Ecological aspects for learning theory of new Digital Age

Recently, the widespread public use of social software has triggered for the need to theoretically ground the learning phenomena in this new environment.

Siemens (2005) has suggested Connectivism as the learning theory for new Digital Age. Connectivism focuses on how information, situated externally from people in the web, and creating meanings publicly in social software environments, aids through connective processes the new creative learning- and knowledge-building cultures.

Besides information-centred view to learning, what Connectivism carries, the other view should explain how learning is triggered by the involvement into the activities or by the observation of the activities of other individuals and groups. This view suggests that embodied cognition could be also considered as part of our knowledge.

Thus, while modelling the learning theories the new social software environments call for, an activity centred view to learning would be of same importance as the information-centred view, and should be theoretically entwined with the latter.

In order to extract the new principles of learning, while considering the activities that are part of the digital culture in social software environments, the web of social software tools with its inhabitants as an evolving and ecological environment must be described. The interrelations between individuals, and the real and virtual places they adopt for themselves in the process of manifesting their ideas, and engaging themselves into various learning activities in self-directed manner should be theoretically explained. This new ecological perspective to learning in social software environments can reside on the ideas of Gibson‘s and his followers approach to ecological psychology, elaborated approach of Engeström’s Activity Theory, rising theory of embodied cognition, but also on the Lotman’s school of cultural semiotics.

Some aspects to be considered and elaborated:

It is generally accepted that learning and tools used by certain culture from one side, and individuals of this culture and their learning and tool-using habits from another side, are influencing and shaping each other mutually (see Vygotsky, 1979). By definition the more social software tools are used, the better they become adjusted to the cultural habits of their users. The more user-defined interrelations between the meanings exist and can be activated by certain social-software specific microformats, the better the systems get for social retrieval of information. The more users‘ activities in social environments are externally marked by the users, for example with machine-readable formats describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do (FOAF), the better the access to the activity-related information and people becomes. The positive side effect of it is also, that the systems obtain new qualities for monitoring and getting awareness, that would open the gateway to the otherwise non-traceble communities in which the members are not personally related into social networks through shared activities. They may or may not have an awareness of each other, but they share similar meanings or perform same type of activities. Access to such people in new environments is potentially opening a multi-dimensional place where individuals can learn from each other or where shared group activities can be initiated for learning purposes. The more people get involved into the similar activities while evoking for themselves certain functions the social tools offer, the stronger the pressure gets of developing the systems towards facilitating this activity, and the more this activity becomes part of the learning culture in this environment.

This presumes the ecological relationships between people and their objectives for action in certain learning environments, and the personally differentiated perception of meanings and tools in their surrounding environments which would all-together dynamically shape the social software environments as places for learning. In particular, the focus is on how social software systems become accommodated with their users through evoking different affordances in the environment, discussing the multi-dimensionality and dynamicity of such places, and explaining how creativity and active participation are triggered in these places ecologically through different types of interactions.

The inhabitants of social web are characterised as distributed selves between different real and virtual social spaces. They express their identity as part of indistinct activity patterns, involving different social tools and different people. They influence social environments by virally spreading ideas that weave people and social places into invisible meaning dimensions. They leave activity traces as cultural prompts for new similar activities within certain dimension of the environment. The personal meaning-space and activity-space may be or may not be transcendent for the other individual learners in the web if the learner is distributing one‘s self between different social software tools.

The awareness of different dimensions of the social web as places for creative learning is obtained by perceiving the other inhabitants of social web as similarly distributed wholes. Tracing the meaning-spaces and activity patterns of other people twined between the distributed real and virtual places they inhabit, the dimensions of social space become unfolded and usable for our own self-directed learning.

Two aspects here are important. The meaning centred aspect suggests to use distributed self to be aware of more communities and their meaning spaces, and to create conditions for transferring information from one conceptual dimension to another. This precondition for cross-border meaning-building activities has been focused both in cultural semiotics as well as in the theory of Connectivism. Weaving one’s own coherent meaning web on top of such connections in distributed places is part of learning practices individuals do in social web to propagate their own self. Second aspect is finding people to learn together with. To be involved in the similar activities, similar spaces need to be used for interaction. The activities the members of such lose communities get engaged with, do not necessarily have to be centrally coordinated, but rather may emerge and exist as social patterns.

Learning through meaning building, and learning from participating in socially shared activities can be explained all together as part of emergent hybrid ecologies. The architecture of such environments interrelates various meaning dimensions, activity dimensions, and the distributed selves. By distributed self people can access different dimensions, propagate their meanings and activities into these dimensions, and use crossing borders of different dimensions for creative knowledge-building, as well as, for embodying and embedding cultural practices of new social web.

Learning affordances of the blog and aggregator

Finally we have managed to analyse some data related to learning affordances of aggregators and weblogs. The study was conducted as part of the master-level Educational Technology course at Tallinn University in spring term 2007.

We analysed students‘ visual schemes of personal learning landscapes and activity patterns, and the written explanations containing information about the learning affordances of social software.

Affordances were collected from the schemes and initially categorised according to the tools they were related to. Each particular affordance could be listed only once in relation to the certain tool.

Next, the second order categorization of affordances according to the activity pattern types was undertaken. The base of the activity types emerged from the analysis of different students‘ activity patterns in combination of tools‘ use. The list of 9 pedagogical activity types was developed.

The following figure demonstrates the different types of learning affordances related blogs and aggregators.

Weblog affordances and implications to learning design

The main affordances of weblogs that could be categorized as supporting the activities related to assembling the learning environment were: personalization of web-pages, adding and saving data and links, limiting the access rights, and information facilitation. One of the students mentioned the affordance of relating weblogs with other mediating environment, indicating that indeed such affordances are perceived, which are evoked by the interrelations of certain tools, not only by one tool. Some students perceived that they can do a prognosis of certain resources and evaluate the usage of different tools in weblog.

