Use of the web for teaching-learning: a knowledge management approach.

Abstract

Using web sites to supplement teaching-learning in higher education has been common since the emergence of the Internet. However, most of the sites are static information sites, which do not provide opportunities for active collaborative self-directed learning. The author suggests a knowledge management approach to educational web use, i.e., establishing web-based tertiary communities of practice (TCPs) to engage the learners in active collaborative self-directed learning, and develop the ability of learning how to learn. This article is therefore to pinpoint such a web-based teaching-learning TCP platform or system, and introduce a generic foundational architectural conceptual design.

Introduction

Using web sites to supplement teaching-learning has been common since the emergence of the Internet. However, most of these sites are static information sites, providing basic information like the syllabi, lecture notes, teaching schedules, etc. Some educational sites do supplement teaching by offering explanations and aids about the subject taught (e.g. Li 1999). Nevertheless, these sites do not provide much interactivity, ordinarily presenting information one-way.

On the other hand, learning how to learn has been identified as one of the key capabilities for effective functioning in the 21st century and promoting the development of such capabilities a main goal in many national strategic plans in education. (Law, 1999) The didactic teacher-centered approach of teaching with the teacher controlling the learning material and the pace of learning appears to be inadequate in achieving such a goal, because it does not provide the learners the necessary opportunities for active collaborative self-directed learning.

Purpose and Scope

The purpose of this article is therefore to introduce a web platform that provides ample opportunities for the learners to engage themselves in active self-directed learning. It is to identify a web-based teaching-learning system whereby the learners are more likely to develop the ability of learning how to learn. This approach of using the web originates from the literature of knowledge management (KM) and "communities of practice" (CPs) available in. recent years. Precisely, the system is a web site designed and used as a "tertiary community of practice" (TCP) connecting students, faculty, administrators and relevant members in the community.

Within the limit of this article, discussion is confined to the TCP's foundational architectural design; it is not concerned with issues about its social infrastructure. (Note 1) However, it should provide insights on the topic being discussed.

Clarification of the Concepts of CP and TCP

"Community" implies the gathering of groups of people at the local, national, or international level. They come together for a common purpose, as in this case, learning a particular domain or sub-domain of knolwedge. As for "practice," a meaning can be found from Manville's definition of CPs:

   Groups of professionals informally bound to one another through exposure to
   a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby
   themselves embodying a store of knowledge. (Note 2)

To Manville, "practice" is seen as practitioners engaging in occupational activities. For this article, we're using Manville's definition. However, "practice" is often referred to something of value, a purpose that a group of people would like to believe. For example, the Yahoo Com-Pra Egroup is a community of practice established to study aspects of the subject "communities of practice."

Communities of practice therefore are not teams, as teams are mutually accountable for the organizational outputs, nor are they work groups, which normally refers to people within organizational boundaries. Participants in CPs are accountable to each other around a common set of knolwedge or competence, and often cut across organizational boundaries. (Wenger, 1998)

As we are now in the Internet age, and knowledge technologies (Note 3) have advanced to a very sophisticated level, communities of practice will inevitably embed the web and the knowledge technology components, because the World Wide Web has become so powerful and computer intelligence so sophisticated that the processes of knowledge sharing and creating cannot do without them. A CP without technologies is analogous to an infertile couple, who lack the potential to reach the greatest functionality of the human kind.

Similarly, TCPs are communities of practice based on disciplinary domains or subdomains in higher education and initiated by interested students, faculty or administrators. As it is a semi-formal, technology-enhanced, unofficial or semi-official teaching-learning platform, the initial technical set-up may originate from faculty and administrators with or without student involvement. After that, the faculty's or administrator's role is one participant, perhaps as a more experienced community member, sharing enthusiasm and expertise for the common purpose.

In short, the TCP is a web-based tech-enhanced environment with a core group of members who have a common purpose of learning something particular. It is a socio-technological unit connecting individual learners and the community so as to generate knowledge. The level of governance and participation is basically local-community-based, with some connections at the national or international level. (Note 4)

Managing Knowledge with TCPs

A knowledge management approach can be used for teaching-learning. Knowledge management (Hoving, 1998) is defined as follows:

   (KM) is the effective creation, use, and preservation of organizational
   knowledge, in a collaborative environment, enabled by use of advanced IT
   tools and methods.

