Intelligent Learning Extended Organization (IntelLEO) project progress

The 7th Framework project Intelligent Learning Extended Organization (IntelLEO) was launched in february 2009. Since then we have been working with the first deliverables.

It is now clear that the team has a lot of Web 2.0 inclined people and the solutions will come from social software developments.

I was responsible of coordinating the State of Art deliverable.
The first overview was composed by: Kai Pata, Mart Laanpere, Jelena Jovanovic, Vladan Devedzic, Emmanuel Jamin, Dragan Gasevic, Marek Hatala, Savas Ziplies, Ana Teresa Correia, Dragan Stokic and Melody Siadaty

It gives overview of the following topics:

INTELLEO FRAMEWORK

PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES FOR INTELLEO
Effective Learning and Knowledge Building is boundary crossing
Knowledge conversion in cross-institutional models

METHODS AND SERVICES RELATED TO COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND KM IN
INTELLEO
Collaboration patterns and models
Interaction Monitoring and Provisioning
Information Security and Privacy issues

METHODS AND SERVICES RELATED TO INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL
LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN INTELLEO
Tools for Individual Knowledge and Learning Management
Tools for Social Networking in Learning-Knowledge Construction
Tools for Collaborative Combination of Explicit Knowledge
Learning Path Creator
Organizational policy tools

SEMANTICS AND CONTEXT MANAGEMENT FOR TEL
Ontology-based approaches to context modelling
Context-aware systems
Context and Privacy Issues

LINK BETWEEN LEARNING AND KM SYSTEMS
The Latest Trends in KM: Social Computing and Beyond
Semantic Annotation of Knowledge Objects
Projects, systems, tools

ICT ARCHITECTURAL AND INTEGRATION ASPECTS
Service Oriented Architecture
Web-Services
Semantic Web Services
Orchestration / Negotiation
Software Development and Integration
Interoperability and Learning Object Repository Management
SWS Design Methodology

We also developed the concept map that visualizes realationships in our IntelLEO knowledge-related glossary.

Now we are working on three business cases that will be the test-ground for empirical research.
Our case in Estonia is the “University teacher training Unit – School as a workplace for teachers” cross-border knowledge conversion. Basic idea is to provide the knowledge building and learning support for professional transfer from one community to another in three cases:
- During teacher training (when students are involved in teaching at schools and couched simultaneously by university staff and professional teachers),
- During implementation year at school as a professional teacher (when students must report back to the university about their progress), and
- During the life-long learning as a professional teacher (when knowledge must move between two communities)

We will use the combination of Elgg advancements in teacher portal Koolielu (the draft version) and LeMill collaborative learning object creation repository as the basic distributed software platform where the competence-management and learning-path creator will be added.

IntelLEO will develop services for supporting harmonization of individual and organizational objectives in cases when individuals are guided by two sets of visions and norms coming from different communities. Secondly it promotes collaborative learning in the groups that involve different members from two organizational cultures.
I think the main goal of IntelLEO is to support the responsiveness of organizations to challenges through advancing cross-institutional knowledge conversion. This responsiveness at individual and cross-organizational level is achieved by motivation to learn in workplaces across community borders. The progress in competences may occur when people are supported in developing self-reflecting habits at workplaces, sharing and combining knowledge and reusing this knowledge while binding temporarily the two sets of knowledge in different communities.

Roots of ecological psychology I

Yesterday we started to revise some concepts of ecology to be useful in our learning context. So i had to come back an look at some theory books.

Harry Heft writes in Ecological Psychology in Context

Heft (2001): There is a dynamic realm of thoroughly natural, co-evolved entities functioning in a web of environmental interdependencies. The structural and functional properties of natural entities, and the interdependencies they share, reflect their ongoing mutual history. This view underlines an ecological perspective.

The founder of ecological psychology is William James (1842-1910). He was among the first generation of psychologists to introduce evolutionary perspective into psychological theorizing. His philosophy of radical empirism can be employed as a philosophical foundation to ecological psychology.

James identified pure experience as the ground of all knowing. Pure experience embedded as it is in a person-environment relation is poised to be dynamically differentiated. The defining characteristic of knowing is selectivity.

Immediate experience consists of things and relations. Knowing is an activity that traces out lines of potential structure in immediate experience, structure is not imposed on experience.

