Situational Awareness Support to Enhance Teamwork in Collaborative Environments

Modern collaborative environments often provide an overwhelming amount of visual information on multiple displays. The multitude of personal and shared interaction devices leads to lack of awareness of team members on ongoing activities, and awareness of who is in control of shared artefacts. This research addresses the situational awareness (SA) support of multidisciplinary teams in co-located collaborative environments. This work aims at getting insights into design and evaluation of large displays systems that afford SA and effective teamwork

Knowledge management and communities of practice in the private sector: lessons for modernising the National Health Service in England and Wales

The National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales has embarked upon a radical and farreaching programme of change and reform. However, to date the results of organizational quality and service improvement initiatives in the public sector have been mixed, if not to say disappointing, with anticipated gains often failing to materialize or to be sustained in the longer term. This paper draws on the authors' recent extensive research into one of the principal methodologies for bringing about the sought after step change in the quality of health care in England and Wales. It explores how private sector knowledge management (KM) concepts and practices might contribute to the further development of public sector quality improvement initiatives in general and to the reform of the NHS in particular. Our analysis suggests there have been a number of problems and challenges in practice, not least a considerable naïvety around the issue of knowledge transfer and 'knowledge into practice' within health care organizations. We suggest four broad areas for possible development which also have important implications for other public sector organizations

A collaborative-project memory tool for participatory planning

Technology is more and more providing planners and designer with tools and methods to collect and communicate spatial data and assist spatial analysis. When we think about new technologies supporting planning we mainly think about GIS, urban modelling, simulation models and virtual reality. But many other challenges to the planning practice need for tools to support and improve planning activities. In this paper we discuss the need of new tools to support knowledge representation and knowledge sharing in participatory planning processes. The paper describes the use of a hypermedia and sensemaking tool (Compendium) to structure the knowledge produced in a real participatory planning process. In the present application Compendium has been used not for real-time capturing but for a post-hoc analysis of a real participatory planning experience. Compendium has been used to represent and reconstruct the group memory of consultation meetings in order to allow both the planning team and the citizens to navigate into the contents of those meetings. Moreover the paper describes the main features and potential of the use of Compendium in Participatory Planning domain, and it describes the results of the group memory reconstruction. Finally the case study opens reflections on the need of new planning technologies supporting participatory knowledge generation, representation and management

Learning design – making practice explicit

New technologies have immense potential for learning, but the sheer variety possible also creates challenges for learners in terms of navigating through an increasingly complex digital landscape and for teachers in terms of how to design and support learning interventions. How can learners and teachers make informed decisions about what technologies to use in the design and support of learning activities? This presentation will consider this question and present a new methodology for design – 'learning design', which aims to shift the creation and support of learning from what has traditionally been an implicit, belief-based practice to one that is explicit and design based. Learning design research at the Open University, UK has included the development of a set of conceptual design views, a tool for visualising designs (CompendiumLD) and a social networking site, for sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs (Cloudworks). An overview of this work will be provided, along with a discussion of the perceived benefits of this new approach to educational design

MediaWiki and Google Docs as online collaboration tools for group project co-construction

This paper reports and describes the use of MediaWiki and Google Docs as online collaboration tools for co-constructing knowledge in a group project. Undergraduate Information Management students used MediaWiki and Google Docs as collaboration tools for carrying out two separate projects. We assessed and compared students’ perception on the effectiveness of MediaWiki and Google Docs after the completion of the projects. Results indicated positive experiences from using the tools for online collaboration in the group projects for some of the students. More students found MediaWiki an effective knowledge management tool than Google Docs.postprintThe 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM 2009), Hong Kong, 3-4 December 2009. In Proceedings of the ICKM, 2009, p. 1-1

Benefits of Conducting Postproject Reviews to Capture Lessons Learned

Organizational learning has been a focus of scholars since 1970. Researchers have demonstrated that conducting postproject reviews to capture lessons learned significantly improves organizational learning. Guided by the concept of organizational learning, the purpose of this case study was to explore how 6 New York metropolitan organizational leaders used postproject reviews to prevent project managers from repeating the same mistakes, increasing cost and time overruns, and experiencing project failure. Semistructured face-to-face and phone interviews were conducted with a project sponsor and 5 project managers in the New York metropolitan area. Data were analyzed using the process of coding and condensing the codes, which produced 5 themes, including effective lessons learned, capturing lessons learned, benefits of lessons learned, barriers to postproject reviews, and leadership support. The findings of this study indicated that organizational leaders used standard templates and organizational policies to ensure project managers execute postproject reviews. Organizational leaders and project managers may benefit from the findings of this study by learning the advantages of conducting postproject reviews. This study may contribute to positive social change by organizations achieving cost avoidance when they reduce project failures and increase project success