RICERCA ITALIANA     

E-learning: how to enhance cooperation in the virtual space within complex organizations

Università degli Studi di Padova

Abstract

Forms of participatory e-learning are widespread and form a large corpus of concrete experiences but sound empirical data on the ways in which professional virtual communities are designed, managed and tutored are still scarce. Little is known on the best practices that should guide the e-learning experiences and on the organizational change requested by / and necessary to successful development of e-learning experiences in complex organizations. This project aims to study three intertwined issues of e-learning in concrete experiences developed within living complex organizations: the learning dimension, the organizational dimension, and the technological dimension. Each of these will be the special target of one of the three research units involved in the project. The three units will have a unitary theoretical reference point in the model of "communities of practices" which is drawn from cultural psychology and a unitary, ethnographically oriented approach to the qualitative methods to be used in the research. The project aims also at enhancing knowledge of the basic processes which support or hinder the development of cooperation within electronic environments. Simulations in cooperative virtual environments (in both immersive and not immersive conditions) will be provided by one of the research units in order to understand how may be possible to enhance co-reference (an important factor for cooperation and mutual understanding according to the theoretical model lying at >>>

Principal Investigator

Giuseppe MANTOVANI Università degli Studi di PADOVA

Research Objectives

1. Understanding how experiences of e-learning designed for high-level learning in complex organizations work in the social and interactive sense. The study - consistently with the expectations that can be drawn from the "situated" reference theories which are accepted by the units participants to the project - aims at identifying success factors of experiences conducted in specific social, technological and organizational contexts.
2. We foresee a "concrete" objective: producing "situated" guidelines for specific cultural, technological and organizational contexts which can be used to guide the design and the implementation of experiences of e-learning in complex organizations by providing precise suggestions on the management of times, spaces, organizational resources, technological platforms (agreements with functions of the public administration responsible for the design and management of e-learning experiences are being prepared).
3. A theoretical objective: identifying the factors that may enhance cooperation in computer mediated environments. The models of situated action and of communities of practices - which are shared by the units research participants to the project - points out that in order to enhance cooperation in the electronic environments it is necessary to improve co-reference. Simulations in multi-participant Cooperative Virtual Environments (CVE) both immersive and not immersive will be conducted to identify suitable ways to produce >>>

First Results

The results of the various phases of the research and of the various outputs produced by the LU participating in the project are not separable from the whole project and its results.

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Research on the applications of computer technologies to social complex organizations stresses the need for models of action and knowledge which can explain the processes happening in the computer mediated environments. To study e-learning application which takes place in complex organizations two elements are needed. One is to develop models of learning and cooperating which can account for what realy happens in everyday conditions. The other is to analyze - with carefully balanced and "situated" methodologies - the processes through which distant learning happens in specific social, cultural, organizational and technological context.
The first problem, i.e. the development of suitable models for distant learning and cooperation, the project refers to the social and cultural theory of learning which is clearly expressed in the well known expression of "communities of practices" (Wenger, 1998) and in the widespread conceptions of learning as apprenticeship taking place in social contexts which provide practical and effective knowledge schemes (Rogoff, 1995), of "cognition in practice" (Lave, 1988) and of the "situated action theory" (Suchman, 1987; Clancey, 1997; Clark, 1997). The roots of this approach can be traced to cultural psychology which considers knowledge as a social and cultural production and gives special attention to the function of artifacts in structuring people's living and learning environments (Cole, 1996; Hutchins, 1995; Engestrom e Middleton >>>