Privacy should be carefully protected and
extended.
•
Democratic policy
making: The public should be fully
involved in policy making for the information
infrastructure.
OCR for page 377
Page 377
CPSR added one more principle based on its members' experiences
as designers and users of networking systems:
•
Functional integrity:
The functions provided by the NII must be powerful,
versatile, well documented, stable, reliable, and
extendable.
These guidelines provide a framework for discussion that is just
as relevant today as in 1993. Since 1993, local, state, and
national legislation and commercial development have eroded many of
these principles-recent examples being the Telecommunications
Reform Act of 1996, Washington State's Harmful to Minors Bill, and
the city of Tacoma's tax on Internet service providers. We have
also witnessed the explosive growth of the Internet. These
developments, combined with CPSR's experiences and observations
with community technology projects, such as the Seattle Community
Network and Virtually Wired, have given us additional insights into
what "public interest" really means.
Every-Citizen's Access-"Infoutopia"
Versus Reality
Since Vice President Al Gore's introduction of the term
information highway into our vocabulary during the 1992
campaign, private, public, and commercial organizations have been
speculating about what the infoway might look like and how it will
be used. Creative scenario builders, science fiction writers, and
even successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates have painted visions
of a "wired" future. But all of these scenarios make one underlying
assumption-that the technology will be available (i.e., affordable
and accessible) for all who want to participate.
Gary Chapman, director of the 21st Century Project, in a 1996
article in CIO magazine, cautioned information executives
that chief information officers in public services must ensure that
information technologies will be the cutting edge and not the
cutting wedge of social progress. Chapman noted that computer use,
particularly Internet use, in poor households (annual incomes of
less than $10,000) is almost nonexistent. At the same time,
public-sector organizations are being pressured to develop on-line
systems that are available to the public over the "Net."
The State of Washington has been struggling with this type of
pressure. In response to public demand and expectations, state
agencies were already putting information on the Web and trying to
grapple with the impact of maintaining an "additional" mode of
dissemination, not a replacement for an existing process. A
governor's task force on electronic public information access was
legislated to make policy recommendations to assist state agencies
in transitioning to the information age. One
OCR for page 378
Page 378
of the major issues facing these agencies is the cost of making
the information available electronically.
In his article Chapman suggests that a partial solution to the
problem of creating a society of information haves and have-nots is
to focus more attention on funding and supporting community
computing projects that make technology more affordable and
accessible. For the past few years, CPSR members, in various
locations around the country, have been involved in projects that
focus on making technology available to everyone.
Community Computing-Public Access To
Cyberspace
Douglas Schuler (1996), former chair of CPSR, in his new book,
New Community Networks: Wired for Change, discusses two
forms of access to community computing resources: community
networks and community computing centers. In 1992, CPSR/Seattle
started a community network for the Seattle area. One of the
purposes of the project was to implement an on-line service that
was grounded in principles that the organization believed in-thus
the formation of the Seattle Community Network (SCN). It is no
coincidence that the policy and principles that govern SCN are
similar to the CPSR guidelines introduced at the beginning of this
paper. The SCN principles are as follows:
•
Commitment to access,
•
Commitment to service,
•
Commitment to democracy,
•
Commitment to the world community,
•
Commitment to the future.
In addition, SCN developed a policy statement as the underlying
governing framework. The high-level guidelines for network users
are:
•
Free speech: SCN is committed to maintaining free
speech rights for all participants.
•
Free access: SCN is committed to maintaining free
access to information for all participants.
•
Right to privacy: SCN is committed to maintaining
the privacy of individuals.
•
Due process: SCN is committed to maintaining the
right to due process of individual users of the network.
SCN is just one of over 200 community network projects in the
country, most providing free or very low-cost access to on-line
services to communities. SCN provides e-mail, discussion forums,
newsgroups, and
OCR for page 379
Page 379
Web services to anybody who fills out a registration form. The
SCN system is available through terminals in all branches of the
Seattle and King County public library system.