The knower appears from the outset in relation to the thing known. The knower and object known each become realized as different constellations of relations themselves coexisting ultimatively in a ground of pure experience.

Experience is unitary, but at the same time, it can simultaneously be part of two constellations of relations, that is, a part of two distinguishable contexts. The object known and the knower are each embedded in contexts of relations that have their own distinguishable structures.

Selection of structure in experience involves following a set of relations in experience. Relations in experience are “transitional experiences which the world supplies” (James, 1912/1976, p. 14). The lines of structure selected out by the knowing function are not imposed on the thing known, but are identified and discovered in it.

Three basic claims characterize James’s philosophy:
- only those things that can be identified or discovered in experience are to be included in one’s philosophical system.
- the relations between things, conjuctive, as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience.
- the world itself possesses an inherent discoverable structure.

In radical empirism, knowing refers to a functional relation in experience between the knower and an object known.

Perceiving is ongoing, continuous, unbroken and multimodal. The continuity of perceptual flux is punctuated by boundaries that gradually flow one into the next. “Boundaries” is misleading, suggesting an edge that is rigid and impermeable. Better put, there are transitions in perceptual experience, which are overflowed by what they separate and whose parts compenetrate and diffuse into its neighbours.

Perceiving is a direct, unmediated, selective discovery of structure in immediate experience.
Perceiving is an action that entails selection of a flow of immediate experience out of the potential ground that is pure experience.

Thinking or conceiving entails selecting and fixing particular parts of this perceptual flow. Through this process, concepts are carved out of immediate perceptual experience at a remove from action and are abstracted from it. The system of concepts is selected out of the perceptual flow. “Concepts extracted from the perceptual flow, ” verbally fixed and coupled together (let us) know what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time (james, 1912/1976, p. 47).

Forming concepts and beliefs is something complex biological creatures do in order to be better in touch with the flow of experience, rather than uncovering fixed and transcendent universal truths. It is a natural process of complex animals attempting to function adapatively in relation to changing environment-person relations.

Launching IntelLEO an Extended Intelligent Learning Organization

Next three years of my work will be partly related with European IST 7th Framework Project IntelLEO. IntelLEO is an acronym for extended intelligent learning organization model – a hybrid knowledge-management model between two institutions.
I will be responsible of the Pedagogical tasks of IntelLEO.

In IntelLEO three business cases will be tested:
- Collaborative learning and knowledge-building strategy within large industrial enterprise (Volkswagen – Strak – the Computer Aided Styling of automobiles) and university
- Harmonising organisational objectives with learning and knowledge-buiding activities between business network (INI d.o.o.), university and customers
- Harmonisation of individual & organisational objectives within in-service teachers and university

In one of the conference talks i have already presented the model:

The objective of the project is to explore how the responsiveness of the learning and knowledge-building environments in an IntelLEO can be radically enhanced by advanced technology, exploiting, in an innovative way, a synergy between:

(a) services for efficient management of collaborative learning and knowledge-building activities and access to and supply of shared content, and

(b) services for harmonisation of individual and organisational objectives.

Three hypotheses of the research are:

The responsiveness of an IntelLEO is corporate performance in which individuals are motivated to proactively learn and construct knowledge.

This responsiveness can be increased:

- if individuals are technologically supported to participate in collaborative learning and knowledge-building activities across vertical and horizontal boundaries of the IntelLEO, and

- if their personal objectives of learning and creativity are dynamically harmonized with the organisational learning and knowledge-building objectives of different IntelLEO counterparts.

2. The effectiveness of the technological support that will be developed in the project to increase the responsiveness of an IntelLEO is achieved by the synergy of the two kinds of services mentioned above ((a) and (b)).

3. Learning and harmonisation of individual and organisational objectives happen at different temporal collaborative knowledge-building and learning groups of an IntelLEO.

Partners in IntelLEO project:

Institut fuer angewandte Systemtechnik Bremen GmbH
Volkswagen AG, Strak
Tallinn University, Centre of Educational Technology
Estonian Teachers’ Association
Zentrum fuer Soziale Innovation, Austria
ATOS Origin
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Organisational Sciences
INI d.o.o.
Athabasca University – School of Computing and Information SystemsAU CA

The launch of the project takes place in Bremen this week.

Ecological learning design framework

We have in Tallinn University nice tradition to re-elect researcher positions every 4 years. My position is now recruited and part of getting it back it is to give a report of my last period work. This will be at monday.