Students did not mention any weblog affordances related community formation activity. This is quite an interesting result, since it is generally believed that weblogs might be a good tool for social networking. It is assumed that the course designs should try to initiate more such activities using new social software functions. Besides community formation, running the community as a creative system is becoming increasingly important.

The most frequent affordances that could be related as supporting the lecturing and presenting activity type were giving tasks and presenting information to the learners. The fact that students could see this pedagogical task-related affordance is promising for the educators who would like to use weblogs primarily as the teaching tools. Some student, however, generalized this affordance and did not mention task-specific actions - affordances what they perceived as creating information and publishing artifacts are the most general function commonly related to the weblogs.

Only one affordance was classified as supporting the information filtering activity type: understanding the information given by the tutor. However, this affordance still indicates towards cognitive information filtering, rather than information retrieval by using various technical features social software offers. The weblogs have several ways of filtering information by tags, keywords, incoming RSS feeds, tag-feeds. From the perspective of course design, it can be concluded that the facilitators need to plan more activities where students could actively try out how to use such social information retrieval methods.

A number of activities could be classified as supporting the self-tutoring activity type. Affordances such as learning, self-study, self-reflection, self-analyzis, and self-evaluation were perceived as part of weblog functionalities. This indicates that weblogs might be used actively in education for self-directed learning. Other affordances students mentioned were creating time-tables and action plans and doing homework.

Student found several affordances that could be classified as supporting the activities related to individual creative assignments. These, that could be related with one student’s learning activities were: getting tasks, browsing thematic information and analyzing information feeds, reading, reflecting on artifacts in the weblog, revising information, presenting, and improving. However, there was high number of affordances, which presumed the interaction with other student’s work, such as commenting the posts, sharing files and giving feedback to peer’s work. This indicates that the the paradigm change is about to happen in what is considered an individual work - commenting and sharing each others’ assignments during the activity shifts the emphasis from the outcome-related assignments, where students must produce a final artifact only, towards increased attention to the learning process in which students develop and dynamically change their knowledge.

A group of affordances were classified as supporting the collaborative creative assignments. Monitoring the other learners and the community reflection, communication with the co-learners and the tutor, sharing and interchange of information with learners, collecting the results from the group activity and coordinating the information among the group of learners were most frequently mentioned affordances. However, it was evident that students did not yet perceive the possibilities social software allowed to do collaborative creative assignments, such as mashing feeds, retrieving information using tags or social browsing etc. Co-construction of knowledge was not perceived as part of the social software affordances.

A small group of affordances were classified as supporting the assessment and evaluation type of activities. These were evaluation of learners knew knowledge, getting feedback and learning from the result of group activities. Notable is that the last two are related to what students can gain from assessment activities. The students were not able of bringing out many different affordances social software might offer for evaluation. This indicates that in the new social-software based course designs the facilitators should develop a bigger variety of assessment methods that originate from the functions social software offers. It is important that assessment and evaluation procedures were used for increasing students’ motivation to learn, and were not merely seen as grading instruments.

A group of affordances were classified as enhancing regulation, monitoring and support activities. Affordances related to the facilitator were monitoring learner’s action and reflection, supervising learners, giving feedback and supporting, recognizing students and giving enthusiasm. Affordance related to the student’s activity was asking the teacher.

Aggregator’s learning affordances

The majority of learning affordances students related with aggregator belonged to three types of activities: assembling the learning environment, filtering information, and regulation, monitoring and support. Activity of assembling the learning environment with the aggregator is favored by the following affordances: creating an aggregator, aggregating personal interest feeds, collaboratively monitoring co-learners blogs, getting feedback and sharing the blog content. Since the aggregator was one of the central tools in the course environment, where students could monitor each other’s weblog feeds and initiate writing feedback, this was influencing strongly students’ perception of aggregators. However, students have not payed much attention to the mashed bookmark feed and bookmark tagcloud which were also accessible from aggregation page. Students noted once the affordance of discussion as supporting community-formation activities with the aggregator. The widgets supporting asynchronous and synchronous discussions were part of the group aggregator. The only affordance supporting lecturing and presenting activity was publishing feeds.

The affordances enhancing information filtering type of activities were: aggregating social tags feeds/artifacts’ information, collecting friends’/community feeds, creating personal filtering for the feeds, monitoring community reflection. Notable is that while some learners perceived information as feeds, the others named it artifacts or information. It may be assumed that this represents two types of thinking: technological (feeds, tags) and information-related (artifacts, blog posts, info). This aspect may be important if aggregators are taught to be used as personal or group learning tools. The affordances related to the aggregator express very clearly students new type of technological understanding of social software - the words feed, social tag, aggregation, and filtering appeared in most of the affordances of this group. Another interesting issue is other-directedness if thinking of the aggregators. Aggregators have commonly introduced as personal tools, while in this master course it was used as a group tool. Thus students perceived mainly the affordances related to monitoring and filtering information from other students and from the community and did not describe the widgets that might be used for mashing personal information.

Affordances belonging to the self-tutoring activity type were missing.

Individual creative assignments were supported by the few affordances like collecting information, reading feeds and selecting information.

Collaborative creative assignments were supported mainly by the affordances of collaborative monitoring the feeds or co-learners. Again the two distinctive perceptions - technological (feed) and learner-related ( co-learner, student, user) can be found when expressing the affordances.

Assessment-related affordances were evaluating feeds and getting feedback. Similarly to weblog affordances for learning, learners see two aspects of evaluation - that of the facilitator who does the evaluation and the other where student benefits from the evaluation. From the perspective of using aggregators in teaching, it is clear that there needs to be developed a new method how to assess students’ personal or group aggregators as their information gateways and activity areas.

Affordances of aggregators related to regulation, monitoring and support type of activities were: getting the instructions, monitoring co-learners or students’ feeds/learners/artifacts, aggregating feeds, sharing personal feeds, and giving feedback to the feed. Interesting was that students named affordances similarly in relation to teacher’s as well as students’ regulation, monitoring and support activities. This indicates that in new type of courses the learning situation is diminishing the difference between the facilitator’s and learners’ roles.