However, availability of on-line services is only half of the
equation of making technology accessible and affordable. Access to
the hardware that is needed to connect to any on-line service is
the other half. This is where community computing centers are
filling a societal need. In several American cities people are
making computing resources available to the public in community
centers, schools, housing projects, and Internet cafes. Often these
resources are available to the general public at little or no cost.
Projects such as Virtually Wired in Boston, Plugged In in East Palo
Alto, and Playing to Win centers across the country provide a
communal space where people can learn computer skills and explore
the resources of the Internet and World Wide Web.
Insights
Many lessons have been learned from observing and participating
in making computing resources available to a large and diverse
group of people. For example, gender balance is possible in the
on-line community. When the SCN project started in 1992, the
commercial on-line service subscribers were mostly males (at least
85 percent) and Caucasian. From the very beginning, SCN has managed
to attract an almost 50-50 mix of male and female volunteers and
participants. In 1993-1994, as SCN was doing its initial community
outreach, entire families would attend meetings on how to become
information providers. Early participants included the Older
Women's League, the Seattle Folklore Society, and the Seattle
Philharmonic.
Nontechnical people were enthusiastic about the SCN project.
Unlike other on-line services, SCN was community focused; it
provided a low-cost, low-threat way for people and organizations to
be information providers and users. Educators, environmentalists,
and librarians were SCN's earliest and strongest supporters, even
in the days before the World Wide Web and Mosaic. Like other
on-line services, SCN provides popular services like e-mail, forum
newsgroups, and Web access-through Lynx. Because SCN tries to be
sensitive to the lowest common denominator with respect to Web
access, all information providers are strongly encouraged to design
their pages for a graphics or a character-based browser. This is an
important design consideration when creating Web pages for a wide
range of people.
Coralee Whitcomb, director of Virtually Wired, in a recent
discussion, shared her requirements for community computing. These
include free e-mail for everyone; a stable interface (something
that lasts more than 6
OCR for page 380
Page 380
months); topic-focused search engines organized around specific
areas (commercial, government, public sector, health care,
nonprofits, medical research hospitals); public access centers
(e.g., Washington Information Network kiosks located in public
spaces throughout Washington State) containing on-line government
information (including committee reports and campaign finances)
that are as common as public pay phones and free on-line services
to schools with the schools given controlled freedom to resell it,
thereby providing some financial support for a community computing
center.
Participating in these projects has also created indirect
benefits that are not purely related to the services being offered.
SCN has been the training ground for many unemployed volunteers who
have later gone on to find jobs in the computing industry. Whitcomb
also made the following points:
1. Never underestimate peoples' need for other
people. We don't take to on-line help and waiting on hold,
especially those who have put off learning about this stuff. 2.
Public access [and] community networking are doing the marketing
dirty work that industry doesn't want to do. We're the ones drawing
in the reluctant, fearful, non-English speakers, disabled, poor,
slow, you name it-they can't be bothered. Without us there will be
no universality in this technology because industry will not do
what it takes to truly distribute it. 3. People are extremely
giving, especially computer geeks. Virtually Wired's most important
role is providing socially disabled, homeless, recovering addicts,
lonely hearts, real community with real people. None of our
volunteers have any money and they have terrific talent, yet they
give away their talent to have a place ''where everybody knows
their name." 4. Computing can be terrifically social. Sharing,
tutoring, and just sitting next to each other is a good feeling.
Some use basketball courts; others use public access. Midnight
computing is a good idea (like midnight basketball). 5. Experience
is worth a thousand words. No amount of hype will develop the
context most of us need to invest in a computer and ISP [Internet
service provider] without a solid reason. Public access places can
provide the key experience to let people decide whether it is for
them or not. 6. Public access can help develop an appreciation for
the many noncommercial uses of the Net. We are going to have a big
campaign democracy theme happening this fall, so people will become
aware of the potential for citizenship.