I have been working in Tallinn University from autumn 2006 with half position working for iCamp project, and from january 2008 at full position. Ecological learning design framework is something what i consider the main work of my last period besides participating in the development of the iCamp intervention model in elearning2.0. It is based on two papers, one Elaborating connectivism is now fully published as the book chapter, another is published in journal Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 2009, Vol. 12, Issue 3.

Educational Social Software for Context-Aware Learning: Collaborative Methods and Human Interaction
Edited By: Niki Lambropoulos, London South Bank University, UK; Margarida Romero, University of Toulouse, France
Chapter XIV: Revising the Framework of Knowledge Ecologies: How Activity Patterns Define Learning Spaces. Kai Pata

Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 2009, Vol. 12, Issue 3, Pages 23–43
Modeling spaces for self-directed learning at university courses
Kai Pata

Here are the slides of the ecological learning framework:

Socio-cultural and ecological explanations to self-reflection

I was reading this sunday morning the chapter from the Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology (2007) by (eds.) Jaan Valsiner and Alberto Rosa:

Social basis of self-reflection
by Alex Gillespie
pp.678-691

Since i have been thinking in terms of inter-subjectivity, activity theory and cultural semiotics earlier, while now my understanding has more and more shifted towards the embodied cognition and hybrid ecology ideas, i tried to see where my standing-point is and where it differs from socio-cultural ideas.

It seems to me that the basic idea in this chapter is recognizing that signs (but then also tools, since both are mediators of action what person needs to realize his objectives in an environment?) are created during culturally constrained actions as multi-perspective and inter-subjective representations, including both the actor’s and the observer’s experiences of that action.

Gillespie suggests that in different social acts we will get experiences of the both sides of the act in lifetime (learner/teacher, giving/receiving), so we can activate these perspectives simultaneously when the we need to create/activate a mediator (sign, tool) to carry out any act.

The re-using of the signs means activating these embodied experiences and switching between these multiple perspectives when using certain sign either alone or with the others in interaction.

In Gillespie’s elaboration i can see direct relations with embodied cognition and mirror-matching theories: these theories assume that we need to experience something, embody it, and only then we can observe others doing it so that it might reactivate our similar neural processes. But embodied cognition has not dealt with this constant activation of different experiences simultaneously – my own perspective as an actor, and the other’s perspective as an observer of that action.

Secondly, in embodied cognition the representational mediation, the processing of signs that represent something is excluded, and the observation, hearing or reading can directly activate sensory-motor paths that make as feel and act.

Following Gillespie, and relating it how i understand these issues, in case of conscious self-reflective activities we might simultaneously activate several previously embodied affordances of the environment (extracted dimensionalities) to do something what we wish to do (eg. my experience of learning and also my experience of teaching), then we are running these sensory-motor activations in parallel/simultaneously/one-by-one that means as a result that we sometimes suppress some affordances in the environment that we initially perceived as coupling with our anticipated affordances for doing some actions.

Rupture and the use of internalized actions as part of self-reflection in this case are the constraints we put to the anticipated affordances of actions internally before even trying to carry them out. Can it be like conscious hindering certain sensory-motor neural activation patterns as part of our decision-making of what act to perform?

Mirroring from others and the social conflict are the constraints emerging from the environment as the response to find/make use our anticipated affordances of action. It means we consciously accommodate our sensory-motor activation paths ecologically, searching in other people, in the environment for coupling affordances of our anticipated affordances for action and hindering those sensory-motor activation paths that do not find the match to become activated.

These are some ideas what i got reading the following parts from the Gillespie’s article:

Self-reflection can be defined as temporary phenomenological experience in which self becomes an object to oneself.

People use semiotic mediators, or signs by which they pick out certain affective experiences or situations, thus distancing themselves from both self and immediate situation. These signs are combined into complex semiotic systems (representations, discourses, cultural artifacts, symbolic resources), that provide even greater liberation from the immediate situation.

Such distance enables self to act upon self and the situation.

Four socio-cultural theories of the origin of self-reflection:

1. Rupture theories of self-reflection posit that self-reflection arises when one’s path of action becomes blocked or when one faces a decision of some sort.

Peirce: A problematic situation. a small irritation or rupture stimulates reflective thought (1978/1998).

Dewey (1896): in ruptured situations the object becomes subjective because the actor has two or more responses toward the object, and the self-reflection arises.
However, from Pavlov’s experiments it is shown that contradictory responses can co-exist without leading to self-reflection.