Interpreting hybrid ecology in augmented reality

A draft of my major ideas.

Background theory

Concepts: embodiment, neural representations of sensory-motor actions, action potentialities, affordances, anticipated goals, action, mediation, coupling, tool, hybrid ecology

The basic ideas in Activity theory (Leontjev, 1975) relate ‘people who want to reach some goals’ with their ‘mediating tools for realising activities’ necessary to ‘reach the goal’. Mediating tools can be cognitive (eg. language, gestures, content of narrative artifacts or pictures etc.) or material artifacts (tools, objects etc.).

Discoveries in cognitive and neuroscience about the functioning of mirror-neuron systems (Gallese et al., 1996), claim, that cognition is embodied through grounding knowledge directly in sensory-motor experiences without the mediation of symbolic representations (Pecher & Zwaan, 2005).

From observation of others and the environment (Rizzolatti et al., 2001), from listening narratives (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998; Iaccoboni, 2005) or from reading narratives (Scorolli & Borghi, 2007) and looking everyday images of objects or works of art (Gallese & Freedberg, 2007) we perceptually activate certain multi-modal action-potentialites to mediate our purposeful and goal-directed actions (see Gallese & Lakoff, 2005). These embodied dimensions are activations of neural representations located in sensory-motor areas in brain.

Hommel (2003) assumes that action control to all behavioral acts is ecologically delegated to the environment - when planning actions in terms of anticipated goals, the sensory-motor assemblies needed to reach the goal are simultaneously selectively activated in the environment, and bind together into a coherent whole that serves as an action-plan, facilitating the execution of the goal-directed actions through the interaction between the environment and its embodied sensory-motor activations.

My understanding of affordances sees them as the emergent constraints in the activity system dependent of various system components and interactions. I interpret them as action potentialities. However, affordances can also be potentially embedded into mediating tools due to cultural use of language or due to culturally defined activity potentials objectified in artifacts and tools.

Our hybrid nature

Hybrid ecology binds together into one inseparable whole the subjects aiming to do something, the surrounding environment with its objects, and the mediating tools of their action. In this view all external entities of the person can be considered as an environment (eg. living and nonliving things and their causal and structural interrelations).

In this symbiosis we can see that in any activity there is no clear and distinct border between subject and the environment. The mediation between the personal (internal) and environment (external) is a dynamic two way process of embodiment of environment’s dimensions, and expressing the embodied in the environment.

Any action can be taken only on the basis of embodied dimensions of the environment.

Environment becomes a place for action if we accommodate it with our tools, if we embed part of our embodied sensory-motor experiences to the external environment and if we reuse it constantly matching our internal embodied sensory-motor action potentialities and action potentialities that couple with it around us.

Extending and accommodating ourselves to the environment

To be purposely navigating and acting in the environment, persons need to embody part of the environment in order to toolisize it, and start using it for their action. This is not necessarily a conscious and goal-driven process. Also the environment with its culturally defined action potentialities in relation to persons’ previously embodied action-potentials and emotions can evoke certain goals for action. In such case certain aspects of the environment may be extended above the others to the range of the persons’ perception.

People can also toolisize the environment by externalizing their internal imaginations, emotions and sensory-motor action patterns to the environment as objects for use for themselves and the others.In a way it can be seen as making the environment as part of their symbiotic being where they can find and use the common sensory-motor action potentialities over and over again.

Toolization is not necessarily merely a process of symbolizing meanings. If toolization of the environment is done by language, or making narrative or visual artifacts it is done by using symbols as carriers of sensory-motor action potentialities. But toolization is also direct activity carried out in the environment, when the objects of the environment and some perspectives of the environment are actualized to express and carry out goals-directed action plan, which has sensory-motor neural correlates.

Creating new tools

Our usual acting in the personally accommodated environment is based on the preferred perception of affordances that match with our sensory-motor action correlates of previously embodied emotions and actions. Basically we repeat ourselves to feel safe in the environment. We actualize the affordances that we define for ourselves as the members of certain culture, those that enable us to take active part in this culture.

However, some of the affordances, that are very distinct from the usual affordances, may also be perceived and may start intruding the activation of embodied sensory-motor paths. These affordances can be viewed as the noise to be ignored or noise to be considered.

Some of the noise we try to ignore, telling to ourselves that it is the similar affordance to some other usual affordance. Similar affordances are coupled with the previously anticipated sensory-motor action potentialities.

Some of the noise we perceive as analogical affordances. Analogy is accepting the difference in nature but making the relation on the basis of some features. In this case partial coupling of anticipated affordances with the actualized affordances happens, which may activate only part of the previously embodied sensory-motor neural correlates or even some new ones.

Looking for the noise to activate different sensory-motor experiences is an important aspect of our creativity. Looking for the noise may lead us toolizising the environment for us differently. We basically create new tools to accommodate ourselves into the environment with our usual goal-directed plans. Or, the creation of these new embodiments from the environment would lead us to the totally new set of goal-directed action plans. We shift from one set of anticipated affordances we are looking for in the environment to another set.

Tools we create from tools left to the environment

Lev Manovitch has pointed out to some trends of tool designs in modern environment.

Manovitch deals with ‘interfaces’ enclused to ‘objects’. There is a new trend in design: disappearance of technological objects as such, which become integrated into our spaces. In such cases the previous culturally accommodated tool or artifact and the previously culturally accommodated technological interface may together start triggering different potential affordances for action.

The action potentials technology offers through ‘interfaces’, and the action potentials that the objects had in another previous culture, can be contraversial and may cause certain “battles” between what action to carry out, evoking the necessity for internal grounding between the different sets of affordances. This would result in not using these new devices most effectively as planned by the designers and visioners of new technology, because we would be triggered simultaneously by the affordances evoked by two different cultures.