Conclusion
Looking back on the CPSR principles that were articulated in
1993 and our experiences since then with the public at large, it
appears that many of them have been validated. Providing available
computing and a
OCR for page 381
Page 381
forum where everybody can be both a consumer and a producer of
information is an essential component of a free society.
References And Further Reading
Chapman, Gary. 1996. "No Cover, No Minimum," CIO,
July.
Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility (CPSR). 1993. Serving the Community: A Public
Interest Vision of the National Information Infrastructure.
Miller, Steven. 1996. Civilizing
Cyberspace-Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway. ACM
Press, New York.
Schuler, Douglas. 1996. New Community
Networks: Wired for Change. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
OCR for page 382
Page 382
Lifelong Learning
Gerhard Fischer
University of Colorado, Boulder
A Ubiquitous Goal
Lifelong learning has emerged as one of the major challenges for
the knowledge society of the future. This challenge is recognized
by the international community as a variety of recent events
indicate: (1) 1996 was the European Year of Lifelong Learning; (2)
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization) has included lifetime education as one of the key
issues in its planning; and (3) the G7 group of countries has named
lifelong learning as a main strategy in the fight against
unemployment. Despite this great interest, there are few
encompassing efforts to tackle the problem in a coherent way.
Lifelong learning cannot be investigated in isolation by looking at
one small part of it, for example, K-12 education, university
education, or worker reeducation.
Learning As A New Form Of Labor
The previous notions of a divided lifetime-education followed by
work-are no longer tenable. Learning can no longer be dichotomized,
spatially and temporally, into a place and time to acquire
knowledge (school) and a place and time to apply knowledge
(the workplace). Professional activity has become so
knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become
an integral and inseparable part of adult work activities.
Professional work cannot simply proceed from a fixed educational
background; rather, education must be smoothly incorporated as part
of work activities. Similarly, children require educational tools
and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire
to learn and create, and not simply to communicate subject matter
divorced from meaningful and personalized activity.
Lifelong learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring and
applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic,
self-directed problems. It is applicable to the educational
experience of both children and adults; it brings the child's
experience closer to meaningful and personalized work, and it
brings the adult's experience closer to one of continued growth and
exploration. Lifelong learning is grounded in descriptive and
OCR for page 383
Page 383
prescriptive goals such as the following: (1) learning should
take place in the context of authentic, complex problems (because
learning is more effective when people understand its impact); (2)
learning should be embedded in the pursuit of intrinsically
rewarding activities; (3) learning on demand needs to be supported
because change is inevitable, complete coverage of relevant
information and knowledge is impossible, and obsolescence of
acquired skills and knowledge is unavoidable; (4) organizational
and collaborative learning must be supported because the individual
human mind is limited; and (5) skills and processes that support
learning as a lifetime habit must be developed.
Design
Lifelong learning integrates and mutually enriches the cultures
of work and education. Central to this vision in our own research
is the notion of design activities, a model of work that is
open-ended and long term in nature, incorporates personalized and
collaborative aspects, and combines technical and aesthetic
elements. Design (as practiced by engineers and architects
designing infrastructure and buildings, lawyers designing briefs
and cases, politicians designing policies and programs, educators
designing curricula and courses, and software engineers designing
computer programs) is an argumentative process, involving ongoing
negotiations and trade-offs. It is also a collaborative process,
making increasing use of new social structures brought about by the
advent of computer networks and "virtual communities." The
communality that binds design activities together is that they are
centered around the production of a new, publicly accessible
artifact. It is impossible for design processes to account for
every aspect that might affect the artifact designed. Therefore,
design must be treated as an evolutionary process in which
designers continue to learn new things as the process unfolds, new
requirements surface, and technologies change.
