Knowledge Sharing Pyramid: Communication, Learning and Convergence S.M.F.D Syed Mustapha Department of Computer Science Dhofar University Sulatanate of Oman
[email protected] B. T. Sayed Department of Computer Science Dhofar University Sulatanate of Oman
[email protected] Abstract There have been diversified approaches in developing knowledge management technology as a solution to promote knowledge dissemination, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in an organization or community. These approaches have strengths and weaknesses of their own with respect to technological advances, user’s reception, adaptability and success rate in the actual sense of generating knowledge. In all approaches adopted by any Knowledge Management Systems developers or practitioners, three essential elements that lie within the spinal of knowledge transfer, knowledge sharing and knowledge dissemination are determined in this discussion. They are social communication, social learning and symbolic convergence that are ordered in a pyramid form. Social communication plays a base role and an important factor towards the process of capturing the knowledge either for the community working in a traditional organization or in a virtually working community, failure of which would lead to a dramatic drawback in learning. The stage that follows after the communication is social learning. The concept of social learning refers to mainly learning through modeling the behavior through socialization. It could be implemented through discussions, seminars, demonstrations and other practical medias. The final stage in knowledge capturing refers to symbolic convergence where the community has its shared repertoire. Sharing repertoire refers to sharing vision, views, ambition within the selected community group. Social communication, social learning and symbolic convergence are three separated theories that in this paper we show them in a single framework as a knowledge sharing pyramid. It is postulated that the three theories are interrelated and feeding to each other in which potentially to be incorporated as the features to be fulfilled in building knowledge management system (KMS). These theories are discussed with respect to KMS scope and suggest the general architecture as a solution to building such system.
Introduction Building a working and successful knowledge management system (KMS) can be complex when considering various factors that contribute to its success. KMS does not stand alone as a single technological system as it constitutes of the people who are the targeting object where knowledge should lie within. It is essential then to study about how people may use the system not only as an individual but as a community. The reason being is that any organization that adopts KMS as a tool for knowledge sharing, knowledge dissemination and knowledge creation needs the whole community in the organization to benefit it. Organization that plans to adopt KMS is assumed to consist of employees who primarily can be categorized as knowledge workers. They have freedom and liberty in introducing new solutions, new ideas, new products and the working culture describes
dynamic
thinking,
non-rituality
in
function
and
bureaucratic-free
environment. An organization of this characteristic, the communication is highly interactive and extensive through meetings, informal discussion and brainstorming. Very frequently that the workers are sent for trainings, seminars and conferences for renewing knowledge and skills and at the same time share them with colleagues. Therefore, there are strong elements of learning among the colleagues as the main source of advancing and improving their performance. In fact, in Japan, the collegial values are strongly bonded that they know their colleagues' family, problems, hometown and they extend these values outside office hours. The existence of community values is important as the baseline to our further discussion in the knowledge sharing pyramid. The community values are characterized as having the social communication [1,2,3], social learning [4,5] and symbolic convergence [6,7]. They are essentials for the people in an organization to be observed in practice in order to make knowledge sharing, knowledge dissemination and knowledge creation to occur. Being the technologist in KMS, we
propose to incorporate them in the process of building KMS. In the subsequent sections, we discuss each community value, social communication, social learning and symbolic convergence and finally describe the general architecture of the KMS that supports the operations of knowledge sharing (with this reference to include knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination).
Knowledge Sharing Pyramid Social communication is a widely studied research field by researchers from various disciplines such as anthropologists, psychologists, psycholinguistics as well as technologists. The communication theory specifies human communication with respect to social impacts and values. Social learning is popularized by Bandura [4,5] who studies how people learn about doing something through observing, imitating and modeling. For example, a child learns how to build a toy house from the Lego set by observing the parent doing it. Symbolic convergence is introduced by Bormann who describes the cohesive and interactive of a working group towards achieving certain goal. The three theories stated above are not found to be mentioned in literature elsewhere as a consolidated and interrelated theory specifically in the aspect of knowledge management. We postulate that they are associated in the order as shown in Figure 1.
SYM BOLIC CONVERGENCE SOCIA L LEA RNING SOCIA L COMMUNICATION
Figure 1. Knowledge sharing pyramid
The pyramid shows the order of prerequisites such that the social communication has to be fulfilled before social learning can be attained and subsequently, the latter is needed before reaching the symbolic convergence. In [8], we study the practicality through some survey on homogeneous community who is strong with social communication to observe the subsequent impact to the social learning and symbolic convergence. A community that manages to reach at the symbolic convergence is claimed to have unity in thinking and goal, and to share values. This is a culmination of social characteristic that any organization should possess in order to make knowledge sharing, knowledge dissemination and knowledge creation to happen. In a simple example, your colleague will not reveal his knowledge if he treats you as a competitor in attaining his own personal goal. On the other hand, a colleague who shares the vision of the company with you will share his latest finding about the best approach in improving the work performance. A KMS that can measure the existence of social communication, social learning and symbolic convergence will be able to give proper indicator about the potential of applying KMS successfully. In the following, we discuss the three theories with respect to encoding them in KMS.
