Accelerating Physical Community Involvement with Online Community Resources
Novel Design Feature Proposal by ErikWJ

Introduction

Knowledge transfer is difficult and consumes a lot of energy (Szulanski, 2000). Joining a new community can be overwhelming because it requires new members to learn procedures, politics, social norms, and to acquire tacit knowledge about the way a physical community operates. Moving and starting a doctoral program can be difficult because it forces new students into unfamiliar territory both intellectual, logistically, and geographic. The more energy that is focused on navigating this territory, the less that can be focused on central behaviors in the program and could lead to longer times through the program, feelings of isolation from the community, and unnecessary stress. This design idea focuses on creating an online community that will assist new students at the School of Information join the current community by accelerating Jean Lave's concepts of legitimate peripheral participation.

Legitimate Peripheral Participation

The term legitimate peripheral participation was introduced in Jean Lave’s piece: Situated Learning in Communities of Practice. Lave argues that real learning is the process that takes place during the transition from, in the authors term’s, a newcomer to an oldtimer. To Lave, the optimal environment of learning is not a classroom, but a community of practice. Lave first examines apprenticeships that offer this alternative cultural point of view of the social process of learning, specifically the Yucatec Mayan midwives.

The Yucatec Mayan Midwife becomes a midwife while learning the craft within an apprenticeship model. During this process of learning, the act of teaching is neither formal nor implied. There is not a day where a skill like prenatal massage is taught, it is simply learned through exposure to the practices and the surrounding context. Apprentices have the opportunities to see the community of practice, in this case, "midwifery", early on and have a broader idea of its scope and essence than just viewing particular tasks in which they are engaged or that are most easily observable. Apprenticeship thus provides an individualized and realistic learning setting. Newcomers absorb the essence of midwifery practice as well as specific knowledge about many procedures, simply in the process of participation in the community. And it is in this process of becoming a master that knowledge and skill develop, not formal training of the skills.

The example of Mayan Midwifery shows the learning process from newcomer to oldtimer that occurs in apprenticeship models. At the School of Information, the Ph.D. program has been constructed as an apprenticeship model between student and advisor. There is the possibility of designing a multi-tiered apprenticeship model that takes advantage of local knowledge of the current Ph.D. students that are already on the path to becoming oldtimers. The next key example that Lave uses is that of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) to show how that in a community of practice the concept of ones identity transforms when actually learning occurs. The main goal of AA is not to teach someone twelve steps on how to stop drinking but to reconstruct the identity in the company of near peers from that of a drinking non-alcoholic to a non-drinking alcoholic.

Lave then uses these points as the model for proper learning and critiques the current systems of learning as the commoditization of learning. The logic is that one can become a master when the product of labors of someone is made for value in their own life. The current western model of learning is that people learns skills not to master them, but to sell them. A person is not a midwife, but a person can perform the duties of a midwife for a price. When people are not learning to find solutions to their own needs a separation occurs and human activity becomes a means rather than an end unto itself. A result is that the possession of a skill is valued separately from the individual. The ability to have a community of practice is no longer ‘efficient’ except in rare situations; grad programs, medicine, and law are examples.

Taking Lave's understand of where knowledge resides suggests that anecdotes and informal information sharing hold useful information that is not available from official documents and existing resources. Participation in the virtual community will develop social and possibly intellectual ties to members in the physical community. These relationships alleviate some stress in moving to a new community, develop trust among future colleagues, and promote for socialization. Feeling that one is an active part of a desired community is normally better than feeling one is outside that same community. Established communities like SI that have regular turnover are dependent on the incorporation of new members. The community is only as strong as its participants and while new member do not feel like part of the community, their participation is limited. This limits the potential value of the site to all the current members. Successful knowledge transfer eases the burden on existing community members.

Design Idea

Defining the project is aided with Preece’s four criteria for an online community:

People: Specifically the Ph.D. students in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, but the masters students will also benefit from this research.

Purpose: The online community is designed to enhance the physical community that it supports. Barriers between the two can be broken down and the advantages of a healthy online community can be realized even though there is the parallel physical community. The advantages include: information on demand, partial anonymity, alternative methods of visualization, relationship development, and more. Currently resources that aid SI students are either distributed across many different sites or are non-existent.

Computer Systems: The online community will begin with a centralized portal application that will be the entry point for all of the available resources. Different types of technology will used to accomplish different goals. As Clark and Brennan (1991) illustrate in their paper, different forms of communication are appropriate for different types of information tasks. Material that is more static can be represented through word documents, personal narratives can take advantage of the blog format, information that changes regularly but created by only one person might be better represented through an updated web site, and information that changes and can be updated by many people can take advantage of the strengths of a wiki.

Policies: the Ph.D. students that want to participate in the research of SIEVE determine the direction of the site. Each student can add their own component of technology that will benefit the SI student community and allow for a researchable question for the student that wants to participate.

Implementation through SIEVE

The title is: SIEVE = Students Information Evaluation, Visualization, and Exploration. This primarily will be for new students coming into the program as a way to increase their sense of belonging into the community and provide the information they can use in a more intuitive fashion. SIEVE is also a student-run incubator for research. The new community will be a test bed for theories about distributed collaboration and development of intellectual communities - a living project taking advantage of participant observation and the accessibility and flexibility of the environment.

The two critical design features of the community are the distributed administration of the design elements for the community and the centralization of currently distributed expertise and knowledge. The online community will provide new avenues for accessing existing information whether it's housed in individuals, digital documents, or social relationships. The community will also build on existing knowledge by exposing redundancies and gaps in information available. The research aspects of the project are itself an instance of a community of practice, training graduate students through active participation within the community. Students working on the project will be increasing the opportunities and needs to work with knowledgeable others resulting in the production of publishable research and useful information technologies. The challenge will be the integration of the different technologies that are utilized and maintaining the motivation of the researchers who are involved.

References

Clark, H.H., & Brennan, S.E. (1991). “Grounding in communication.” In L. Resnick, J. Levine, & S. Teasley (Eds.) Perspectives on socially shared cognition Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, pp. 127-149.

Lave, J. (1991). Situating Learning in Communities of Practice. In L. Resnick, J. Levine, & S. Teasley (Eds.) Perspectives on socially shared cognition Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, pp. 63-82.

Preece2000: Preece, J. (2000). Online communities. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. (What is an online community, pp 5-19).

Szulanski G. (2000) “The process of knowledge transfer: a diachronic analysis of stickiness,” Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 82(1), pp. 9-27.

Discussion

NoorAliHasan: How exactly will this work? Is it something like Ask Metafilter (http://ask.metafilter.com/∞) or the Zephyr help instance or is it more like a wiki - an unofficial guide to SI?

PaulResnick: Beyond the inspiration that there should be an online space that aids legitimate peripheral paricipation, you haven't articulated how any of your design choices are influenced by that goal. What alternative designs have you considered and why do you think some alternatives are better than others at enabling legitimate peripheral participation?