Several messages came together for me. Individuals and groups seek
automaticity that reduces cognitive effort. One path is pratice, leading
to habituation or embodiment with the loss of names. Its danger is to
stop at 'good enough'. A second path is the elaboration of naming. Its
danger is to come to rest with logical and syntactic prestructuring (ie,
global data models) that gives the illusion of knowledge and learning, in
that it extends facts and a kind of structure but without meaning. (Put
aside for the moment that these paths favor different kinds of knowledge
-- teche vs. episteme, with phronesis in between.)
Individuals prefer the first path. Groups seem to prefer the second path.
But how would a GROUP proceed if it chose the first path, and also used
the computer? The following habits would have to be developed, each of
which violates a current pattern:
- Patience to allow structure to develop without breaking frame.
- Energy to break frame rather than follow cliched structure.
- Assertiveness to edit other people.
- Unimpressed with the beauty of a first version and one's own ideas.
- Ability to make an opponent's argument better than the opponent.
- Basic literacy and hermeneutic skill.
I see two evasions of this challenge. One is to let shared hypertext grow
like a weed patch, not noticing that individuals maintain their
hypertexts, and in the maintaining are learning. Hypertext gets the
reputation of being disorderly because the users are reluctant or unable
to order it. The other evasion is to let the computer programs stand in
for thinking. It will dutifully put things in meaningless shoe boxes and
run gee whiz routines such as word matching.
That's tidiness, not order. Or rather, to the extent there is order, it
is in the pieces and my ability to respond to them. If I represented
order in the linkages among the pieces, I would learn from doing so, and
possibly others would learn when traversing the linkages. And if we began
to see things the same way, and to see them in a richer network than any
one of us could produce, then we might have some group learning.
I'm admitting that group learning through development of a knowledge
repository is taking the second path, the elaboration of names. The other
path can be taken at the same time, but I suppose there is some tension.
(I just had a demo of QuestMap (nee CM/1) which is used to diagram a group
discussion. Nifty tool, but presenters say they never edit the map!)
Kent Myers kent_myers@smtplink.sra.com
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Host's Note: CM/1 is a product of Corporate Memory Systems, Austin TX, if
I remember correctly. Follows the IBIS model of rhetoric which includes
something like: Issues, Positions, Supporting Arguments, Opposing
Arguments, and Decision Rationale.
I thought it would be great for documenting a public policy debate and
it's resolution, or the corporate decision to build a facility or expand
in a market. To me, it seemed way too structured for supporting the kind
of dialog we talk about in learning organizations.
-- Rick Karash, rkarash@world.std.com, host for learning-org
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