Recensie
Review of Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities
Publicatie : Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities
Auteur : Etienne Wenger, Nancy White en John D. Smith
Recensent : Judith Schoonenboom
Recensiedatum : 7-6-2010
Digital Habitats (DH) is a book that every educational technology advisor should read. In DH, technology is viewed from the perspective of a community of practice: communities in which people come together to learn about a shared topic and the practices that develop around that topic.
DH is aimed at the technology steward, someone who supports a community of practice in selecting, configuring and using the technologies that best fit the community’s needs and who, by doing so, designs a digital habitat in which the community can flourish. In fulfilling their tasks, technology stewards should be aware of the four perspectives on a digital habitat:
· tools that support specific community activities;
· platforms in which tools are packaged;
· features that help make tools and platform usable and ‘livable’;
· the full configuration of technologies that sustains the habitat.
DH equips technology stewards with a variety of tools to fulfill their tasks successfully. One important tool is the set of three ‘polarities’: rhythms, interactions and identities. These are three dimensions that can be used to classify activities within a community.
· Rhythms contains the poles togetherness and separation. Members of a digital community are usually separated in time and space, but they come together in the community.
· Interactions contains the poles participation and reification. Participation means that members engage directly in conversations, reflections and other activities within the community. Reification means that members produce physical and conceptual artifacts – words, concepts, methods, stories, documents, links to resources - that reflect their shared experience and around which they organize their participation.
· Identities contains the group identity and the individual identity. While group identity reflects the togetherness that members of a community experience, the individual identity reflects differences between individuals. Differences not only arise because of community members’ different origins and existing opinions, but also develop through the interactions between individuals.
The technology steward’s task is to provide support for both poles of each polarity in the community.
The choice of specific tools, platforms, features and configurations also depends on the community’s orientation. DH identifies nine possible community orientations. A community can be oriented towards:
· organizing meetings;
· having open-ended conversations;
· working on projects;
· working with content;
· acquiring access to expertise;
· maintaining relationships;
· stimulating unique individual contributions;
· cultivating a community;
· serving a context.
These orientations are not mutually exclusive. Based on the above distinctions, DH provides a wealth of information and tips on how to support a digital habitat.
To what extent DH is relevant to higher education? In this part of my review, I will address this interesting question by exploring the kind of help DH offers in choosing tools in relation to a real-life example derived from Dutch higher education. Five part-time students, themselves teachers in higher education, each perform an individual study of the value of Kolb’s learning styles for their own teaching practice. After a period of individual investigation, the students put their individual results together, comment on each other’s work, incorporate feedback, formulate collective conclusions and thus arrive at a collaborative text, which is then made public so that the outside world can consult their work. The students work on their research project for two months; during that period, they meet face-to-face four times.
First of all, DH helps classify the nature of this collaboration. This mini community is a clear example of working on projects and, to be more specific, the variant within this category which DH refers to as ‘co-authoring’. At the same time, this example also fits the category ‘serving a context’, since the resulting product has been published.
DH teaches that co-authoring requires a separate space in which the team can collaborate without being disturbed by others. In cases where close tracking and editorial control are important, it also recommends that tools with file check in/out and version control should be considered. For more informal situations, wikis and sharing word processing documents are more appropriate. With regard to publishing, it is important that the community has a “public face”, for example in the form of public, searchable web pages, blogs, newsletters or mailing lists. To invite the external audience to comment on an artifact, use can be made of blogs; if one wants the external audience to contribute to the further development of the artifact, wikis are preferable.
The three polarities mentioned above can be used as a basis for further reflection on the design of the tools. With respect to rhythms, the co-authors meet twice a month. Given the desired level of collaboration intensity, I infer that additional digital meetings will be necessary, both synchronous and asynchronous. The two poles of interactions prove to be very important. The final research report is a form of reification, in the sense that a group product is delivered. For this purpose, interaction between group members is needed in the form of feedback and discussion about the collective conclusions. Such considerations reveal the list of co-authoring tools supplied by DH to be incomplete. The textual tools mentioned only support reification, while our case calls for tools that support participation as well. In terms of identities, the final product should reflect the group identity in the form of collective results. Yet, individual identities also play a role in the form of individual texts, the feedback that individuals give each other and individual contributions to the discussion about the conclusions. In this respect too, there is a need for tools that support participation.
Is Dutch higher education sufficiently well equipped to support this type of co-authoring? I would argue that this is only partially the case. The often heard advice that students should be encouraged to collaborate on texts using a wiki or Google Docs ignores the fact that, in many situations in higher education, the contribution of an individual student has to remain identifiable. Checking the history of a wiki for this purpose presents a teacher with too many difficulties. Working with separate documents, with separate comment functions and with sophisticated Track Changes options can be a useful tool. DH equates wikis and word processing documents as informal ways of working, but this approach does not do justice to the obvious difference between the two in recognizing individual contributions. In making this point, it is important to note that Track Changes should identify the movement of text as distinct type of intervention, rather than representing it as the deletion of one block of text and the insertion of another. Fortunately, Office 2007 meets this criterion. Another important requirement is that documents should be stored on a shared server, such as a Sharepoint server. As anyone who has ever attempted to use Merge Documents to integrate the comments of several reviewers in a single document knows, this function simply does not work. In all honesty, I do not know if I would be able to obtain access to such a shared server.
In many higher education institutions, it would appear that the presentation of staff and student publications to a wider audience still has a long way to go. To be fair, my own institution does have an institutional repository, where the authors described in the case study above did manage to publish their work (see http://hdl.handle.net/1871/13337). However, the existence of this repository is known only to a few and, for some time now, publishing rights have been restricted to designated departmental contact persons, which does not encourage publication. Furthermore, institutional repositories lack facilities for adding comments. In short, the Dutch higher education has its work cut out for it in this field, something that Digital Habitats makes painfully clear!