A Facilitation Task Taxonomy for Communities of Practice

The role of a facilitator is key to the effective establishment and sustainment of Communities of Practice (COP). This paper presents a taxonomy of facilitation tasks that have to be carried out to support various COP processes that take place during the different stages in a COP’s life-cycle. Inspired by facilitation research in the area of Group Support Systems (GSS), we identified 33 facilitation tasks. These tasks are grouped into internal facilitator roles (Information Source, Inspirator, Guide) and external facilitator roles (Information Source, PR Manager, Investigator). The COP facilitation task taxonomy can serve as a basis for training COP facilitators, as a guide for COP facilitators to prepare for and assume their role, as a starting point for developing tool support for COP facilitators, and finally as a research instrument to study COP facilitators in the field or devise experimental treatments focusing on facilitation of large online groups

A Model for Understanding Success of Virtual Community Management Teams

Virtual communities enable people with common interests to interact with each other. Until today, research has mostly focused on the aspects of social interaction, usability and success factors for virtual communities. But due to the link between effective coordination of management teams and success of virtual communities, virtual community management becomes of great importance for both research and practice. Therefore, the imperative of this research is to develop an understanding of what drives management teams of successful virtual communities. Drawing on existing literature, we identify relevant theories and use a previous exploratory case study in order to provide a theoretical explanation of the variables and factors that affect the success of virtual community management teams. Furthermore, we provide first suggestions for measurement instruments in order to subsequently test our proposed model using empirical, quantitative methods

Knowing is Silver, Listening is Gold: On the importance and impact of feedback in IT-based innovation contests

IT-based innovation contests are making use of distributed knowledge of users and other external stakeholders to collect ideas or to let them develop innovations for new products and services. In addition, IT-based innovation contests increasingly offer functionalities to evaluate and comment the submissions of other participants. Whether this feedback proves to be useful to enhance the quality of submissions is examined in a field experiment. We use the theoretical perspective of absorptive capacity for a cluster analysis to identify relevance of feedback in form of comments, in comparison to relevance of participants‟ individual knowledge. The most important result indicates that listening to comments by other users can even overcome a lack of individual knowledge. The study strengthens first assumptions that the design element „community functionality‟ needs to be carefully designed and implemented when setting up an IT-based innovation contest

INCREASING THE WILLINGNESS TO COLLABORATE ONLINE: AN ANALYSIS OF SENTIMENT-DRIVEN INTERACTIONS IN PEER CONTENT PRODUCTION

We investigate mechanisms that trigger collaborative work behavior in online peer communities. We regard the collaboration among Wikipedia editors as a social process influenced by specific communication practices. We analyze and quantify the way Wikipedia editors communicate their feedback and support towards each others’ work in form of sentiments and opinions, and explore to what extent this influences online trust among them. We show that peer content production in Wikipedia is influenced by sharing sentiments during discussions among editors. At the global level, sharing sentiments positively influences the level of online trust. We also find a significant difference in the amount of online trust among editors who share mainly positive or mainly negative sentiments. We further suggest that providing and receiving especially supportive feedback expressed in form of positive sentiments and opinions may be beneficial in terms of virtual teamwork

The Impact of Sentiment-driven Feedback on Knowledge Reuse in Online Communities

Knowledge reuse is of increasing importance for organizations. Despite the extant research, we still do not adequately understand the ways peers are motivated to reuse knowledge with the help of wiki technologies. In this paper, we study the motivation for knowledge reuse in a prominent instance of online social production: Wikipedia. Studying knowledge reuse in Wikipedia is important since Wikipedia has been able to leverage the benefits of efficient knowledge reuse to produce knowledge goods of relatively high quality. Specifically, we explore: 1) how Wikipedia editors (any peer who contributes to developing articles in Wikipedia) communicate their feedback toward each other’s work in peer conversations and 2) to what extent sentiment-driven feedback impacts the level of knowledge reuse in Wikipedia. The results show that displaying sentiment-driven feedback positively influenced the level of knowledge reuse. Our study further shows a significant difference in the level of knowledge reuse between editors who shared mainly positive or mainly negative sentiments. Specifically, displaying mainly positive feedback corresponded to a superior level of knowledge reuse than displaying mainly negative feedback. We contribute to the extant literature of online social production communities in general and Wikipedia in particular by providing a first building block for research on peer feedback’s role in developing and sustaining wiki-based knowledge reuse. We discuss our findings’ implications for theory and practice

IMPROVING TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES THROUGH LESSON STUDY IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN MASERU LESOTHO