Rethinking, Reinventing, And
Reengineering Education
A deeper understanding and more effective support for lifelong
learning will contribute to the transformation that must occur in
the way our society works and learns. Investments in information
technology have so far produced disappointing results because both
industry and education tend to use these technologies simply as
support mechanisms for existing practices rather than as vehicles
to promote fundamentally new ways to create artifacts and construct
knowledge. A major finding in current business reengineering
efforts is that the use of information technology
OCR for page 384
Page 384
has had disappointing results compared to the investments made
in it. Although a detailed causal analysis of these findings is
difficult to obtain, it is generally agreed that a major reason is
the fact that information technologies have been used to mechanize
old ways of doing business rather than fundamentally rethinking the
underlying work processes.
We claim that a similar argument can be made for current uses of
technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing
practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what
education should be about in the next century. As an example, the
"innovation" of making transparencies available on the World Wide
Web rather than distributing paper copies of them in class takes
advantage of the Web as an electronic information medium, but
contributes little in the way of introducing new epistemologies.
Old frameworks of education do not get changed by using technology
in a "gift-wrapping" approach where traditional instructionist,
fixed-curriculum, decontextualized, rote learning is "wrapped" with
new technologies such as computer-based training, intelligent
tutoring systems, multimedia presentations, or the World Wide Web.
We need computational environments to support ''new" frameworks for
education such as lifelong learning, the integration of working and
learning, learning on demand, authentic problems, self-directed
learning, information contextualized to the task at hand,
(intrinsic) motivation, collaborative learning, and organizational
learning.
Myths And Misconceptions
The current debate about the ability of computation and
communication to change education fundamentally is (in our opinion)
based on a number of basic myths and misconceptions. The most
prevalent of these are the following:
•
Computers by themselves will
change education.
There is no empirical evidence for
this assumption based on the past 30 years of using computers to
change education (e.g., computer-assisted instruction,
computer-based training, intelligent tutoring systems). Technology
is not a "deus ex machina" that can solve the existing problems of
education. Traditional, instructionist approaches are not changed
by the fact that information is disseminated by an intelligent
tutoring system.
•
Information is a scarce
resource. "Dumping" even more
decontextualized information on people does not seem to be a big
step forward in a world where people already suffer from
information overload. Instead, technology should provide ways to
say the right thing at the right time in the right way.
•
The content, value, and quality
of information and knowledge are improved
OCR for page 385
Page 385
simply because information is
offered in multimedia or over the Web.
Media alone do not turn irrelevant or erroneous information into
more relevant information. We must create innovative technologies
(e.g., design environments, simulations, visualizations,
critiquing) to let people experience knowledge in new
ways.
•
Ease of use is the greatest
challenge or the most desirable goal for new
technologies. Usable technologies that do
not serve the needs and concerns of people are of no value. Rather
than assuming that people should and will be able to do everything
without a substantial learning effort, we should design
computational environments that offer a low threshold for beginners
to get started and a high ceiling for skilled users to do the
things they want.
•
The myth of the Nobel Prize
winner-one of the earlier arguments in
support of the information superhighway was that every school child
would have access to a Nobel Prize winner. Although this argument
is true (or soon will be) at the level of technical connectivity,
it is hard to imagine that Nobel Prize winners will look forward to
getting a few thousand e-mail messages a day.
•
The single or most important
objective of computational media is reducing the cost of
education. Although we should not ignore
any opportunity to use technology to lower the cost of education,
we should not lose sight of an objective that is of equal if not
greater importance: increasing the quality of education.
•
Human learning is equal to
machine learning. Although we have
deepened our understanding of human learning through progress in
machine learning, there are fundamental dimensions, such as
motivation and competing requirements for a person's time, that
make human learning a much more complex and interwoven activity
than machine learning. There is substantial empirical evidence that
the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive. It is not that
students cannot learn; it is that they do not wish to.
Challenges
Making learning a part of life creates many challenges,
requiring creative new approaches and collaboration between many
different stakeholders. For illustration, a few of them are
mentioned here:
1.
