CSCW conference & links to LO LO10934

Magnus Ramage (magnus@comp.lancs.ac.uk)
Sun, 10 Nov 1996 22:17:53 +0000

Hello,

I'm writing to see if anyone on learning-org is attending the ACM
Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 96), held this
year in Cambridge MA, next week. If so, I'd like to meet up! I haven't
sent many messages to the list, but have been an avid reader when I get
the time, and it's nice to connect with people in the flesh. (I shall also
be attending the Participatory Design conference that precedes CSCW, at
MIT.)

[For those who don't know and might like to, CSCW is a research field
concerned with how people work cooperatively, and how computers do or
could support that working. It's a weird interdisciplinary mix of computer
scientists, sociologists of various brands, anthropologists, cognitive and
post-cognitive psychologists, management people and educationalists. It's
pretty closely linked to the software systems known as 'groupware'.
Details of the conference are on the Web:
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/cscw96/ ]

More generally... I am interested in the links between CSCW/groupware and
the learning organisation. I am wary of taking groupware to be some kind
of driver for the learning organisation, which looks to me too much like
technological determinism; but I think there are useful links in
attitudes, not least the much-vaunted notion that groupware encourages
flattening of hierarchies and more creative forms of communication. (Not
sure about the first of those!) A collection of papers on the links
between CSCW & OL is due to appear in the December 1996 issue of the "ACM
SIGOIS Bulletin".

My research at present is concerned with the evaluation of CSCW systems,
and a discussion of how this links up with organisational learning can be
found on a paper on my Web pages:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/evaluation/Eval_lea
rning.html.

Briefly, I think evaluation (in any sphere) is so fraught with
difficulties of multiple stakeholders' views of what is 'good' or 'bad'
that it's difficult for evaluators to come to *any* kind of meaningful
conclusion. Instead, I suggest that evaluation needs to be seen as a
facilitation of organisation learning among different stakeholder groups.

Comments on these ideas are welcome, and please mail me if you'll be about
at CSCW!

Best wishes,
Magnus Ramage

--

Magnus Ramage Computing Dept, Lancaster University, LA1 4YR, UK Email: magnus@comp.lancs.ac.uk Web: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/staff/magnus.html

If the only tool you have is a Hammer, then everything looks like a Process

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>