Basically what we need, is immersion of cultures, becoming these new ‘immersive technology generations’ and we will no more distinguish the potential affordances the objects evoke as old and new activity potentials. Rather we will shift out internal immersed and augmented intentions into the environment activating combined affordances.

Do we need new designs to obtain the new culture or would the new culture emerge in using currently not ideally integrated technologically enriched objects and augmented reality? If so we will just start evoking different affordances in this environment and the design and immersion of old and new should not necessarily be melted to each other organically, we would do it by ourselves, with our perception and imagination.

In this case we can act in the current environment we are used to, but we can see, if we want so, in this environment also this virtual, technologically added space - we will get hybrid, augmented or ecologically defined environment for totally new activities, where we can go or not go depending our intentions.

Manovitch assumed that another trend in design is that tools are vanishing and becoming into seamless interfaces. It seems that in interaction with new technological and hybrid tools affordances of the activity-side become stronger and stronger perceived, while the affordances of the previously recognized tool or artifact sides, where interface is embedded, are decreasing in the perception of the user.

In the PhD thesis of Elza Dunkels “Bridging the Distance: Children’s strategies on the Internet” (2007) she conducted online interviews in chatroom to ask about how children perceive the Internet environment. She wrote: From 8000 words in the interviews kids actually mentioned the word computed 19 times, and only at 2 occasions this was initiated by the child. Communication and fun themes, rather the use of technology per se prevailed.Kids totally forgot that technology is there as a mediation tool of their action goals!

To interpret these results, it seems that the actualized affordances of Internet seemed not to depend of the objects, computers, technology with its functionalities and limitations, but instead these ‘information age immersed kids’ had real life and very warm and alive activity goals and thus they perceived in the technology environment other affordances than the grownups from earlier generations. Kids actualized for themselves the ‘communication and interaction affordances’ and did not consciously actualize the affordances of the technology as something that mediates their actions.

Hybrid beings interact

Interesting perspective emerges if the person, who externalized the embodied sensory-motor action potentialites (basically their tools as mediation devices) for themselves to the environment, is viewed from aside by another person. For the other person two versions of the environment may appear.

One is where he can see the other subject together with its mediation devices. The studies of embodied cognition indicate that it is highly likely to embody and directly activate the sensory-motor patterns they view the others doing in the environment - thus what is happening is the culturally defined selective embodiment of the action-potentialities (tools they make from the environment to use it)of the others. Evolutionary, this can be viewed as some kind of reuse or optimization strategy, getting the same result without using the energy what was initially used on creating the initial interrelation between the person and the natural environment.

Vyas and Dix (2007) suggest that sets of affordances exits at the level of person, group/community and culture, and that the interactions between these affordances may influence each other.

Second is if only these man-made objects (various cultural tools eg. texts, patterns, images, artcrafts etc.) and other type of traces of their activity are left to the natural environment, but their initial originators have left the scene. Now, it is the question of culture to couple the previously experienced sensory-motor action potentialities with those that are recognized in the environment. It is highly likely that this kind of embodiment and toolization of the environment for purposeful action is always partial or even completely transforming the initial action-potentialities of the tools.

The notion of meanings in activity-centered view to hybrid ecology needs to be elaborated. Meaning is the result of embodiment of environmental entities partially as sensory-motor action potentialities. Meaning-making is a more or less conscious search of action-potentialities in the environment that can be coupled with previously embodied ones in the process of making them mediating tools. What is meaning making for an individual in these situations when he/she can see only the environment toolisized by someone else?

First is, when does the person notice that the environment is actually toolisized - perhaps this is a culturally defied process of noticing certain affordances, coupling it with embodied affordances and taking action if there is a match of affordances. Noticing affordances and actualizing something from the environment as tools similarly as other people depends of whether they are part of this community and culture.

It can be assumed that cultures leave traces of activity potentials as patterns to the environment which can be actualized if the pattern is strong enough, frequent enough and matches with some of the anticipated affordances for the person. It is clear that if these patterns are left to the environment without perceived interrelation with their creators, they are harder to be actualized similar way by other people.

Hybrid ecology in augmented environments

The previous aspects of hybrid ecology are quite general and deal with the nature of individuals acting in an environment.
What happens if the environment too becomes hybrid?

Recent trends in the Web development have caused the immersion of borders between the real and virtual spaces, giving rise into the new potential learning environment. New kind of social software eg. blogs, wikis, social bookmarking services, social artifact repositories enable user integration into democratic content-development and publishing. Mashup technologies allow publishers to syndicate their data into machine-readable RSS feeds to which readers can selectively subscribe with free social software. Geotagging systems make it possible to create locative content by mobile devices, situated both in real and virtual environment (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006). Locative content is digital media applied to real places, any kind of link to additional information set up in space together with the information that a specific place supplies, which is triggering real social interactions with a place and with technology (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006; Hanzl, 2007, Kaipainen & Pata, 2007).

This new learning environment – an augmented reality/virtuality - consists of distributed virtual spaces generated by social software tools, and of the real spaces and objects, in which locative content has been added with mobile devices. Augmented reality, the reality overlaid with virtual reality, and virtual reality, in which representations of the real world have been embedded and contextualised, is enabling interactions both in real and virtual spaces. Lonsing (2004) suggests that an augmented reality system generates a composite view in real time - a combination of a real scene viewed by a user and a virtual scene generated by a computer, where the real scene is submerged with additional information in order to enhance the perception of the user.

Rich layers of embodied knowledge and practice in the real spaces, and authentic context triggering activities and knowledge-building in virtual spaces, makes augmented space into a potential learning environment with new challenges for the learners. This new learning medium is a distributed activity space in which learners meet other learners, knowledge artifacts and practices.

New augmented learning environment provides novel tools and triggers new types of activity patterns in this distributed space. Possible learning patterns involve both actions in real and virtual spaces - thus we need to view this space as one whole.