The educated and informed citizen of the future: "super-couch
potato" consumers or enlightened designers? The major
innovation that many powerful interest groups push for with the
information superhighway is to have a future in which everyone can
demonstrate creativity and engagement by selecting one of at least
500 television channels with a remote
OCR for page 386
Page 386
control. The major technical challenge derived
from this perspective becomes the design of a user-friendly remote
control. Rather than serving as the "reproductive organ of a
consumer society" (Ivan Illich), educational institutions must
fight this trend by cultivating "designers," that is, by creating
mind-sets and habits that help people become empowered and willing
to contribute actively to the design of their lives and
communities. This goal creates specific challenges for
computational artifacts, such as the support of end-user
programming and authoring.
2.
The "basic skills" debate. If the hypothesis that most
job-relevant knowledge must be learned on demand is true, we must
ask ourselves the question: What is the role of "basic skills"? For
example, if the use of software packages dominates the use of
mathematics in the workplace, shouldn't a new function of
mathematics education be to have students learn to use these
mathematical artifacts intelligently? Another important challenge
is that the old basic skills such as reading, writing, and
arithmetic, once acquired, were relevant for the duration of a
human life; modern basic skills (tied to rapidly changing
technologies) will change over time.
3.
Can we affect motivation? As mentioned above, there is
substantial empirical evidence indicating that the chief
impediments to learning are not cognitive but motivational. This
raises the challenge of creating learning environments in which
learners will work hard, not because they have to but
because they want to. We need to alter the perception that
serious learning must be unpleasant rather than personally
meaningful, empowering, engaging, and fun. Our research has
developed computational environments that address these
motivational issues; for example, systems have explored making
information relevant to the task at hand, providing challenges
matched to current skills, creating communities (among peers, over
the Internet), and providing collaborative access to real
practitioners and experts.
4.
School-to-work transition. If the world of working and
living relies on (a) collaboration, creativity, definition, and
framing of problems; (b) dealing with uncertainty, change, and
distributed cognition; (c) coping with distributed knowledge; and
(d) augmenting and empowering humans with powerful technological
tools, then schools and universities should prepare students to
function in this world. Industrial-age models of education and work
(e.g., based on Skinner and Taylor) are inadequate to prepare
students to compete in the knowledge-based workplace. A major
objective of the lifelong learning approach is to reduce the gap
between school and workplace learning. Current research addresses
some of the major school-to-work transition problems and develops
answers to the following questions:
OCR for page 387
Page 387
•
How can schools prepare learners and workers for a
world that relies on an interdependent, distributed,
nonhierarchical information flow and rapidly shifting authority
based on complementary knowledge?
•
What basic skills are required in a world in which
occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather
than decades?
•
How can schools (which currently rely on
closed-book exams, the solving of given problems, etc.) be changed
so that learners are prepared to function in environments requiring
collaboration, creativity, problem framing, and distributed
cognition?
•
To what extent will lifelong learning and new
approaches to learning and teaching-such as learning on demand,
learning while working, relations, and the involvement of
professionals in schools-prepare learners for work?
Lifelong Learning: An Impetus For
Designing Every-Citizen Interfaces
There is general agreement that as we approach the next century
and next millennium, our society is changing to a knowledge and
information society. There will be new opportunities and new
challenges in all dimensions of our lives. But the future is not
out there to be discovered: it has to be invented and
designed. Making learning a part of life and the implications
this has for how, under the influence of new media, human beings
will think, create, work, learn, and collaborate in the future are
major considerations for the design of every-citizen interfaces to
the national information infrastructure (NII). Although the
technologies surrounding the NII are important, we should not
forget that they are means to ends and that we need to develop a
deep understanding of these ends.
Further Information
Background information about the ideas articulated in this
position paper can be found on the World Wide Web:
1.
About the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design (L3D) at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, and its research activities:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/˜13d/
2.