According to Piaget (1970) the problem situation forces the child to abstract and recognize his/her developing schemas when these schemas lead to unfulfilled expectations.

It was not clear from this explanation, why semiotic mediators must be stimulated.

2. Mirror theories of self-reflection suggest that the defining feature in self-reflection is the presence of an other.

The other perceives more about self-reflection than self can perceive.
The reflective distance from self which self-reflection entails first exist in the mind of other. This can be fed back to self by other, such that self can learn self from the perspective of other (Bakhtin 1923/1990).
Other provides feedback to the self same as mirror provides feedback about our appearance that we cannot perceive unaided.

The society can be a mirror as well, leading to self-reflection (Cooley, 1902). According to him, self is a social product formed out of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of his judgement of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling such as pride or mortification.
Cooly always related self-reflection with judgements leading to emotions such as pride, shame, guilt etc.

Questions: How does self take the perspective of the other? Is other a passive mirror, neutrally reflecting back to self?

3. Conflict theories of self-reflection suggest that self-reflection arises through social struggle.

Hegel: self-consciousness arises through gaining recognition from an other who is not inferior to self. Self and other treat each other as physical objects, and thus deny any recognition to each other. Due to this denial they enter into a struggle, the outcome of which is the relation of domination and subordination, that is master-slave relation. The slave can get recognition from the master but not vice versa. Slave struggles for recognition, developing new skills and competences. Self-onsciousness arises from struggling for recognition.

Psaltis & Duveen: Explicit recognition of new acquired knowledge by other and self is needed for durable cognitive development through interaction – the interaction needs to provide mutual self-reflection.

Sigel’s (2002) Psychological Distancing Theory asserts that discrepancies introduced by utterances of others can put a cognitive demand on the child which can in turn lead to representational work and thus distancing.

Activity Theory (Engeström, 1987) assumes that problematic situation includes problems introduced by the perspective of others. Participants within an activity system prompt each other to reflect upon the conditions and rules of their ongoing interaction. Thus contradictions between different counterparts of an activity system lead to reflection.

Social representation theory (Duveen) emphasizes that there are contradictions in the bodies of knowledge that is circulated in modern societies. Bauer and Gaskell (1999) suggest that people become of aware of the representations at the points at which they overlap or contradict each other. This coexistence of multiple forms of knowledge in the society can lead to self-reflection.

Similarly to rupture theories, it is not clear through which semiotic processes self-reflection arises.

4. Internalization theories of self-reflection posit that thought is a self-reflective internal dialogue with absent others, between their internalized perspectives.

Self-reflection arises through internalizing the perspectives that the other has upon self, followed by self taking the perspectives of other upon self.

Vygotsky (1997) emphasized that the process of internalization is a process of transformation rather than simple transmission. Signs are first used to mediate the behaviours of others, and later used to talk about self, reflect upon self, and mediate the behaviour of self.

Mead and Vygotsky conceive the sign (or significant symbol) as comprising two perspectives – the actor perspective and the observer perspective.

On one hand, there is the embodied actor perspective (the response) to some object (the child reaches hand to point to an object she wants to get). On the other hand, there is the distance introduced by the observer perspective of the other on the action (mother sees the grasping gesture indicating desire to get the object). The grasping becomes pointing when the child uses both of these perspectives.

Thus the sign (significant symbol) is fundamentally inter-subjective: it evolves both actor and observer perspectives in both self and other.

Questions: if the sign is composite of the perspective of self and other, how does this composite form, how are these two perspectives brought together.

Gillespie (2005) now starts to generate his own theory. He relies on the Mead’s theory of the social act suggesting that people move amongst the positions with a relatively stable social/institutional structure (host/guest, buyer/seller).

Each social act pairs (eg. giving/receiving, teaching/learning) entails reciprocal actor and observer positions and perspectives which mots people have enacted. They have previously been in these social positions of the other. Thus we are able to take these perspectives in each social act. The self becomes dialogical, containing multiple social perspectives for each act.

The social act is the institution that first provides individuals with roughly equivalent actor and observer experiences, and second, integrates these perspectives within the minds of individuals. When both actor and observer perspectives are evoked within a significant symbol (or sign) /like in gesture/, then there is a self-reflection, because self is both self and other simultaneously.