Several community-activities with new technologies can be built upon the relationships between real spaces/objects, people and meanings:
Space with dynamically embedded meanings (eg. spoken narratives, movement) entails action potentials. The embodiment of these action potentials is a process of coupling affordances evoked by internal imagination and goals in one hand, and the perceived and culturally predefined external affordances from the environment, on the other hand. As a result, this space becomes into a place for new interpretors and starts triggering activities.

Question is of course when can persons in such places perceive the patterns of activities, when can they perceive affordances of the certain culture to interact with this culture?
(eg. How much geotagged content at places/virtual content in blogs, social repositories there needs to be, that it would reveal activity potentials for triggering certain community activities. What happens if the activity potentials coupled with different anticipated activity potentials, how do such creative threads and activity derivations emerge and influence the augmented reality activity potentials?)

In which areas of the augmented reality (real or virtual) can the activity potentials be actualized, will the proceeding activity take place in the same dimensionality or can it cross the imaginary border of these spacial dimensions of the augmented reality?
(eg. i can add geotagged content in real place, but later it starts my virtual activities in virtual space, that in turn can be traced as activity patterns from the real place)

Information Technology and Organisations, viewing affordances

I was reading a paper that super-fits to the task what i have in hand, elaborating some pedagogical IT aspects for extended organizations formed by cross-border interactions of universities and industries. Plus, it is well in accordance with my affordance-affinity and ecological aspects of affordances:

At its core, an affordance perspective recognizes that a technological object has some recognized functionality but needs to be recognized as a social object. As a social object, its influence on organizational functioning and performance cannot be separated from expertise, jobs, processes, or structures.

Authors raise the question: How do novel combinations of IT and organizational features create new affordances and how affordances impact on organizations’ boundaries.

The article is from the special issue dealing the interrelations of technology and industries.

Zammuto, RE, Griffith, TL, et al.
Information technology and the changing fabric of organization
ORGAN SCI 18 (5): 749-762 SEP-OCT 2007

Organizing no longer needs to take place around hierarchy and the collection, storage, and distribution of information as was the case with “command and control” bureaucracies in the past. The adoption of innovations in information technology and organizational practices since the 1990s now make it possible to organize around what can be done with information. These changes are not the result of information technologies per se, but of the combination of their features with organizational arrangements and practices that support their use.

Earlier theories:Common to these models is the underlying premise that the structural forms of organization (e.g., functional, divisional, matrix) are defined by hierarchies because they specify authority relationships, determine information flows, and serve as the primary mechanism for the coordination and control of activities. Hierarchy was the original thread from which the fabric of organization was woven.

* Increasing technological complexity requires greater structural complexity for effective performance (Woodward, 1958,1965).
Woodward, J. 1958. Management and Technology. H. M. S. O., London, UK.
Woodward, J. 1965. Industrial Organization” Theory and Practice. Oxford University Press, New York.

*The number of exceptions in a work flow and the extent to which exceptions were analyzable would impact the location of discretion and power within an organization, the interdependence of work groups, and how they were coordinated (Perrow, 1967, 1970).
Perrow, C. 1967. A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations. Amer. Sociol. Rev. 32 194–208.
Perrow, C. 1970. Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View. Wadsworth, Belmont, CA.

* Decision-making uncertainty could be reduced by decreasing the amount of information required through the provision of slack resources, by buffering, or by increasing an organization’s capacity to process information. Increasing information capacity could be accomplished using formal hierarchical information processes and through lateral integrating mechanisms. Galbraith (1973, 1977) saw information technology as a tool to enhance vertical information processing whereas horizontal information processing could be increased by creating linkages between people who possessed part of the information required for a specific decision-making activity.
Galbraith, J. 1973. Designing Complex Organizations. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Galbraith, J. R. 1977. Organization Design. Addison-Wesley, Reading,MA.

The contingency theory debate about the relative merit of technology versus size and environment as determinants of organizational structure in the 1960s and 1970s.

Institutional theory (Meyer and Rowan 1977), population ecology (Hannan and Freeman, 1977), and resource dependence theory (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978).

By the mid-1990s, technology had virtually died out as a theme in the study of organizational form and function within the organization science literature.

Technology’s relationship to organizational form and function.
1996-2005 13 articles examined the relationship between IT and organizational phenomena such as communications, teams, learning, the nature of work, and interorganizational relations.

While the field’s interest in the relationship between technology and organization declined, IT’s penetration
of everyday life and the world of organizations increased dramatically.

Manufacturing resource planning (MRP) systems during the 1980s
In 1980s IT was primarily used to automate existing operations and to increase the speed of
communication. Automation within organizational functions meant that routine information collection and storage tasks were taken over by IT, replacing paper and people with electrons, without fundamentally changing the way work was done. Managers relied on upward flows of information to surface problems with the ongoing operations and downward flows of instructions for making adjustments. Zuboff’s (198 seminal research demonstrated, automation increased managers’ sense of certainty and control over both production and organizational functions, thereby reinforcing hierarchy.
*Productivity paradox suggested that information technology was not significantly affecting organizational form and function as reflected by outcomes.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems during the early 1990s
In 1990s research began to report a positive relationship between IT investment and productivity in industries and firms. Greater investment in IT is associated with greater productivity growth (Dedrick et al., 2003). IT as enabler of organisational changes - the wide range of performance of IT investments among different organizations can be explained by complementary investments in organizational capital such as decentralized decision making systems, job training, and business process redesign.

ERP incorporated supply chain management systems during the late 1990s, which allowed integration to occur across organizational boundaries.
These systems reduced the need to use hierarchy to manage information flowsand coordinate activities. As a result, these enterprise systems decreased the need to move information through a hierarchy, allowing people to organize around the work itself and what could be done with the information.

Process-oriented IT integration
In addition to automating work, activities, events, and objects are translated into and made visible by information (Zuboff (1988).
Opportunities for emergent patterns of interaction or, in other words, new forms of organizing. Everyone could “see” and understand the whole work flow.
Horizontal communities of work
These communities of practice organize work not through static vertical slices, but through emergent horizontal flows of work around core processes (Brown and Duguid 1991).

