KMD 2003 Evolving Knowledge Community
Overview
This knowledge community will be an evolving resource for graduate students enrolled in future KMD2003 course and those who have already finished the course. As a space in the "Encore Wiki", we predict that encore researchers will also use resources that are developed in this community. This community represents current course's vision, activities including course themes and design ideas, annotated resources, and student produced presentations. It also invites all contributers to revise and further develop their shared works as their ideas progress during and after the course. This document describes and explains design rationale, potential community members, community resources, choice of technology, and activities of the community. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the current design and make recommendations for future work.
Design Details
Design Rationale
Communities that employ online technologies move beyond the limitations of face-to-face communities. Advantages of internet supported communities include: (a) increase in the number of potential community members, which in turn increases the chance of sustainability; (b) removing time and space barriers for participation in community activities; (c) giving equal chance to all members to contribute to community activities at their own convenience and decreasing the chance that a number of members dominating community activities; (d) multiple communication channels allow members with different communication styles to participate in community activities; and (e) keeping a comprehensive, tangible archive of previous discussions and community history (Johnson, 2001; Shumar & Renninger, 2002).
Online technologies can also facilitate and enhance the process of knowledge building by facilitating learners' active contribution to collective cognitive responsibility (Scardamalia, 2001), what makes all members of a knowledge community responsible for enhancing and improving existing knowledge.
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This diagram indicates the components of the KMD2003 Knowledge Community and their direct and in-direct relationships. For instance, the Designs were directly influenced by knowledge media technologies discussed in class that evolved from the past section's classifications of learning technologies. By constructing this visualization, these components can be seen as separate but also interdependent building blocks that form the basis of the KMD2003 Knowledge Community.
Who belongs to KMD 2003 evolving community?
Graduate students and the instructor(s) of KMD2003 course are the most immediate members of this community. Other member groups include but are not limited to KMD2003 course alumni, previous/future instructors, and members of the encore community. At any given term, students who have registered in KMD 2003 and their instructor are expected to be actively participating in building this community.
Major Community Resources
Every time KMD2003 course is offered, students and the instructors decide about the themes they want to learn more about. But, the general structure of the course has remained almost the same. Major
- weekly themes: Identifying an innovative knowledge communities, discussing, and critiquing their respective technologies was a major component of KMD 2003. Each group of students chose knowledge communities based on their interest or the themes that had emerged in the previous section of the course. Presentations mostly involved online pre-class activities and in-class discussions and collaborations that required students to think critically about the affordance of innovative technologies.
- design ideas: Final product of students' work in KMD2003 course is a design activity where students worked in groups to develop a theoretically grounded knowledge community using technology-enhanced media. Ideas could be developed from scratch or groups could further develop design ideas that already existed in the infant KMD2003 knowledge community. Design pages of this wiki illustrate the collection of ideas and approaches to design and develop knowledge communities for a variety of purposes. Design projects are in different levels of implementation and some of them may have the capacity to be picked up and further developed in future KMD2003 classes. The present design idea was adopted from an earlier attempt.
- annotated resources: including papers, websites, and knowledge media that have been used during the course by groups of students. Future students can use this annotated collection of resources, update them, or revise the information that is shared about them.
Activities
A major portion of activities of KMDI Evolving Knowledge Community takes place in "KMD2003: Knowledge Media and Learning" course. It is expected the students, instructors, and alumni use this virtual space to reflect on how they set learning goals, plan to achieve them, and evaluate the implemented plan. Generally speaking, community activities include:
- Projecting students' contribution to the course in the forms of class presentations or design projects. Students will be able to reflect on their own work, identifying avenues for improvement. Description of themes that have been discussed in previous courses can guide future students to identify which themes need more work or which theme has transformed completely and needs to be revisited.
- Adding annotated recourses like articles, books, websites, software that are used during the course and tagging them so that other community members who look for resources on specific topics can find them more easily
- Providing asynchronous comments and feedback to online community resources because Encore wiki allows members to leave comments on every page. This way, the community is open to continuous modification and improvement
- Collecting data and conducting action research to evaluate how KMD Evolving Knowledge Community affects students', instructors', and alumni learnin about knowledge media and learning is another activity that community members should consider to undertake as the KMD2003 course matures.
Choice of technology for community
Major consideration for technology that hosts KMD2003 knowledge community include:
- Working across platforms
- Flexible for collaborative work
- Enhancing members ownership of the knowledge community
- Scalablity for a growing community
- Ability to be connected to related knowledge communities
The class started using Sakai as the virtual space for KMD2003 course but due to technical problems with Sakai the instructor and students decided to use alternative media for class announcements and some collaborative works. Google Groups was a good choice and was used as course communication media throughout the course. However, google groups did not satisfy the above features for desirable technology. Wiki, on the other hand, appeared to be a suitable choice among available technologies to host KMD2003 web-supported knowledge community. In their first attempt, KMD2003 students in Summer 2006 also used the Confluence Wiki (http://confluence.atlassian.com/dashboard.action) to present outcomes of their learning processes and resources they used. Yet, based on the recent development of Encore community [http://www.encorewiki.org], the virtual component of KMD2003 was transferred to a space in the Encore Wiki.
Interactions
Promoting members' ownership is a goal of virtual communities. The encore wiki where KMD2003 community resides as a workspace, allows giving students high level access to community resources and media. The KMD2003 Knowledge Community is ideally owned and developed by its members who can interact with the design in at least the following ways:
- doing collaborative project work in small-groups
- communication of community related activities among the whole class
- using as workspace for "roughing out" ideas
- building community resources
- platform for presentation of designs, projects
Limitations of design and implementation
The idea of developing an evolving virtual home for KMD2003 originated in its first section in Summer 2006. Although following up with what had been already started in that class seemed the most obvious option for the second section, it took almost half a term until a group of students in the second section decided to continue the development of the online KMD2003 community. Some of the limitations faced in the current attempt were:
- Failing to develop the virtual component along with face to face classes
- Access to stable and suitable technology
- Asynchronous communication that can extend time line of projects
- Frequent updating of the wiki to sustain the growth can be time consuming for students
- Motivating and maintaining all members active participation and contribution
Implications and Future work
We recommend that in future sections:
- choosing a stable and scalable technology to host the communications, documentations, projects, resources and any other activities for learning community
- involvement of all students in the initial design of the course and selection of technology
- documenting of designs and presentations early in the course with progressive updates in the online learning environment
- promoting collective cognitive responsibility by all students assuming ongoing maintenance and community building as an integral part of the course
For us, as we spent nearly two third of the KMD2003 course planning for and designing this online presence of community would be interesting to see how future members of this community will further develop or drastically change the present structure. We recommend that the process of KMD2003 community development be documented and the insights be shared with other scholars who have an interest in employing knowledge media to visualize and keep track of knowledge building processes in their respective institutions.
References
Johnson, C. (2001). A survey of current research on online communities of practice. Internet and Higher Education, 4, 45-60.
Shumar, W., & Renninger, K. A. (2002). On conceptualizing community. In W. Shumar, & K. A. Renninger (Eds.), Building virtual communities: Learning and change in cyberspace (1 ed.) (pp. 1-17). Cambridge, United Kingdom:CambridgeUniversity Press.
Contact Information
David Gelb dgelb@utoronto.ca
Hedieh Najafi hediehn@utoronto.ca