Topic 2 - HI2

The following are links that relate to the content of the second topic in HI2. The aim of this section of the course is to set the scope for the term Group and to begin to discuss the concept of Supra Individual Knowledge. It does this in two ways:

1. We will discuss various definitions of term Group, e.g. groups at Individual, Team, Organization and Industry Level
2. We will discuss interaction at group level and the structuring activities in groups

A key text will be provided for this topic: J.P. Walsh. Managerial and Organizational Cognition. Organization Science, 6(3), May - June, 1995. pp. 280 - 321.
A copy of Organization Science, 6(3), 1995, can be found in the J.B. Morrell Library under Periodicals G

The following web links may also be of interest.

• Overview of Situated Learning - http://www.lincoln.ac.nz/educ/tip/49.htm
  Learning as it normally occurs is a function of the activity, context and culture in which it occurs (i.e., it is situated). This contrasts with most classroom learning activities which involve knowledge that is abstract and out of context.

• Overview of Lave and Wenger (1991) - http://websites.ntl.com/~james.atherton/learning/situated.htm
  A quite different kind of learning theory, situated learning, which is primarily social rather than psychological and originates from Lave and Wenger (1991).

• Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning - http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/ilt/papers/JohnBrown.html
  Examines the separation between knowing and doing, which treats knowledge as an integral, self-sufficient substance theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used.

• Scholarly Web Sites as Organizational Memory System - http://www.hci.oulu.fi/~kuutti/Martin.htm
  Organizational Memory Systems enable organizations to exploit knowledge that resides in the collective memories of their employees and is not found in any of the formal documents produced by the organization.

• Designing Organizational Memory - http://www.gdss.com/DOM.htm
  A central assumption of this paper is that most knowledge work happens in groups, and that group work is largely conversations. It provides examples of some of the challenges for the construction of organizational memories, e.g. (1) The knowledge acquisition problem (such as the capture of informal knowledge); (2) context preservation; and (3) issues relating to temporal knowledge (such as relevance vs. time).

• Asynchronous, Distributed Apprenticeship using a Hypermedia based Group Memory System - http://www.ul.ie/~cscw/ivor/apprentice.html
  ... organizational / group memory is currently defined in such a nebulous way that it is harder to find out what is not within the system than what is. This site provides some theoretical ideas for the creation of Organizational (Group) memories using multimedia and hypermedia technologies.

• Organizational Memory and Cooperative Awareness - http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/evaluation/OM_CA.html
  Organizational memory and cooperative awareness are two abstract notions that currently have considerable currency within CSCW. Organizational memory is the attempt to capture a residue of the processes and rationale occurring in an organization, for later use; cooperative awareness is the concept of what other people are doing at a particular time, or indeed just who is around in whatever space is under consideration.