As IT takes over many coordination and control responsibilities from hierarchy, traditional hierarchical
views of organizational form become incomplete.
A conceptual shift—from “organizational form” to “forms of organizing”
Alternative forms of organisation:
- the adhocracy (Mintzberg 1983)
- the heterarchy (Hedlund 1986)
- the shamrock (Handy 1989)
- the boundaryless organization (Devanna and Tichy 1990),
- the hypertext organization (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995)
- the edge-of-chaos organization (Brown and Eisenhardt 199

We try to capture the interplay between IT and organization using the term “affordances” in the sense that new combinations of technology and organizational features continually create possibilities that affect organizational form and function.

Affordances are the result of the confluence or intertwining of IT and organizational features.
Using an affordance lens suggests that although IT and organization features may exist independently of each other, their value for explaining organizational form and function comes from how they are enacted together.
At its core, an affordance perspective recognizes that a technological object has some recognized functionality but needs to be recognized as a social object. As a social object, its influence on organizational functioning and performance cannot be separated from expertise, jobs, processes, or structures.

We describe five possible affordances—1) visualizing entire work processes, 2) real-time/flexible product and service innovation, 3) virtual collaboration, 4) mass collaboration, and 5) simulation/synthetic reality.

1. Visualizing entire work processes affordance is the ability to observe the entire work process in action from “end to end,” representing it through language, imagery, or physical artifacts to make decisions about next steps when alternative actions can be taken.
This affordance is enabled by the symbiosis of technology and organizational features. Visualization enables the collective sensemaking. This affordance makes the organizing process emergent and mutable.This affordance can make organizational boundaries more permeable yet able to be monitored.

2. Real-Time/Flexible Product and Service Creation affordance is the ability to create software-enhanced products and services by quickly recombining components in new and innovative ways. Several enabling technology features make possible the integration of components in innovative ways including web-based service-oriented architectures, standardized component designs, and open source software.Creation of a “common ground” of social action that enables people from diverse backgrounds and expertise to come together easily is needed to trigger this affordance.
Transactive memory systems is one example of shared understanding that must be able to allow for emergent cognitive structures as problem definitions and solutions dynamically evolve (Lewis et al. 2005, Majchrzak et al. 2007). Structures are needed to facilitate crossing thought world boundaries such as boundary objects that accommodate the kinds of knowledge being codeveloped among the groups (Carlile 2004), and boundary spanners of varying types to gather up information, scout out opportunities, or ward off unnecessary interference (Ancona and Caldwell 1992). These roles, coupled with help from intermediaries such as brokers, opportunity recognizers, and translators (Markus et al. 2002, Majchrzak et al. 2004), facilitate more creative mixing of the components.

3. Collaborating virtually affordance refers to the ability to share and integrate others’ knowledge when that knowledge is primarily conveyed through virtual media. Virtual collaboration can broaden participation in an organization’s work processes and decision making by including people located at its periphery.Virtual collaboration increases the potential for bringing people from different organizations and disciplines together dynamically for short periods of time.Virtual collaboration provides the opportunity to capture decision rationales and work processes as work is done, enabling future actors to reuse or learn from past work. Virtual collaboration enhances the potential for organizations to extend their boundaries.

4. The mass collaboration affordance is defined as the process by which people interact on a many-to-many basis via the Internet as opposed to a one-to-one basis (e.g., instant messaging), or a one-to-many basis (e.g., list servers) creating new unexpected content. Maintaining norms of reciprocity are critical (this is in accordance with Nonaka’s ideas of managing ba!).
A major implication of the mass collaboration affordance (like using wikis in organisation) for organizing is that it creates the potential for quickly developing temporary organizations.It affords the possibility of unbounded networks.

5. The simulation/synthetic representation affordance is defined as the capability to conduct what-if scenarios.Simulation can affect how people actually go about their work by giving them multiple simultaneous personas to play, e.g., a person may play an avatar at Toyota and a real marketing person at Toyota.

Knowledge creation in organisations

Reading a book:

Knowledge emergence. Social, Technical and Evolutionary Dimensions of Knowledge Creation
Eds. I.Nonaka & T.Nishiguchi
Oxford University Press, 2001.

Nonaka, Konno & Toyama:

What knowledge management should achieve is not a static management of information or existing knowledge, but a dynamic management of the process of creating knowledge out of knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is hard to verbalise, and is deeply rooted in an individual’s actions and expertise, as well as ideals, values or emotions. Explicit knowledge can be expressed formally and transmitted across individuals. Understanding the reciprocal relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge and social knowledge conversions with this knowledge between individuals is the key of understanding knowledge-creating processes.

Four modes of knowledge conversion are:
- Socialization (tacit -> tacit) consists of tacit knowledge accumulation through physical proximity, wandering outside and wandering inside for collecting social information, and transfer of tacit knowledge;
- Externalization (tacit -> explicit) is creating concepts through abductive thinking, the use of metaphors for concept creation, the use of models, diagrams or prototypes to articulate tacit concepts;
- Combination (explicit -> explicit) consists of acquisition and integration, which involves justification of knowledge and negotiations of finding agreement, synthesis and processing at presentations and meetings, and dissemination that is supported with communication networks;
- Internalization (explicit -> tacit) consists of personal experience and acquisition of real world knowledge through learning by doing, simulations and experimenting, and by virtual world knowledge acquisition.

The interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge moves up to the ontological levels eg. individual -> group -> organisation -> between organisations. Organisational knowldge creation is a spiral process that crosses sectional, departmential, divisional, and organisational boundaries.

Ba, a Japanese term refers to a physical, virtual and/or mental space shared by two or more individuals or organisations. The nature of ba will condition social relationships among these social units and hence have a determining influence on the scale and scope of knowledge creation. The role of management in the knowledge-creation process should be to design and/or facilitate the emergence of appropriate ba, rather than directly intervene in the knowledge-creation process.