A slide show of a presentation to the National Science
Foundation about lifelong learning:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/˜13d/presentations/gf-nsf-9.95/
OCR for page 388
Page 388
3.
About Agentsheets, a computational substrate to support the
development of design environments, simulations, and
visualizations:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/˜13d/systems/agentsheets/
4.
About the Agentsheets Remote Explorium, an environment to turn
the Web from an information dissemination medium into a
collaboration medium:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/˜13d/systems/remote-explorium/
5.
AboutWebquest, a system that exploits the Web with interactive
learning games:
•
About the system itself:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/˜corrina/mud/
•
A paper describing the system:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/˜corrina/WebQuest/
6.
About "SimCity in 10 Minutes" describing the philosophy of the
Center for Lifelong Learning and Design on end-user programming:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/˜corrina/simcity/
OCR for page 389
Page 389
Supporting Learning In Communities Of
Practice
Charles Cleary
Northwestern University
Lifelong Learning: A Key Function For
The National Information Infrastructure
The National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIIAC,
1995) has identified education, particularly, lifelong learning, as
one of five key areas requiring attention in the development of the
NII. Although the NIIAC does not argue for its focus on lifelong
learning, the case for the importance of lifelong learning is now
familiar to most education researchers:
•
The range of skills and knowledge that individuals
now need for satisfying, productive lives is so broad and
unpredictable that we can no longer hope to teach them all they
need during the traditional school years.
•
Many types of technical knowledge have but short
half-lives, so individuals need to continually reeducate themselves
if they are to keep current.
•
Individuals change careers increasingly often,
and, when they do, they frequently need to augment or rebuild their
skills base.
•
Learning is increasingly intertwined with
"regular" work, as individuals and organizations see continual
improvement as an integral part of doing work.
•
Learning is fun and so people wish to continue learning even after the
traditional school years end.
In short, the need to support lifelong learning is well
established, but the mechanisms for doing so are less well defined.
This position paper addresses the question: How can we apply the
NII to foster lifelong learning?
Communities Of Practice As Communities
Of Learning
To support learning we must begin by considering how people
learn most effectively. For instance, consider these four themes
from recent educational research:
OCR for page 390
Page 390
•
Motivation is
critical. Learning is most effective when
learners are able to pursue challenges they care about.
•
Transfer is hard. It is easiest for people to apply what they learn when
they learn it in a context like that in which they will need to
apply it. Traditional "teach-em-and-test-em" methods of teaching
often lead to inert knowledge.
•
Skills are more important than
facts. A good speechmaker must command
both impressive writing skills and broad factual knowledge. But
skills are harder to acquire than facts. So people are more often
concerned with learning how
(e.g., how to draft a speech) than learning
that (e.g., that George
Washington was the first president). To learn skills, people must
practice them (learning by doing).
•
Support is
essential. People learn to do complex
tasks best when they receive coaching. People are ready to learn
when they have tried something out and have failed. But they need
advice to help them understand why they failed and to determine how
to improve their performance.
These themes point out that people learn most readily when they
care about what they are learning, when they try to solve problems
in realistic contexts, and when they have access to coaching when
they get stuck. Although these constraints may not be satisfied
very often within the walls of today's schools, they are
satisfied in many situations outside school. In particular, they
are satisfied when people who share an interest in a domain support
each other in advancing their learning. Such groups, which have
been labeled communities of practice, are quite common. From
a group of engineers who are concerned with similar problems to an
investment club to a swimming team, people often join together in
communities of practice.
Communities of practice can provide fertile support to help
individuals learn throughout their lifetimes. As an example,
consider a group interested in fostering literacy. Such a group can
help with motivation. A college student who thinks he may
want to dedicate his career to increasing literacy levels can sit
in on a few events that the literacy group sponsors to make sure
that the field matches his expectations before he commits to it.
The group can help with skill building. The literacy group
can enable the college student to engage in real tasks (e.g.,
helping run reading groups) and work on real problems (e.g.,
selecting appropriate material for a particular reading student).
