Mathemagenic

Martin Dugage on Collaboration tools for communities of practice:

I have never been really satisfied with various studies and white papers on collaboration tools because I believe that the tools you use to collaborate depend on the level of trust you have established between the parties involved. There is no point in blogging if you don't want to engage into conversations, and it's no use introducing instant messenging in an organization where nobody trusts each other. So I tried to summarize this is a little diagram which I have found to be helpful in my communication.

I took the liberty to copy and resize Martin' diagram, since I believe that it's worth attention of a broader audience (and the visual is better than any summary I would make :) 

Loved the approach! A few thoughts:

Thinking of correlations with my long-term thinking on relation-building stages and blog networking.

Martin calls it "community space", but some of the tools (e.g. IM) are primarily one-to-one tools... Wondering if/how we should take into account binary relations between people within the "community cloud" (also: degrees of trust in the community "in general" and between specific people may differ substantially).

Not sure I'd place IM/Skype into "shared values" space: personally I'd often use it in "information" or "cognitive space" (intrusiveness of IM is defined not only by the tools themselves, but also by social conventions around - this can redefine uses).

Wonder if next to the "trust" scale there is a need some another scale ("purpose"?) - at least to account for the "action" end of collaboration (thinking about the observations of bloggers switching to email/IM/wiki when it comes to joint actions.

See also: comments and an example from Jack Vinson

In one of the comments to this weblog Will Thalheimer suggested a link to his post on mathemagenic processing. Nice, since the title of my weblog comes from a research brief by Will (the old link is not working, but the text is the same).

Which brings me to a few things:

1. Now research-on-learning insights comes from Will in more digestable RSS format - Work-Learning Journal is strongly recommended to anyone into learning (especially to those heavily into practice rather then theory).

2. I was forced to go back and to think what mathemagenic processing actually was once again, and this time I picked something that I'm pretty sure will come back in some thinking about ethnographic writing (bold is mine):

When learners are faced with learning materials, their attention to that learning material deteriorates with time. However, as Rothkopf (1982) illustrated, when the learning material is interspersed with questions on the material (even without answers), learners can maintain their attention at a relatively high level for long periods of time. The interspersed questions prompt learners to process the material in a manner that is more likely to give birth to learning.

3. Something from another post, on experts as e-trainers (bold is mine):

I've been reading Richard E. Clark and Fred Estes' recently released book, Turning research into results: A guide to selecting the right performance solutions. They recounted research that shows that an expert's knowledge is largely "unconscious and automatic" to them. In other words, experts have retrieved their knowledge from memory so many times that they've forgotten how they do this and how the information all fits together---the knowledge just comes into their thoughts when they need it. This is helpful to them as they use their expertise, but it makes it difficult for them to explain to other people what they know. They forget to tell others about important information and fail to describe the links that help it all make sense.

This is something directly relevant from KM perspective as well - thinking of best-practices/story-telling approaches vs. apprenticeship.

I know it's cryptic, but better I blog at least something, instead of hiding useful links in my del.icio.us,  don't you think? :)))