Ba is a time-space nexus, a locationality that simultaneously includes time and space. To participate in ba means to get involved and transcend one’s own limited perspective or boundary. Knowledge is embedded in ba, if knowledge is separated from ba it turns into separate information, which can be communicated independently from ba.

I wonder what are the relationships of ba and forms of intersubjectivity?

Important aspects in ba management are:
- Providing knowledge vision that transcends the boundaries of existing products, divisions, organisations, and markets. Knowledge vision defines, what kind of knowledge the company should create and in what domain, it also defines value systems that evaluates, justifies and determines the quality of knowledge the company creates.
- Building and energizing ba by providing space, utilizising created ba dynamically, allowing creative autonomy, causing creative chaos that breaks down routines, habits and cognitive frameworks, facilitating the redundancy of information, which is needed to perceive what the tacit knowledge of the members of the organisation is, and to which direction they should be constructing the knowledge.

Krogh, Ichijo & Nonaka:
Care can facilitate organisational knowledge development by nurturing trust among the employees. Knowledge-creation depends on whether there is low or high care and whether there is creation of individual or organisational knowledge. In low care organisations individuals seize knowledge on their own and do not share with the others, social knowledge of the organisation is explicit and buereaucratic, often not understood by employees. In high care organisations individuals in social networks share tacit knowledge both at individual and organisation level and understand the knowledge.

M.A. Cusumano:
Microsoft promotes both creativity, a key factor of innovative knowledge creation, and structure. Creativity is related with flexibility and entrepreneurial spirit of the hacker culture. The basic elements of their approach are to continuously synchronise what employees are doing individually and as members of parallel teams and to periodically stabilize the evolving product features by specifications as the project proceeds.

G. Michaelis:
Cooperative processes, that is communicative relations, bind participants to each other and with the actions they are performing. The success of cooperative processes depends on the effectiveness of actors and also of their capability to switch from one position to another: from action performer to the one who requests action.
- Participants in a cooperative process change over time
- Each participant switches between acting and communicating
- Each participant is engaged at specific time moment into different cooperation types depending on her position among other cooperative participants
- Actors switch between different forms of cooperation and between different types of knowledge transformations
- Synchronous and asynchronous forms of collaboration are used

According to Brown and Duguid (1994), during the evolution of cooperative processes, each of their components continuously moves from center to periphery and in the reverse direction. Effective border resources, helping the users to switch among cooperative processes without losing awareness of the context where they are cooperating, are needed.

They use cooperation and collaboration terms differently from CSCW and CSCL traditions where cooperation is dividing tasks and roles when doing something and collaboration is shifting the tasks and roles dynamically between people during the activity.
Another thought is can we describe it as Engeström’s knotworking?
The nature of these border resources is still a bit unclear. Is it the same as boundary objects? Boundary objects are objects that are both plastic enough to adapt the local needs and constraints of several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites (Star, 1989).
Is cooperation same as boundary practices? Boundary-crossing as participation takes place in the form of brokering in which people use their common membership in various activity systems (networks, projects, learning situations) to coordinate perspectives, to trasfer ideas or to introduce elements of one practice into another (Wenger, 1998). Wenger also distinguishes boundary practices, which establish boundary encounters on a regular basis and build an ongoing forum for mutual engagement.

D.E. Westney:
She discusses several cross-border knowledge creation processes within multinational enterprises in terms of location (generic or location-specific) and nature (tacit or explicit) of knowledge.

She identifies 4 distinct cross-border knowledge-creation processes:
- Combining centrally located generic knowledge with locally dispersed location-specific knowledge:
- Combining generic knowledge from tow or more locations
- Joint cross-border interactions using location-specific knowledge to generate generic knowledge or to transfer knowledge to other locations
- Using analogy to apply location-specific knowledge from one location to another

The geographic dispersion of the tacit generic knowledge is more important motivator for the R&D than explicit generic knowledge.

K. Yasumoro & E. Westney:
Japanese companies use front-line management, where factories, R&D labs, sales and marketing organisations are valued as the key centres of knowledge creation. Key aspects of this approach include the diffusion of significant levels of discretion, response capability, and problem-solving responsibilities to front-line employees and an egalitarian work culture that minimizes differences across organisational statuses and ranks.

T.Nishiguchi:
Proposes a model of knowledge creation based on the coevolution of interorganisational relations. Exploitation and symbiosis between organisations are perceived not as separate systems but as interwined and nested within a twister.Knowledge creation emerges through the destabilizing and dynamic interactions between the two systems. In this view organisations are seen as entities with their own perception, consciousness, and memory whose interactions with other organisations can be driving force that creates and maintains order within the social and economic system.

Distinguishes two systems of interorganisational relations; Exploitation system and Symbiosis system.

Exploitation system:
Decision-making: central and unilateral
Skills: functional
Information: the result
Information-processing: serial, sequential and delineative
Control structure: Arm’s lenght
Safeguard: bidding, multiple sourcing, short term contracts
Requirements: bargaining
Objectives: distribution, survival
Attributes: Dichotomous, antagonistic, win-lose, dead end, mechanistic, homeostasis

Symbiosis system:
Decision-making: constitutent, synergetic, self-reflective, retrospective
Skills: relational
Information: process
Information processing: parallel, concurrent
Organisation: boundaryless, crossfunctional
Control structure: Clustered
Safeguard: single or parallel sourcing, risk-sharing, profit-sharing
Requirements: commitment
Objectives: cocreation, coadvancement,
Attributes: permeable, adsorptive, win-win, organic, open-end, hoeochaos

Some relevant papers:
Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology
Volume 30(1) Winter / hiver 2004
The Framework of Knowledge Creation for Online Learning Environments
Hsiu-Mei Huang
Shu-Sheng Liaw

Organizational Knowledge Acquisition
Brian R. Gaines

Managing Existing Knowledge is Not Enough: Knowledge Management Theory and Practice in Japan
Katsuhiro Umemoto

public participation in web

From
Hanzl, M. (2007). Information technology as a tool for public participation in urban planning: a review of experiments and potentials. Design Studies, 28 (3), 289-307.