Both the group and the college student benefit. Furthermore,
communities of practice also often provide established routes for
scaffolding learning, whereby new members begin with simple tasks
and work their way up to expert-level tasks. Finally, the group can
also help with coaching. If the college student runs into
trouble when he tries to find appropriate reading materials, he can
turn to the literacy group for advice from a senior member.
OCR for page 391
Page 391
Communities of practice can also serve as engines for advancing
group learning. An organization learns most effectively when it can
harness the experiences and energy of all of its members. Often the
learning cycle begins with the most junior members in a group. For
instance, when a new member asks a question that the group cannot
readily answer, then the group learns of a need for new learning.
When the group works to develop an answer, the group advances its
theory of its domain. When someone later tries out that answer and
finds a wrinkle in it, the cycle begins again. Acting alone, the
members of the community will run into only a few problems and be
able to generate a few potential answers. When they join in a
group, the members can leverage each other's specific experiences
to build significantly more powerful understandings of their
domain.
Given that communities of practice provide an effective and
relatively widespread mechanism for supporting lifelong learning,
it is not surprising that the NIIAC links them together in its
report (NIIAC, 1995):
By providing people of all ages with
opportunities for lifelong learning and workplace skills
development, the NII should enhance each individual's ability to
create and share knowledge and to participate in electronic
communities of learning.
Still, the question remains: How can we apply the NII to
support communities of practice?
An Approach To Supporting Communities
Of Practice
Communities of practice can effectively support both individual
and group learning. For a community to operate smoothly, it
requires frequent and flexible communication between its members.
Furthermore, if a group is to grow to significant size, it requires
some way to leverage the experience of its thought leaders, so that
they do not become overwhelmed with demands for coaching. Because
of these constraints, few communities of practice function
effectively today if they contain more than a few dozen members or
members who are geographically separated.
The foundation provided by the NII can potentially enable
members of a community to communicate across the boundaries of
space or time. However, this potential is yet to be realized. To
effectively support communities of practice, improved applications
must be developed that will run on top of the NII.
What sorts of applications are these? As an example case,
imagine that an independent business consultant would like to learn
how to better diagnose a client's problem. He is a member of a
geographically dispersed
OCR for page 392
Page 392
group of independent consultants. What sorts of applications can
be provided that will help the consultant take advantage of the
resources of the group (and that will help the group develop
resources that are worth taking advantage of)?
Three separate classes of applications are needed. The most
fundamental is that groups require organizational memories
to keep track of what their goals are, what they know, and what
they would like to learn. As a simple example, the business
consultant might tap into a "memory" of business cases to search
for one that is similar to his client's. However, organizational
memories alone are not sufficient because too often the knowledge
they contain lies inert. Accordingly, groups also require two
classes of applications that actively deliver knowledge to the
point of need. First, groups require performance support
tools that help users perform tasks effectively. For instance,
the consultant could make good use of a performance support tool
that leads him through the process of making an effective
diagnosis, feeding him appropriate advice or factual content from
the group's organizational memory as it becomes relevant.
Additionally, groups require training systems that enable
individuals to learn how to perform tasks in a safe environment.
For example, once the consultant makes his diagnosis, he could
benefit from a training simulation that helps him learn how to
position his recommendations to his client in his final
presentation. Again, these training systems will rely on the
knowledge contained in the organizational memory, both for raw case
material and for coaching knowledge about how to respond to common
failures or queries.
Organizational Memories
The most straightforward function of a group's memory is to help
members of the group publish their expertise to each other and to
"outsiders." If my brother-in-law happens to be an expert investor
and I wish to know how to allocate my retirement funds, it would be
reasonable for me to want some advice from him. However, the
problem arises that 15 other people ask for the same advice in the
same week, particularly if he is a member of a large investment
club. People who develop a specialty do not want to have to answer
the same questions time and again. Instead, they require some
mechanism for publishing what they know. Unfortunately, current
media are not particularly effective at publishing large bodies of
complex interrelated knowledge. So we require improved group
memories that provide more effective mechanisms for publishing
knowledge.