Gillespie calls self-reflection triggered by an actor perspective self-mediation and the self-reflection triggered by an observer perspective on an actor short-circuiting.

Gillespie assumes that different socio-cultural theories of self-reflection are not in opposition, but rather theorize different proximal paths leading towards self-reflection.

The magic of social act is that it integrates the actor and the observer experiences or perspectives into the formation of signs enabling higher level of semiotic mediation. Conceiving of the sign as this integration of perspectives elucidates the logic of self-reflection.

Whenever one uses the sign it can carry self from one perspective to another continuously.
Introducing the concept of sign (significant symbol) as a complex semiotic system entails abandoning the assumption that complex semiotic systems mirror the world. Instead, it conceptualizes these semiotic systems as architectures of inter-subjectivity, which enable translations between actor and observer perspectives within a social act.

Any narrative is not just a narrative that is analogical to self’s own experience, it is an inter-subjective structure that enables translations between actor and observer perspectives. Partially integrated actor and observer perspectives are the pre-condition for self-reflection. Rupture, feedback, and social conflict can cause self-reflection because of a pre-ecxisting and only partially integrated architecture of inter-subjectivity.

Collaborative video workshop impressions

This week we had the collaborative video workshop with the Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia and Tallinn Univeristy IMKE people. We aimed to try out how does collaborative video publishing work in different Project-related activities. Second aim was to develop the Fooga software.The group-work results showed that if we have a new type of tool, it also makes us to think of totally new kind of activities, not to copy previous patterns from another kind of learning settings.

Teaming up and Introducing the members
Collaborative compilation of project materials
Presentation and evaluation of projects

My own impressions were from this last team. In spite of numerous technical problems we managed to test out a multi-perspective evaluation method with the collaborative video software.
Main idea is that new evaluation paradigms expect that participants of the activity should be involved into the development of evaluation criteria. Thus each participant can first brainstorm different evaluation criteria. Later the videos of these evaluations of an activity can be restructured, compiling together certain aspect of evaluation.

Our team filmed with mobiles the discussions of other groups. These films we made separately were uploaded to the common project area. Next each of us looked these films, cut and edit them until one clear perspective was extracted. We found two perspectives what to evaluate in the group-work: the body language perspective in teams and the way team-members use the technology in their discussions. If such clear evaluation criteria were visualised through the collaborative effort, these can be used to evaluate the activities of groups, since now there is visual evidence what to look for, what to pay attention.

The illusion of Mediationism

To do something, what i wanted to do for a long time, i read the chapter claiming that mediationism is used like a miracle-tool in different theories. Why i was so hopeful – because there are approaches that deny the perceptional and representational way of making the world meaningful. For example, there is a theory of embodied cognition, where the processing of representations is not needed but they claim that persons directly activate the sensory-motor action paths in brain when being imposed to the sensory-motor action potentialities or affordances in the environment.

The Windowless Room:’Mediationism’ and how to get over it
by Alan Costall
pp. 109-123
From Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology
Eds. J. Valsiner & A.Rosa
2007

The book is standing on my table for a while, but the only chapter i have managed to take a look is the intriguing one by Alan Costall. I never saw such a lecture-style in a handbook!
His beautiful saying is: ‘making a fetish of mediation’. He describes several approaches how mediationism is used.

He uses the metaphor of windowless room to describe the mediationism. We find us over and over again in a room without windows, with pictures hanging on the walls, which depict other windowless rooms.

His conclusion is that there are so many ways of getting into this windowless room.

He does not want to suggest direct theory of perception or action, but wants to indicate that mediationism seems like a barrier between us and the world.

Within cognitive psychology mediationism has taken the form of representationalism.
Cognition has long been defined in terms of representations.
To deal with situated actions, representationalism gets into trouble because in different contexts the different representations become the second order representations that also involve contexts.
The meaning of representations is obtained when they are mapped onto the world.
It is believed we need to run internal representations to bridge the gap between the perceiver and the real world.

According to the social cognition approach we can only know about other people in an indirect way. Persons’ internal states cannot be observed directly and must be inferred from different cues.

Knowing as a representation or correspondence: knowing is viewing from outside, true knowing is theoretical not practical. Cognitive theory continues to identify knowing with practices of abstraction, such as classification, computing, calculation, logical inference. Our ability to interact approprately with objects depends on the capacity, fundamental of human beings, for categorizing objects and storing information about them, thus forming concepts, and on the capacity to associate concepts with names.

