ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

WITH NEW INSIGHT GAINED from recent experiences through the MAIDT program, i’ve revised ESPRIT to ESPRIe on 9th September and then to ASPRIe on 1st October.

First, to ‘Analyze’ audience, context and content is more appropriate than to ‘Explore’ the same. Second, to ‘Evaluate’ is also more appropriate than to ‘Track’. And ‘e’ (Evaluate) should sit right in the middle of the cycle like the spoke in a wheel. All stages shall move to and fro ‘e’ because the designer/technologist need to continually evaluate the effectiveness of every stage (whether ‘Analyze’, ‘Strategize’, ‘Produce’, ‘Rollout’ or ‘Influence’). And to be more complete, instead of KirkPatrick’s Reactions, Learning, Transfer and Results, the last stage should be based on Stufflebeam’s CIPP model — ‘Context’, ‘Inputs’, ‘Process’, and ‘Products’.

Finally, with new insights from a new paper by Drs C & H, the Strategize (S) and Influence (I) stages also need to be fine-tuned. The design of one or more activities (called ’spark’ by Dr Gilly Salmon, and termed Interactions in my model) is of primary importance — it motivates the student into action and learning (Motivate). As the C & H paper noted, the “designed activity should be situated in the real world context and should always be associated with an identifiable outcome (e.g. the activity of building a bridge has an identifiable outcome, that is the built bridge).”

There should also be rules of engagement, complementary roles as well as timely scaffolding (Engage) to encourage meaningful interactions, exchange of useful information and eventual development of community and personal identity (ties back to the Strategize (S) stage). Finally, appropriate knowledge tools (to use a Jonassen word, “mindtools”) are also necessary to enable the learners to collaboratively make sense of knowledge learnt/found and to construct new/integrated/transformed knowledge (Empower).

TO SEE A SUCCESSFUL COP (Community of Practice) in real life that embodies these principles and those in the C & H paper, check out Wikipedia.

The community there has good leaders and the right ingredients — good Situatedness, Interdependence, Commonality and Infrastructure. It is a living example of a very vibrant online community. The online outcome (a free open-content encyclopedia on the Web) actually better represents the community’s collective knowledge and perspectives, and is much more accessible to all members of the community than is possible for a F2F community.

Members collaboratively share and construct knowledge (in hundreds of thousands of quality articles — a highly complicated task which normally cannot be accomplished through F2F organizations, let alone communities). A wiki such as MediaWiki is their tool. The site’s Policies & Guidelines are their rules. All members take on the roles of writers AND editors. Anyone can change what anyone else wrote. Some (about 200-300 out of many thousands — a significantly larger pool of participants than is possible F2F), however, are administrators who can ban IP addresses and protect pages from abuse.

Finally, because of all these as well as their common goal (or object) and complementary strengths, they (the subjects) all have a common identity now — they are known as Wikipedians. And I’ve just become a new member of the community.

(See also Replies To Common Objections in Wikipedia and About Wikipedia in my MediaWiki.)