Social Communication Social communication can be captured in the form of verbal and non-verbal. The current research in ubiquitous computing in future will enable capturing these information easier when computable gadgets and microchips are embedded in our daily life. The technology currently supports communication on the internet platform using personal computer. The verbal communication using current technology requires the users to type their conversation. The speech-to-text or speech recognition technology, albeit exist, is not matured enough to capture the right words without confusion. Social communication has to be identified by analyzing the written dialogues or discussions on the following properties (refer to [9]:
a.
Phatic communication – reflects the degree of formality or informality of one's relationship to the other.
b.
Syntactic and semantic words – simple words that are recognized syntactically to indicate the types of communication. E.g. A teenager in Malaysia will understand a text written as "Hv stg to eat 2 nite?" or "Wat pe mlm nih" but not others from different countries. The semantic words requires some background knowledge of similar interest such as "We play 3-1-1, escalation, bogey-match" will be understood only by golfers.
c.
Status – the social category of a person can be classified from the way he/she expresses a feeling. Bernstein [10] believed that a working class uses less word (restricted codes) in describing a situation compare to the middle class. The author believes that this is due to the limited skill of language expression of the working class compare to middle class.
d.
Denotative meaning – words that can only be understood by those belonging to certain culture.
e.
Connotative meaning – words that are understood by certain individuals.
Even though phatic communication is used in a casual way, the interaction between the two communicators indicates that some prior relationship has been established or possibly to establish. For example, a man in a street greeting a girl whom he never met before will not be able to establish a phatic communication if she refuses to do so. However, it will be easier to start a phatic communication with a newcomer to your organization as your background is somewhat known. A general conversation text that uses some syntactic word contraction can only be understood the group members who are acquainted by the language, culture and social style. The text example given above will not be understood by the Malaysian of older generation
despite knowing the same language. This is common in a chat room where the individuals in the session do not know each other but they enjoy the dialogues due to the common way of communication. The semantic aspect of the conversation indicates the group that belongs to a certain social class or special interest group such as sports, politics, clubs etc. However, they may not necessarily have established personal social relationship but their connection is mediated by the common interest, concern and knowledge about the subject. The class of a person can be perceived from the way he expresses his thought and idea. Usually, a person has more comfort establishing communication within the same social class. Communication between groups that uses words of denotative meaning reflects the common cultural understanding and values. While the connotative meaning bears the words that are specifically understood and used by certain individuals. Social communication gives strong evidence that the communication flow is seamless, message is explicitly and implicitly well-understood, the communication is barrier-free from the factors such as social class, culture or language style and the language used is commonly accepted. However, it does not prove that the group knows each other personally or having collegial friendship even if they have been communicating for some time.
Social learning The second stage in the knowledge sharing pyramid is the social learning. It can only take place when social communication has been well established. It is the stage where social relationship is instituted seriously since the elements of learning are taking place in the communication. Learning from colleagues and counterparts as a part of working practice has been described mainly in the community of practice [11]. When an apprentice joins an organization, he observes the way his colleague gets information, who is the right person to deal with, what is the best practice and the actual practice and the working culture of the organization.
In the current technology that is available today, it is difficult to capture learning activities taking place in terms of capturing the learning substance that transpired between the learner and the mentor, how the learning is effectively operating and functioning and whether the learner eventually implements what has been learned. Despite that, we have to identify the properties of social learning that are potentially to be captured by the available technologies. a.
Actions – about the methodology and approach in solving a problem or performing the tasks, the physical steps involve in approaching the solution, the artifacts that are used in the process.
b.
Philosophy – about the ideas, concepts, justifications, policies, procedures, arguments and explanations.
c.
Behavior – about the fashion, interest, hobbies, informal activities such as sports, clubs and politics.
d.
Personality – about innate abilities such as public-speaking ability, extrovert character, spend thrift, easy-going, patience etc.
Social learning is said to take place when some if not all of the properties mentioned above are migrated from members to another members that are involved in the process. The Japanese is known as people who act fast, apply strictly on the procedures and uses modern devices in performing a task. The author has personally observed that some foreign students who have spent time studying or working in Japanese environment imitate, absorb and learn this actions and refuse to return back to their home country to work. A newcomer who is used to work in a nonprofit service-oriented organization where the working philosophy emphasizes on rules and procedures will have to adjust the concept towards working in a new working place where profit and customer are the main factors. In the former place, he used rules and procedures as the basis of explanation while the latter; he had to adjust according to the client's need. A person's personal activities can also be determined and influenced by the social members around him. One who chooses to
associate himself close to his colleagues or friends in his personal life will play himself in the activities of the group. For example, going for fishing in which he is not interested in before in order to be part of the group. Finally, the personal behavior of a person is also affected such as in the way he spends the money when everyone in the group exhibits luxurious life as the norm. The social learning of a person to a group is intense when the four properties hold. These values of the properties are adopted based on what are appealing to the group at that time. One of the weaknesses in the social learning group is that an individual who leaves and joins other group or organization will reinitialize these values to adapt to the new values and norms. Another weakness is that the members in the group may compete among each other against their own vision. For example, a group of engineers who share their expertise and knowledge in their work to build a car and also spend their time together in the past time will not share their personal vision for attaining a single chief engineer position. However, if one's vision can be shared and appreciated as a group's vision, the community has escalated to the next level in the knowledge sharing pyramid, borrowing the concept of Bormann's symbolic convergence.