All apprehension of objective reality is mediated through subjective existence, ideas forever interpose themselves between the knower and the, objects which he would know.

In cultural psychology the representations are primary, they are situated in social practices rather than in mental models. But what then do these representations re-present?

In social constructivism the realm of socially constructed imposes itself between us and nature and through which we cannot reach the world itself.

For constructivists it is not material world itself what conveys meanings, but the language system or whatever system we are using to represent concepts. Social actors use conceptual systems of their culture and the linguistic and other representational systems to construct meanings and make the world meaningful and to communicate world meaningfully to others. Culture is about shared meanings. Meanings can be shared through our common access to language. Culture emerges from nature as the symbolic representation of the latter.

He suggest that we need to find a place in our theories for the existence of both meaning and mediation before and beyond the realm of representations and symbols, and take their materiality much more seriously. Mediation is taking place in the world and is changing the world, constituting objects not constituted before.

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 (1988) 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 1998)

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 management in organisations

Was reading the book
Knowledge Creation and Management
edited by
Kazuo Ichijo
Ikuijoro Nonaka
Oxoford University Press, 2007

Preface
In 1492-1800, at globalization 1.0 period, enterprises were entering to the global markets. 1800-2000 was the period of globalization 2.0 with global competition of enterprises. Starting from year 2000 globalization 3.0 has started with newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally through knowledge work.

Why do firms differ. The theory of the knowledge-creating firm
by I.Nonaka & R.Toyama
Theories explain that differences between firms originate from imperfections of profit-maximizing like blocked barriers (cannot get certain confidential resources or mobility problems); high cost (too costly to acquire resources, high transaction costs); limited capabilities of managers (firms fall into path dependencies and are ecologically dying out).
Firms differ also because of their management vision (values, commitment of employees) differs, they envision different futures (maximizing profit versus making a good car).

It has been claimed (Teece, 2003) that firms are passive entities in the environment, that take information and produce products and services, but they merely adapt to the environment and never try to shape it. Nonaka and Toyama view firms as dynamic knowledge-creating entities that interact with the environment (an ecosystem of knowledge) reshaping the environment and even itself by creating and intaking knowledge assets and the environment as an ecoystem of knowledge and multilayered ba, through knowledge creation.

The knowledge-based theory of the firm rests on two elements:

1) basic view of human beings (human subjectivity in the company’s information-processing machine is not a noise)
The difference in human subjectivity (how we view the world) in companies helps to create new knowledge. Humans are not replaceable parts of machines. An individual transcends himself/herself through knowledge creation (Nonaka, Toyama, Konno, 2000). In organisational knowledge-creation process, individuals interact with each other to transcend their own boundaries and, as a result change themselves, others, the organisation, and the environment.

2) process of organisational knowledge creation (where knowledge includes values and ideals).
Knowledge-creation theory treats knowledge as fallible and influenced by subjective factors. However, in organisational knowledge-creation this subjective tacit knolwledge, held by individuals, is externalized into objective explicit knowledge to be shared and synthesized within and beyond organisations, and newly created knowledge is, in turn, embodied by individuals to enrich their subjective tacit knowledge. Organisational knowledge-creation is an ongoing social process of validating truth in which knowledge keeps expanding (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).

The firm’s knowledge vision (Why do we exist and do what we do?) inspires organisation members so that they are encouraged to create knowledge and defines a consistent value system to evaluate and justify the created knowledge within the organisation. Firms need the concept/goal/action standard as a driving objective of knowledge-creating process that helps to realize the vision.

Knowledge creation is guided through the synthesis of contradictions (Nonaka & Toyama, 2003) – accepting dualities and synthesizing them through dialectical thinking and action in dialogues. Contradictions that cannot be solved through objective analysis alone can be solved by synthesizing subjective views and intuitions that have accumulated through practice.

A foundation for knowledge-creating activity is ba – a shared context in motion at certain time and space.At ba one can be open to the others by losing oneself, seeing itself in relation to the others, accepting their views and values. The boundary of ba must be permeable so that it can accept new contexts. Ba needs the participation of multiple perspectives.

The ecosystem of knowledge consists of multilayered ba, which exists across organisational boundaries and is continuously evolving. A knowledge-creating firm needs to manage a multilayered ba, which stretches across organisational bondaries. At the same time firm needs to protect its knowledge assets as sources of competitive advantage.

