The Canterbury Tertiary Alliance has developed a set of Qualifications in Applied e-Teaching and Support. The core courses are taught online in site supported by Interact from the Christchurch College of Education.
The team involved in the project have already developed a vibrant online community among themselves and the participants in the pilot for one of the courses. Their aim is to continue to develop this community of practice, research and learning around the qualifications.
Yesterday I attended a presentation at CORE of the Review of the recently completed T4T4T project. This was a research-oriented pilot of online community of practice for teaching staff at the four major tertiary institutions in Canterbury.
It is encouraging to see the extent to which online collaboration is being embraced in this sector and the richness of the learning gained through this pilot. I recommend reading the review when it is released.
Some questions emerge for me.
While T4T4T clearly shows that it is possible to increase the opportunity for participation among tertiary teaching staff, it seems that the motivation to do so remains at best variable. The increasing incentives for the NZ tertiary sector to focus on research does little to encourage it. What can be done to develop a culture of development in teaching and learning in this area? One idea raised at yesterday’s meeting is encourage research into subject-specific teaching.
The pilot also shows that there is some interest in teaching and learning among tertiary staff. I would be interested to hear of any research as to what these folks are doing already to act on that interest. If we are to invest in encouraging this, would we be better to create new communities or to encourage and teach people to join ones that are already there – or simply to start their own?
Imagine a world where flywheels were just as hard to get started as they are in our world but where, once they got started, they get faster by themselves.
This is what culture change is like. If you get it right, once a certain point is reached, it just gets faster by itself.
This gets called critical mass. Unfortunately, that term technically applies to nuclear reactions.
I expect that JL Moreno would have agreed that he was concerned with:
the collective value of all “social networks” [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other ["norms of reciprocity"]
This is the definition of “Social Capital” from the website for Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s 2000 investigation of social capital trends in US society.
It accurately describes the business that GroupSense is in.
This infovis article on Collaborative Filtering provides a good summary of various approaches to ACF and concludes that :
“Memory Based algorithms outperform the others in yield and quality of preference prediction. It turns out, on the other hand, that they are the most conceptually simple and the easiest to implement, too.”
Effectively, if you have enough data about people’s preferences, you can predict someone’s preference for an object they haven’t rated from how the object is rated by other people who have similar preference profiles.
People who like what you like (your “taste buddies” in Walter Logeman’s words), also like this.
Psychodrama and Sociometry contribute significantly to the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of GroupSense online collaboration services. More than that, though, they provide the vision and inspiration for this work of increasing collaboration in social systems.
JL Moreno’s goal was the maximum spontaneous participation of every individual concerned in the groups in which they live.
This excerpt from Moreno’s writing is as applicable to work, learning and knowledge-sharing groups as to any:
“…we have to consider every individual in [their] concreteness and not as a symbol, and every relationship [they may] have…. we cannot gain a full knowledge unless every individual participates spontaneously in uncovering these relationships to the best of [their] ability. The problem is how to elicit from every [person their] maximum spontaneous participation. … how to motivate [people] so that they all will give repeatedly and regularly, not only at one time or another, their maximum spontaneous participation.”
Thanks for this quote to Sara Crane, President of the Canterbury Westaland Branch of the Australain New Zealand Psychodrama Association.
I have been a member of NZKM for over a year now. I attended a worthwhile event they held where Larry Prusak presented.
There is also a small informal chapter forming in Christchurch (catalysed by Julian Carver of Seradigm).
I’ve just signed up on the website of the NZ KM Society, an Auckland-based network of KM practitioners.