Team 2
Team 2 – Many Eyes
Update of Did You Know?
Team 2 posted some great videos for this week (thanks!), and I wanted to add by posting an updated version of the Did You Know? video.
Team 2 Community Building and Shift in Communication Practices
This week’s readings lead us to shape our discussion about the relationship between building communities and the role of conversations. The introduction to Cluetrain Manifesto (CM) provided a strong outlook as to how natural human conversations are shaping the markets (instead of the other way around) and shifting in business trends as consumers, employees and people are breaking down the “power structures and senseless bureaucracies”. When companies open themselves to these conversations and look at these new marketplaces, they will start to look at problem solving differently. “The World Wide Web reinforces freedom. The Internet routes around obstacles”. Yet, many companies “fear these changes, seeing in them only a devastating loss of control”. The CM provides forewarning to corporations to shift and pay heed to how they can benefit from these conversations to better serve the new markets. We look forward to further readings from the manifesto as we look at community building and the relationship to social, economic and education concerns.
Wenger’s article on communities of practices is relevant to the discussion of human interactions and world change. As people continually relate together in a shared practice, they form a community of practice. These practices include but are not limited to common language, tools, rules, implicit relations, perceptions, and world views. One purpose or result of a community of practice is to create/discover meaning. Meaning is derived from both historical roots (what a thing has traditionally meant) and new, living, in-the-moment roots (what it means right now). Wenger uses the phrase “negotiation of meaning” to connote the idea of human participation in finding meaning as well as the idea of deliberate effort and readjustment. But it is not only the human agent who contributes to creating/finding meaning. The object or situation itself contributes meaning, too.
This is why Wenger develops two sides of the meaning coin: participation and reification. Participation is what people mutually bring to a situation to ascribe it meaning. It involves all sorts of relations, bad and good. Participation transforms individual contributors, but it also transforms the community as a whole. Reification, on the other hand, is the meaning given to our situations and experiences through the formation of a single representation. Reification can simplify activities, but it can also be taken too literally. Both reification and participation exist in any situation in which communities of practice try to discover meaning, and they compensate for each others’ weaknesses.
This week, in order to enhance the conversation of our team’s postings we have included three videos that touch upon the social media revolution of the web and the impact on community building. The content of these videos also touch upon identity and language which have been relevant in shaping our discussions for the past few weeks.
Social Media Revolution
Did you know 2.0
Communities of Practice
Team2- Week3- Design
Pea’s article focuses on the notion of the renunciation of intelligence as singularly contributed by the individual agent and as a merely accomplished, but rather constructed by people in action and socially constructed. He states that “through collaborative efforts towards shared objectives or by dialogues and challenges brought about in persons’ different perspectives.(P.48)” , which supports that “distributed intelligence” is a kind of socially collaborative, constructed knowledge . In addition, Pea mentions that environments in which “humans lives are thick with invented artifacts that are in constant use for structuring activity, for saving mental work and avoiding error”, yet the invention, development and integration of these “artifacts” have forced us to adapt and engage in new learning situations that open the range of understanding and knowledge building, both individually and in collaboration. Relating this to the education system today, we need to invest in assessing the collaborative effort of achieving shared understanding and building knowledge in collaboration.
Pea’s argument align’s with John Dewey’s (an author of democracy and education) notion that all human experience is social and involves contact and communication. He states that living and interacting within social environments that encompass the present body of knowledge (which is the focus of the educational system). Furthermore, Dewey explains that people live in a social world that is shaped by human experiences, and these combined experiences construct knowledge.
When incorporating “distributed intelligence” into practice in the design aspect, there are two points to keep in mind:
1. Collaborative/ Interactive: A good design is not simply one-way knowledge given, but rather getting learner involved in contributing to distributed intelligence. Learners can exploit various means to achieve tasks. The collaboration and interaction exist not only among human beings, but also with the environment, tools, and even the designers.
2. Desire Affordance: Pea states that “the interpretation, relevance, and meaning of resources available for activity are shaped by the desires with which people come to situations (P.55)” We can see creativity emerging from situated interpretations of resources in the environment based on desires.
Both of two points support Pea’s advices to get to distributed intelligence: Augment intelligence with computing, inscriptional system, guided participation and situated cognition.
This can be related to the “Horizon Report”, which focuses on how technologies in education aid in the knowledge construction process within the social framework. We know that technologies help to facilitate distributed intelligence through: collaboration without boundary; knowledge anywhere and anytime; and efficiency in satidfying desires.
If we use these technologies and tools and establish shared goals in building a collaborative knowledge base, students and teachers both engage in a valuable learning experience employing these resources, adapting to them and drawing on them to CREATE more knowledge in a cyclical process. Taking into consideration these new social environments, these technologies can take learning to a whole new level.
Certainly, there are some challeges and critiques that we need to notice. For example, how do teachers identify themselves in a classroom? Should teachers be required to learn about these things in order to better meet their students’ expectations? Is there larger generation gap between parents and kids because parents are not familiar with the modern communication ways? If open content is used as a powerful tool to inform a greater number of individuals, what is the motivation for individuals to register as students? How do we differentiate between individuals who have completed the course “officially” and those who have studied the open content? Just think about it!