Knowledge assets are not knowledge just created but it also includes social capital that is shared in the organisations. One of the most important knowledge asset is firm-specific kata, a pattern or way of doing things in dialogues and practices. Three steps of kata, creative routines, are: shu (learn), ha (break) and ri (create).

Leadership of knowledge-creating firm requires active commitment from all members of the organisation, not just from elite members using the middle-up-down mechanisms.Middle managers break down the vision or driving objectives, create ba and lead dialogues and practices. Knowledge is the source of power that exist outside the hierarchy of organisation. Leaders provide visions, develop and promote sharing of knowledge assets, energize and connect ba, protect ba from outside contexts so that it can develop in its own contexts according to organisation vision, enable the spiral knowledge creation.

Knowledge in organisational settings.
L.Prusak & L.Weiss
Early knowledge management initiatives collected individual knowledge assets without contextualizing them in team contexts. New view of knowledge management has increased attention to the adding context to content and the group knowledge (opposite to individual knowledge) is made easier to access, secondly the social networks must be made viewable making it easier to find knowledge workers with whom to establish relationships.

Knowledge creation and Transfer. From teams to the whole organisation.
B. Büchel
There are two key measures of social networks that indicate the organisational capabilities and use of social capital: density of networks within teams, and number of external contacts. Performance is more effective if density of networks in group creates cohesive understandings, however, too cohesive groups with stabile perpectives lose effectiveness and are unable to integrate diverse perspectives from external contacts.

Knowledge transfer within organisations
D. Leonard
Transfer is always two-way.
Knowledge assets must be replicated to hold stability within firm, but understanding the core knowledge and practices these assets hold is essential to apply them in situational contexts.
Knowledge assets must be evaluated and changed through reuse in different situations.
Initiating creative fusions to cooperate at multiple levels.
Types of knowledge to be transferred: know-what, know-why, know-how, know-who.
Barriers of knowledge transfer: too rigid or too vague knowledge assets, culturally sticky knowledge (difficult to separate from source), the gap between the initial source and the receiver of knowledge assets.
Transfer is aided if knowledge is made explicit and if there is physical proximity of the knowledge source and the receiver.

Bringing the outside in
M. Mazevski & N. Athanassiou
Knowledge is personal – social networks and social capital.
Relationships may be:
strong/weak: stong relationships are built with the kind of interaction necessary for establishment of shared tacit knowledge, they are characterised by trust
flexible: participants share many areas of knowledge and expertise, they have willingness to share and learn
transferable: transferable relationships can be given to someone else, people are reluctant to transfer strong relationships unless they are aware that new contact is worthy
power: power is the access to resources that are important and scare, powerful relationships provide access to such resources.
satisfying: if needs are fulfilled reciprocally

Human resources management and knowledge creation
M. Osterloch
Creating synergies constitutes collective good that can be used by people who have not contributed their share to its production.
In contrast to manual teamwork, pure knowledge teamwork raises productivity of the team if different knowledge is dispersed among different people (Hayek, 1945).
The result of knowledge teamwork is at least in part new explicit knowledge that can be used by others outside the team.
Knowledge workers in teams have more bargaining power than manual workers do, the people cannot be easily replaced.
Motivation is the key of knowledge work:
- enjoyment based intrinsic motivation: the individual acts as homo ludens (Huizinga, 1986), pleasure is derived from activity itself and not from compensation, flow experience
- prosocial intrinsic motivation takes into account the well-being of others, the welfare of the community, people want to contribute to common good of their community or company
extra-role behaviour: willingness to cooperate, willingness to keep organisational citizenship behaviour (protecting other members if rules are violated)
How to increase intrinsic motivation:
The perception of autonomy decreases if people perceive that their self-determination is reduced when doing intrinsically interesting activity. They feel that they are not the origins of their behaviour.
Feeling of competence grows if individuals understand what they are doing and when they feel responsible for outcome. If people feel that they are competent, they make greater contributions to the community (Kollock, 1998). But individuals must get positive feedback about the outcome of their contributions that does not eclipse their feeling of autonomy. Feedback must be perceived as supporting not controlling. Second, individuals must believe that their participation is important for the provision of the community good. Feedback, whether other members have received and used the contributions, and training possibilities are important. Providing opportunities to personal contacts increases motivation.

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