On the first image Hanzl describes the interactions between real and virtual spaces during the process of public participation in urban planning. Virtual reality 3D models and social software tools are part of this process.

Next two images depict increased levels of e-participation in different web-based systems and the types of participation according to Hudson-Smith et al., 2002.

In the table, Hanzl describes different kind of public communication and indicates is it one-directional either from authorites to people or vice versa or two-directional. This is showing in detail how some forms of web-based public communication have been ‘One-way-web’ and how new services enable ‘Two-way-web’ and two-directional communication.

Terry Anderson keynote

Terry Anderson’s keynote at Ed-Media 2007
Social learning 2.0 - keynote slides

I wonder how Terry Anderson actually defines affordances. The list he introduced seems a bit learning-environment property-centered rather than emergent in the activities. I would rather disagree of using the affordance term like this.Or, if to take a second thought web 2.0 is not only tools and in this case, we can see these affordances as part of the activity system affordances. Some of the affordance descriptions of Terry actually involve the verb for action and some properties and some actors..so in this sense maybe i could name them affordances.

Affordances of web 2.0:
- massive amounts of content

- communication: high quality, low cost

- agents (rrs, google alerts, MeetingWizard etc.)

Terry has previously written in his blog about Models of the many. In his keynote he elaborated this topic again.

Taxonomy of the many

Group (team)
conscious membership
leadership and organisation
cohorts and paced
rules and guidelines
access and privacy controls
focused and other time limited
may be blended F2F

Metaphor: virtual classroom

Network
shared interest/practice
fluid membership
friends of friends
reputation and altruoism driven
emergent norms, structures
activity ebbs and flows
rarely F2F

Metaphor: virtual community of practice

Collective:
aggregated other,
folksonomies
stigmatic aggregation

Metaphor:
wisdom of crowds

Dron and Anderson 2007

Terry was also referring to Durkheim’s Collective consciousness: Collective representations exist outside of the individual consciousness

Interesting was that this keynote ideas reminded me the ideas that i developed some time in last autumn about knowledge that is interpersonal. On my thinking this understanding and acceptance of what kind of knowledge we as individuals, groups and networks and collectives obtain as part of learning is the key factor which brings forth the paradigm change in learning. Learning is too much considered as related with this individual knowledge. Isntead it should be directed towards obtaining and using this collective consciousness.

I would like to revise this model of knowledge in the light of the taxonomy that Anderson and Dron 2007 are suggesting.

looking biologically at knowledge communities

Recently there has been an overexploitation of the community ideas, which has some ways become as powerful term in computer-based systems as the computer metaphor in cognitive systems.

For example Wenger’s idea of communities of practice is conquiring the World, both in education and work.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Each community has some core area towards where those who do not belong to this group stream for. The community is thus always keeping and renewing its’ practices.

In education this idea has transformed into the learning communities conception, and there are attempts of forming knowledge-building communities. For example in Estonia we attempt at creating a knowledge-building community of teachers in LeMill environment:

a Web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources

The essence of the community in biology and in social systems seems to have some resemblance, thus, i got an idea what if to take the “biology glasses” and look at the processes in these networked knowledge communities.

Of course, I am not the first one to try it. There is a very powerful “rhizomic versus taproot metaphor” from Delueze and Guattari circling around since 1980ies.

For Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizomic knowledge was the opposite of the arborescent or tree-like knowledge with its hierarchical systems of understandings and where everybody and everything had its place in an economy of power and totalising theory.

Deleuze and Guattari argued that a ‘rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains…a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded…a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002, p. 7-9).

Deleuze and Guattari state that, The rhizome is an accentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states.

Now, what intriques me here is some contraversity between he community of practice ideas which seem to be following the taproot kind of central area ideas and the totally center-free rhizomic model, which I feel is much more likely in networked systems.

The taproot communities are formed around people while the rhizomic communities are artifact and meanings centered.

Now, if we want to create a knowledge-building community, it seems the rhizomic model, which centres ideas is more valid than the person-based taproot-model. My previous work-experiences in Miksike learning community proved that people came for ideas and materials - the more there was free content, the more they visited the site, but they didnt form networks. Networking was triggered by activities at some extent, possibilities of doing something for their own purposes with new web-based tools in which the others could participate (eg. quizzes for the schools etc.).

This arises another interesting issue, related to activity theory - new tools seem to initiate the community formation. They provide new means of realizing one’s intentions and objectives.

In LeMill the overall intention is that teachers would form communities around shared (or individual) content-creation. The model supported by Tigerleap foundation favours community-formation at teacher-training courses where people learn the tools and MUST create content. It is believed that later these teachers will become active users of the environment.

Personally i do not believe that this is the right model, because ownership of new tools cannot be achieved with short time. The tools do not come alone - they are part of new paradigm, new kind of thinking which is much harder to accept. Teachers do not see why they should create something for the others. At some extreme cases, they are also against of using the others as a source of ideas.

But which would be the model that works?
Can the community be formed like a taproot, initiated by central person?
Or would the new members in LeMill identify themselves as part of the community and the Wenger’s community of practice idea would work?
Or is there some other kind of pattern under the community-formation, especially at inital phases where there is no community core yet? Something rhizomic for example…
Something conquring the territory for my species? maybe ..what always happens in biological communities, at grasslands. How could we initiate this kind of grassland-formation and increase the ‘biodiversity’? because this kind of community is less vulnerable to extreme conditions and changes compared to monocultures.

In one of my earlier writings i tried to compare the lifespan of the community with the lifespan-diagrams of biological communities. I would ask now, in what stage of community are LeMill different communities, and can we look at the different periods of the community-formation using different models?

Some interesting papers:
Rhizome@internet