Additionally, organizational memories should be dynamic,
changing as the group modifies and expands on its ideas.
Organizational memories
OCR for page 393
Page 393
should help groups keep track of what their goals are, what they
know, and what they would like to learn. Current systems are not
particularly effective at helping communities develop new knowledge
(or capture the new knowledge they do develop). When a novice asks
a question for which the community has not yet developed an answer,
what should happen? The question should be posted and perhaps
routed to those who have an interest in (or responsibility for)
developing an answer. These people must develop their opinions,
perhaps collaboratively. Differences in opinions must be ironed out
or at least understood. The results of this discussion need to be
captured in a form that makes it readily available, as needed, to
those who later develop a need that it can address.
Today, applications such as e-mail and usenet news support some
of the functions required to support knowledge building. However,
the hard problem is integrating all of these functions,
particularly those having to do with capturing the results of
discussions, thereby helping groups to pull together a consensus
point of view from a collection of disparate opinions. Complicating
this task is the observation that the same piece of content may be
relevant in quite different situations (e.g., a counter-example to
someone making a claim, a piece of advice to someone facing a
problem, an illustration to someone asking a question). To build
dynamic memories, the indexing problem-determining how to
label content so that it can be retrieved in the range of
situations in which it will be relevant-must be tackled.
Performance Support
Members of a community of practice rely on each other for
support and advice as they perform their work. However, it is not
always possible to access the right expert at the right time.
Accordingly, we require performance support tools that help members
tap into a community's organizational memory. This support can take
a range of forms, including providing cases that are similar to the
situation in which a user finds him-or herself, abstract templates
for how to perform a task, and automated tools that actually
perform the task for a user.
When a person tries to leverage each of these types of support,
he or she is likely to have a range of sorts of questions. For
example, someone who is trying to find a case in a performance
support system might want to ask questions such as:
•
"How should I go about choosing a case?"
•
"What mistakes am I likely to make?"
•
"Who can help me understand if I have chosen an
appropriate case?"
OCR for page 394
Page 394
If a performance support system only provides raw content (e.g.,
cases) and does not also answers such questions, it is likely to
leave some users confused about how to apply the content that it
does provide. Accordingly, performance support tools should not
only provide raw content, they should also allow their users to ask
a range of types of questions about that content.
Simulation-Based Training
People learn by doing. For instance, to become a good investor,
one must do a lot of investing. But investing is a risky business.
So it is best to practice in a safe, controlled environment, one
that allows effective coaching to be delivered as it is required.
Simulation-based training environments can allow people to learn by
doing without the risk of catastrophic failure.
More generally, it is often easiest to explain what a domain is
about to prospective members of a community by letting them try
completing a task in the domain. Similarly, it is often easiest to
help existing members learn new skills by allowing them to have a
go at them. Since performing tasks in the real world is often
expensive and does not permit adequate coaching, giving members
simulated experiences is a sensible approach.
However, good simulations require good content. A simulation
builder must identify which tasks are important to simulate,
what case material may be used as grist for the simulation,
what errors users are likely to make, and what
coaching is appropriate to deliver when those errors occur.
Importantly, this is the same type of content that an effective
organizational material should provide.
The Nii's Role
The NII can, in theory, help those with similar interests work
together, even though they may be separated by barriers of space
and time. This potential, if realized, promises to revamp how we as
individuals learn throughout our lifetimes and how we as a society
grow our capabilities. However, to realize this potential, we must
move beyond general goals to a specification of the types of
applications we desire the NII to support. Only then can we create
the particular research agendas needed to develop these
applications.
Reference
NIIAC. 1995. Common Ground: Fundamental
Principles for the National Information Infrastructure. First
Report of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council.
March.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
information infrastructure
Items in cart [0]
