge capture to make items accessible as well as readily reusable.
The discussion forum would capture the reflections of the group on the process as a whole. The forum entries are harvested by hand, so to speak. I will go into the forum, read and summarize what I find, send a draft out to the participating members, and the final result will be a product harvested from a larger archived body of thoughts, ideas, speculations, suggestions, etc.
These two tools, the blog and the discussion forum (and one could easily add a virtual chat such as iCohere’s QuickMeeting with its ability to save a transcript), used purposefully, can begin to set up a structure to capture that tacit, personal, collaborative, “unstructured” information and begin the transformation of that tacit information into explicit knowledge that can then be shared and disseminated, – maybe even in the form of a learning or knowledge object.
As new collaborative tools emerge and become more sophisticated, we need to examine carefully how they might contribute to the transformation of teaching and learning. The knowledge-creating powers of NLII’s VCOPs should be in evidence at the end of the LOVCOP’s 2004 work. We accept the challenge!