Published ThesisIn Lesotho, there is a general concern about the performance of learners in mathematics. There are many factors which can contribute to this. One of the factors can be the quality of teachers themselves. This study was set to improve teachers’ pedagogical practices through Lesson Study in Secondary Schools in Maseru Lesotho. Firstly, the study established teachers’ understanding and their pedagogical practices before and after an intervention could be given. The study also sought to explore if there were any changes in teachers’ classroom practices and also if there was any impact on learners’ understanding of mathematics after teachers had undergone Lesson Study training. The challenges that teachers experienced in implementing Lesson Study were also looked at. The study adopted a mixed method approach which employed a questionnaire, observations and interviews. The first phase of the study consisted of 200 secondary mathematics teachers in Maseru to whom questionnaire was administered. The second phase of the study was made up of 18 teachers from three secondary schools based in Maseru. These teachers received a one day intensive training on Lesson Study which was followed up by another one day school-based intensive training. In this phase data was collected using classroom observations and interviews. The findings from the study indicated that Lesson Study had positive impact on both teachers and learners. As a result of participating in Lesson Study, teachers were now able to reflect on their practices, and this had improved their pedagogical practices, and content knowledge. There had also been an improved teacher collaboration. All these attributes led to improved teacher-confidence in the teaching of mathematics. The results also revealed learners whose teachers participated in LS were motivated, participated more in classroom discussions and showed more understanding of mathematical concepts. However, the findings had revealed that time was a major of challenge encountered during implementation of Lesson Study in Lesotho. Teachers did not have a common time for meetings due to their packed timetables. A model of Lesson Study which emerged from the findings of this study showed that unlike in other LS models where one teacher presents the research lesson and others observe and take notes on learners’ learning, the Lesotho model showed that teachers used team-teaching

Practice-Based Design for Professional Learning and Knowledge Sharing: Adapting the ‘Key Situation Model’ for Social Work in England

How can social workers be supported to continuously develop knowledgeable and ethical practice? Acknowledging the dilemmas and uncertainties in social work practice that unfolds in complex environments, this thesis turns to practice-based perspectives in response to the main question. It foregrounds the interplay of humans within physical and social environments with a focus on ‘practices’ and considers the challenges for social workers as practitioners, professionals and knowledge workers. In relation to individual decision-making, the role of research, theory, tools, emotions, experience and reflective deliberation are explored. On an organisational level, evidence-informed and best practice, knowledge transfer, group reflection approaches and the role of technology are examined. The author argues that knowledgeable and ethical practice emerges from knowledge related (epistemic) practices within organisations that are grounded in what professionals do. This requires reflexive and mindful professionals who are able to weave together different forms of knowledge and ethical principles with practice situations and with organisations who will support epistemic practices and environments for reflective learning, knowledge co-production and the sharing of knowledge. Building on earlier work (Tov et al., 2016; Staempfli et al., 2012), the author argues that the Key Situation Model can support both practices and environments. Key situations are the typical practices that social workers regularly encounter and thus reflect what social workers actually do. 116 key situations in social work in England are developed and validated in a modified three-round Delphi study with experienced social workers from diverse sectors from across England (n1= 13, n2= 88 and n3= 41). Based on these and informed by the Activity Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework, this thesis presents design options for social work organisations for the implementation of the Key Situation Model’s blended reflective learning and knowledge sharing. These design options could support the development of knowledgeable and ethical practice

Online Communities of Practice and Professional Change: a Three-Tier View of the Knowledge Embedding Process

This interpretivist study, in the field of information Systems, investigates the process of transformative professional change using a knowledge management lens. The goal of the research was to understand how online communities of practice (CoPs) facilitate the transfer and embedding of professional knowledge. It was guided by the question: How do online CoPs facilitate the transfer and embedding of professional knowledge? This topic was of contemporary and strategic significance in New Zealand: The government had embarked on a strategy to transform teaching in NZ schools, aiming to leverage a major investment in IT infrastructure, using online CoPs to help embed a new paradigm of studentcentred, ICT-enriched learning at system level. There was, however, no research to suggest how this might occur. Despite the increasing use of online CoPs by organisations, and an expansion in the number of tools available for this purpose, there is little understanding of how online CoPs can facilitate knowledge transfer. The way in which knowledge embedding (deep transfer) occurs, and the role online CoPs may play in supporting this process, is particularly poorly understood. This is significant issue in this internet-rich era, when developing nations are aiming to cultivate knowledge economies. I conducted the research using a case research strategy, qualitative methods and an inductive process of theory generation. The research case was a national professional development programme for schools, with five CoP subunits: Four were regionally based school cluster CoPs and one was a distributed blogging community. (Membership of this community overlapped with three of the cluster CoPs.) Based on my analysis of data, and on feedback from participants, I found that three complementary mechanisms were operating simultaneously, facilitating the embedding of knowledge at meso, micro and macro levels. The result of my study is a threelevel explanatory theory. At the meso (school) level, knowledge embedding followed a six-stage cycle, with different activities and issues characterising each stage. Online CoPs played a different role at each stage. At the micro (individual) level, knowledge embedding was driven by teachers' crossings of multiple engagement spaces (communication contexts) in a polycontextual environment. Crossings drove personalisation and facilitated the linking of theory and practice, leading to deep individual understanding. At the macro level, the embedding of knowledge was driven by the brokering function of a middle layer community in a system of overlapping, tiered CoPs. Key roles were played by two kinds of knowledge brokers: connector-leaders and follower-feeders. All three embedding-facilitating mechanisms promoted five fundamental knowledge embedding processes: focusing, persuading, aligning, adapting, and owning (developing ownership)