Co-ordinating distributed knowledge: An investigation into the use of an organisational memory

This paper presents an ethnographically informed investigation into the use of an organisational memory, focusing in particular on how information was used in the performance of work. We argue that understanding how people make use of distributed knowledge is crucial to the design of an organisational memory. However, we take the perspective that an ‘organisational memory’ is not technology dependant, but is an emergent property of group interaction. In this sense, the technology does not form the organisational memory, but provides a novel means of augmenting the co-ordination of collaborative action. The study examines the generation, development and maintenance of knowledge repositories and archives. The knowledge and information captured in the organisational memory enabled the team members to establish a common understanding of the design and to gain an appreciation of the issues and concerns of the other disciplines. The study demonstrates why technology should not be thought of in isolation from its contexts of use, but also how designers can make use of the creative flexibility that people employ in their everyday activities. The findings of the study are therefore of direct relevance to both the design of knowledge archives and to the management of this information within organisations

The relationship of (perceived) epistemic cognition to interaction with resources on the internet

Information seeking and processing are key literacy practices. However, they are activities that students, across a range of ages, struggle with. These information seeking processes can be viewed through the lens of epistemic cognition: beliefs regarding the source, justification, complexity, and certainty of knowledge. In the research reported in this article we build on established research in this area, which has typically used self-report psychometric and behavior data, and information seeking tasks involving closed-document sets. We take a novel approach in applying established self-report measures to a large-scale, naturalistic, study environment, pointing to the potential of analysis of dialogue, web-navigation – including sites visited – and other trace data, to support more traditional self-report mechanisms. Our analysis suggests that prior work demonstrating relationships between self-report indicators is not paralleled in investigation of the hypothesized relationships between self-report and trace-indicators. However, there are clear epistemic features of this trace data. The article thus demonstrates the potential of behavioral learning analytic data in understanding how epistemic cognition is brought to bear in rich information seeking and processing tasks

Collaborative Caring: Stories and Reflections on Teamwork in Health Care

[Excerpt] There are many theoretical and conceptual books and countless articles that have explored issues of teamwork in general and teamwork in health care in particular. The editors, and many of the authors in this book, have read most, and have even written some of them. To tackle the issue of teamwork, we have, however, taken a different approach. Rather than write a theoretical book about what teamwork is, what it is not, where it exists in health care, what barriers prevent its implementation and how they can be removed, we have chosen instead to address these questions through narratives and reflections that vividly describe good teamwork as well as problems in creating, leading, and working on genuine teams. What we believe is too often lacking in the literature is a clear and compelling picture of what teamwork looks like on the ground, in the institutions where health care work is delivered and where teams play well, or don\u27t play well, on a daily basis. The question we ask here is thus: What is the state of play in most health care institutions? To describe the state of play, we have asked clinicians to write what we think of as where the rubber hits the road stories or reflections about the nature of teamwork in their own particular work setting. To gather these stories, we talked to many people in different health care disciplines. In the invitation for submissions we wrote the following: We are seeking short, concise narratives that describe a concrete example in which you personally have been involved. The idea here is not to focus so much on the individual doctor-patient, nurse-patient, therapist-patient communication but the teamwork that was involved in ensuring that the standard of care was met or exceeded. If the patient or family was involved, so much the better. Stories can deal with interprofessional or intraprofessional teamwork. On balance, we would prefer to have more stories about interprofessional or occupational teamwork. Nonetheless, we recognize that interprofessional work depends on the ability to create teamwork within an occupation or profession. Stories involving support staff, such as housekeepers who spoke up about a patient safety issue, are definitely within the purview of this book. We would also welcome personal reflections that would enhance our understanding of either how to produce genuine teamwork or the obstacles that stand in its way

Coordination Matters : Interpersonal Synchrony Influences Collaborative Problem-Solving

The authors thank Martha von Werthern and Caitlin Taylor for their assistance with data collection, Cathy Macpherson for her assistance with the preparation of the manuscript, and Mike Richardson, Alex Paxton, and Rick Dale for providing MATLAB code to assist with data analysis. The research was funded by the British Academy (SG131613).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Knowledge convergence in computer-supported collaborative learning

This study investigates how two types of graphical representation tools influence the way in which learners use knowledge resources in two different collaboration conditions. In addition, the study explores the extent to which learners share knowledge with respect to individual outcomes under these different conditions. The study also analyzes the relationship between the use of knowledge resources and different types of knowledge. The type of external representation (content-specific vs. content-independent) and the collaboration condition (videoconferencing vs. face-to-face) were varied. Sixty-four (64) university students participated in the study. Results showed that learning partners converged strongly with respect to their use of resources during the collaboration process. Convergence with respect to outcomes was rather low, but relatively higher for application-oriented knowledge than for factual knowledge. With content-specific external representation, learners used more appropriate knowledge resources without sharing more knowledge after collaboration. Learners in the computer-mediated collaboration used a wider range of resources. Moreover, in exploratory qualitative and quantitative analyses, the study found evidence for a relation between aspects of the collaborative process and knowledge convergence

A department of methodology can coordinate transdisciplinary sport science support

In the current sporting landscape, it is not uncommon for professional sport teams and organizations to employ multidisciplinary sport science support teams. In these teams and organizations, a “head of performance” may manage a number of sub-discipline specialists with the aim of enhancing athlete performance. Despite the best intentions of multidisciplinary sport science support teams, difficulties associated with integrating sub-disciplines to enhance performance preparation have become apparent. It has been suggested that the problem of integration is embedded in the traditional reductionist method of applied sport science, leading to the eagerness of individual specialists to quantify progress in isolated components. This can lead to “silo” working and decontextualized learning environments that can hinder athlete preparation. To address this challenge, we suggest that ecological dynamics is one theoretical framework that can inform common principles and language to guide the integration of sport science sub-disciplines in a Department of Methodology. The aim of a Department of Methodology would be for group members to work within a unified conceptual framework to (1) coordinate activity through shared principles and language, (2) communicate coherent ideas, and (3) collaboratively design practice landscapes rich in information (i.e., visual, acoustic, proprioceptive and haptic) and guide emergence of multi-dimensional behaviors in athlete performance

Support of the collaborative inquiry learning process: influence of support on task and team regulation

Regulation of the learning process is an important condition for efficient and effective learning. In collaborative learning, students have to regulate their collaborative activities (team regulation) next to the regulation of their own learning process focused on the task at hand (task regulation). In this study, we investigate how support of collaborative inquiry learning can influence the use of regulative activities of students. Furthermore, we explore the possible relations between task regulation, team regulation and learning results. This study involves tenth-grade students who worked in pairs in a collaborative inquiry learning environment that was based on a computer simulation, Collisions, developed in the program SimQuest. Students of the same team worked on two different computers and communicated through chat. Chat logs of students from three different conditions are compared. Students in the first condition did not receive any support at all (Control condition). In the second condition, students received an instruction in effective communication, the RIDE rules (RIDE condition). In the third condition, students were, in addition to receiving the RIDE rules instruction, supported by the Collaborative Hypothesis Tool (CHT), which helped the students with formulating hypotheses together (CHT condition). The results show that students overall used more team regulation than task regulation. In the RIDE condition and the CHT condition, students regulated their team activities most often. Moreover, in the CHT condition the regulation of team activities was positively related to the learning results. We can conclude that different measures of support can enhance the use of team regulative activities, which in turn can lead to better learning results