A major function of the TCP therefore can be viewed as engaging relevant human resources in the teaching-learning process with enhanced technologies to enable and empower knowledge creation, sharing and preservation.

The Foundational Architectural Design

A complete architecture of the TCP may include interactive work spaces, databases, access control mechanism, electronic bulletin board, administrative areas, and leisure spaces. The architecture for interactive work spaces with databases, "foundational" to any CP design, would allow easy submitting, storing, and retrieving information and provide opportunities for the participants to share and learn, to explore and discover, to understand and innovate, and to process knowledge.

The design, similar to Prueitt's prototype (1999), is a tri-level architecture, having three levels of knowledge processing. The architecture comprises a filter, an email organizer, and a thematic analyzer, with two modes. The first mode of user interaction is a view of the single level processing of information, whereas the second mode also views the substructural (memory) and ultrastructural (context) knowledge artifacts. The first mode produces a retrieval of stored data units. The second produces two classes of complex knowledge artifacts that manage text units by conceptual content. These artifacts can be used to provide a specific format for intellectual work product.

Prueitt (1999) maintains that tech's capability to interpret mental event representations within a theory of social discourse is the key to knowledge processing, and believes that states and gestures is a foundational notion in the process. States can be used as part of the mechanism of a "knowledge processor," whereas gestures are responses to the states. The states-gestures notion, he said, is built from a generalization of game to user interactions in MUDs (Multiple User Domains). Knowledge processing works by pairing states and gestures. In application, for example, the states and gestures can be used to control and allow the community to focus on a specific set of issues.

Interactive Exchange Square

The foundational component of the TCP, called Interactive Exchange Square, provides an open space for participants to discuss issues, ask questions, exchange ideas, and work together. Its architecture has two modes: (1) An email and forum system for message input cleaning, archiving, and retrieval. (2) A system for knowledge processing.

Mode 1

An email and forum system for message input cleaning, archiving, and retrieval.

A common form of email and forum system can be a text-based threaded forum, with automated email notices to the participants. Threaded forum messages will be grouped together by topic in a hierarchical structure. They can be moderated or unmoderated, depending on the purpose of usage. (Note 5) Moderated forums are recommended when messages need to be polished (e.g. use of precise language, and content organization) for better quality, thus increasing the value of information or knowledge sharing. Forum messages will be streamed using XML into a hierarchy of message structure that can be viewed by all participants and archived. (Note 6) Such ontology streaming, as Prueitt (2000) explains, provides a knowledge process management dimension to the widely accepted practices of online textual communication.

Mode 2

A system for knowledge processing

This mode has a tool set that produces situational models of sequences of mental events. The knowledge processing functionality lies in the system's capability of representing these mental events, a concept Prueitt (1999) called "mental event modeling".

Collaboration -- members working together -- is another form of TCP interaction. The TCP design may also include a collaborative space where members can work together on a common task, or solve a common problem. For example, joint efforts can be made to edit or annotate a long document.

Computer scientists are exploring new ways of transforming distributed information into sharable, universally accessible knowledge, and integrating knowledge from different sources or domains. It is desirable for the TCP to provide integrated work spaces for a knowledge ecology rather than single technology functionality, such as chatting, electronic bulletin board, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, or web publishing. It is also preferable to include automatic filters to point to people and content with matching interests, based on watching one's web behaviors and scanning messages.

Knowledge Generation

Quality communication plays an indispensable role in the process of knowledge generation. The TCP is an inquiry-oriented place where participants are committed to the principle of challenging basic assumptions, values, and falsehood. In a TCP environment, learning takes place in the dynamics of community interactivity, which can be seen particularly in persistent dialogues and collaborative work.

The essence of the TCP forums is dialogue--a written form of many-way communication models, engaging people in persistent and open discourse. The role of a good community leader is vital in effecting knowledge generation. The leader is a gatekeeper setting the agenda to a large extent, although every member is a leader in the sense of being responsible for one's own learning. Asking intelligent questions engages oneself and others in thinking and response, and persistent dialogues around the focal point of open discourse would result in "innovative insights". The possibility of intelligent dialogue is limited only by the participants' imagination. (Allee, 1997)

To end this article, the following example in Business Communications is used to illustrate how knowledge can be generated from the TCP.

