Building Collaborative Knowledge Representations in Real Time
This event took place on Tuesday 05 October 2004 at 12:30
Al Selvin
Software tools for collaborative construction of knowledge representations have existed for several decades. Despite their potential, use of such tools has yet to grow beyond a small universe of academics and practitioners. My research is aimed at expanding this universe by attempting to understand and characterize skilled practice in the facilitation of such representations. Most of the limited work in this area looks at either novices (e.g., learning how to construct such representations), on outcome measures such as participant satisfaction, or on the characteristics of the knowledge artifacts and technologies themselves. I am focusing instead on the "high end" of skilled or expert practice. To do this, I am closely analyzing Camtasia recordings of Compendium sessions and attempting to build a grounded theory analysis of practitioner (facilitator) "moves" in the context of the sessions. This talk reports on the first of these analyses, of a 137-minute Webex and teleconference Compendium session held with a team of scientists participating in the NASA Mobile Agents field trial in May 2004. I analyze 761 facilitator statements and Compendium moves, which were categorized in such terms as degree and kind of engagement, areas of focus, type of move, and other criteria.
Download PowerPoint Presentation (5Mb ZIP file)
Spreadsheet referenced in talk (HTML copy)
Mobile Agents Movie Clip (7.4Mb QuickTime 6 file)
This event took place on Tuesday 05 October 2004 at 12:30
Software tools for collaborative construction of knowledge representations have existed for several decades. Despite their potential, use of such tools has yet to grow beyond a small universe of academics and practitioners. My research is aimed at expanding this universe by attempting to understand and characterize skilled practice in the facilitation of such representations. Most of the limited work in this area looks at either novices (e.g., learning how to construct such representations), on outcome measures such as participant satisfaction, or on the characteristics of the knowledge artifacts and technologies themselves. I am focusing instead on the "high end" of skilled or expert practice. To do this, I am closely analyzing Camtasia recordings of Compendium sessions and attempting to build a grounded theory analysis of practitioner (facilitator) "moves" in the context of the sessions. This talk reports on the first of these analyses, of a 137-minute Webex and teleconference Compendium session held with a team of scientists participating in the NASA Mobile Agents field trial in May 2004. I analyze 761 facilitator statements and Compendium moves, which were categorized in such terms as degree and kind of engagement, areas of focus, type of move, and other criteria.
Download PowerPoint Presentation (5Mb ZIP file)
Spreadsheet referenced in talk (HTML copy)
Mobile Agents Movie Clip (7.4Mb QuickTime 6 file)
Future Internet
KnowledgeManagementMultimedia &
Information SystemsNarrative
HypermediaNew Media SystemsSemantic Web &
Knowledge ServicesSocial Software
Social Software is...

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.
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