A Knowledge Generation Example

Blackburn-Brockman (1999) did a study investigating whether CPA recruiters are more likely to interview candidates with one-page resumes or candidates with two-page resumes when candidates are highly and similarly qualified graduating seniors with accounting majors. It was found that accounting-major applicants with outstanding credentials who wrote two-page resumes are ranked more favorably if they apply for entry level Big Five accounting positions.

Other than research, the TCP can also generate knowledge that is socially and culturally defined. According to Wiig's (1999) simple learning theory, people use prior knowledge to understand the world, and to translate what they accept as relevant and believable into additional knowledge and deep understanding. Because students, faculty, employers, human resources managers, general managers, and other related personnel in the community, come from very different backgrounds and have different frames of relevancy, using the TCP to connect them in a common discourse would surface differences in opinions and perspectives in contexts. The TCP can generate "knowledge" valid to the particular community where the resume is to be evaluated.

Footnotes

(1.) Readers can refer to Kim (2000), for example, for insightful online community management strategies.

(2.) Quoted from "How to Harvest your Employee's Knowledge?" posted by Yogesh Malhotra at a discussion forum at http://www.brint.com/.

(3.) Knowledge technologies are technologies used to enhance and enable knowledge generation, codification, and transfer. For example, Inspiration, a knowledge generation software, allows users to develop flexible, graphical mind or concept maps, and Microsoft's NetMeeting, a knowledge transfer software, has the capacity to create a virtual space for interaction and communication. Technologies used must be able to capture the complexity of context and the richness of knowledge. (Ruggles, 1997)

(4.) One important reason to justify tertiary communities of practice being local-community-based is based on online community research. Scholars (e.g., Galegher, Kraut & Egido, 1990; Mantovani, 1994) have pointed out online teams need to build a relationship, often face-to-face meetings, before they can effectively collaborate electronically. Moreover, people ask trusted peers for advice (Wenger, 1998). Obviously, tertiary students and faculty have the advantage of seeing one another or working together in classrooms or on campus more often than other online community members do, thus establishing a trusting relationship more easily.

(5.) "Moderated" means communication input is approved before it flows onto the floor; the approver acts as a gatekeeper and can reply to a message, post it, delete or approve it before it appears in the forum. An unmoderated message, which is emailed instantly to the list of participants, will automatically be viewed by everyone in the forum.

(6.) Streaming means a medium begins to play before it's finished downloading so that viewers need not wait forever for the text, sound or video to begin.

References

Books and Journals

Alice, V., (1997). The Knowledge evolution: Expanding organizational intelligence. Butterworth-Heinnemann.

Blackburn-Brockman, E., and Belanger, K. (2001). One page or two? A national study of CPA recruiters' preferences for resume length. The Journal of Communication, 38.

Galegher, J. and Kraut, R. and Egido C. (1990). Intellectual Teamwork. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kim, A. J. (2000). Community building on the web: secret strategies for successful online communities. CA: Peachpit Press

Li, T.S. (1999). Internet as an aid to teaching Media Writing. New Technologies and ELT International Conference Proceedings of Selected Papers, Perdanasiswa, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 102-110.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system, Cambridge University Press.

Hypertext

Hoving, Ray (1998). Knowledge Management: A Perspective for CIO'S. Retrieved June 1, 1998 from the World Wide Web: http://www.simphila.org/present2/sld001.htm

Law, N., Lam, W.M., and Mak M. (1999) A web-based system to provide scaffolding support for self-directed collaborative learning. The University of Hong Kong. Retrieved December 1, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.cite.hku.hk/

Prueitt, P. (1999). Event modeling and knowledge processing for managing web corn and e-commerce. Retrieved February 15, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.bcngroup.org/admin/CIL/guide/events.htm

Prueitt, P. (2000). Strategy for organizing text data using CCG plus other techniques. Retrieved February 15, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/visad/strategy.htm

Ruggles, R. (19997). Knowledge tools: Using technology to manage knowledge better. Retrieved 2 May, 2000 from the knowledge Research Institute's World Wide Web: http://www.businessinnovation.ey.com/mko/html/toolsrr.html

Wiig, E, and Wiig, K. (1999). On conceptual learning. Retrieved 12 May, 2000 from The knowledge Research Institute's World Wide Web site: http://www.krii.com/articles.htm

Determining Educational Viability of Online

Dr. Li Tsze Sun, Business Communication Coordinator, obtained his Master's degree from University of Oregon and doctoral degree from Oklahoma State University.