Symbolic Convergence Even though the symbolic convergence theory is not new, it is not fully elaborated with specific characteristics. It is simply described as a group of people who shared by disclosing fantasy themes and rhetorical vision. The original idea about fantasy themes are the inner feeling of an individual that usually will only be disclosed to someone who has intimacy relationship like parents, siblings and spouses. In the organizational context, this idea can be expanded to one's personal feeling that he truly feels that may not easily reveal without the trust and security. For example, a decree from the top management is dislike by someone; he will not display the disagreement to other colleagues except with those he has confidence in keeping it
in secret. In order to encode this idea in computational form, the vision has to be objectified in the following way: a.
Clandestine affairs – sharing one's problem, success and true feeling intimately with another person whom ultimate trust is granted.
b.
Reflexive sharing – an interchange of feelings between two parties of a similar or dissimilar concern and building a mutual knot of trust.
c.
Interlocking sharing chain – continuous form and reformation of private linkage in a chaining manner.
d.
Union of vision – a culmination of shared values among a larger community network.
The strength of symbolic convergence is depicted when someone entrust another person who does not have biological relationship or old-boy friendship to know his clandestine affair. It starts as a one-to-one private conversation session and can be incidental when one realizes that the other party shares the same concern either in a similar or dissimilar way. For example, a medical doctor expresses frustration on the medical facility available in the hospital while the engineer grouses about late payment. Both have reflexive sharing on different issues. In an organization of highly interactive, the formation of several small private networks is fast and simultaneous that they link up as an interlocking chain. On the other hand, these private networks may remain as small if the affairs are not appropriate to be shared at a larger community. Union of vision is joint effort towards working on the same direction even it consists of different sub-issues. Using similar example above, both medical doctors and engineers are disgruntled about the facilities and financial problems but their direction is the same that the organization shall allocate sufficient fund.
General Architecture of Knowledge Sharing Pyramid Building knowledge sharing system that caters and captures the physical activities of communities can be a challenging task with the limitation of today’s technology. Several formidable questions are that “how do we capture someone’s personality”, “how do we recognize the philosophy of group members” and “how do we detect someone’s vision” in a computable form. The author believes that automating this process is an overstated issue in text processing or artificial intelligence. Phatic Communication Paralinguistics and emblems
Syntactic and semantic understanding Status identification
Regulator
Discourse Co mmunicator Analyzer (textual language)
Denotative meaning Connotative meaning
Discourse tool set
Iconic Co mmunicator Analyzer (symbolic language)
Co mmunity Channel for Social group
Social Net work Analyzer and Visualizer
Affect display Mediatory codes Artifact codes
Time analysis > frequency > most recent contact > amount of time in contact
Space analysis – > public distance > social distance > personal distance > intimacy distance
Figure 2. Architecture of knowledge sharing system Figure 2 shows two ways to capture the communication of the community, through text processing using Discourse Communicator Analyzer (DCA) and symbol
language using Iconic Communicator Analyzer (ICA) (some terms borrowed from [9]). DCA analyzes text and characterizes the type of communication by identifying the phatic words, text that uses syntactical expression (such as abbreviated codes/words), words of special meaning or context (sports or technical jargon), text that signifies the social class, words that use denotative (refers to similar culture) or connotative meaning (refers to individual usage). To build a computational model for discourse analysis is a complicated task; therefore, discourse tool set is used. For example, the user can select a list of words available in the tool set in order to express certain meaning. Other aspects of communication which is nonverbal can be expressed using ICA. User can exhibit feeling of anger, shyness, sadness, interest, hobby by displaying iconic symbol. For example, a person who likes to go shopping and spend money will display currency note and shopping mall pictures near her identity symbol such that the other community members of the same interest can come close to her. This is called paralinguistics symbols. Regulator provides the iconic symbols to represent the intention of someone to start a conversation or to catch attention by staring and holding someone’s gaze. The facial effects such as opening mouth, frowning forehead can be shown through affect display. The users can also use artifactual codes such as symbols of books to represent knowledge, documents to represent articles in the conversation. Mediatory codes consist of pictures to represent symbolically about a person, for example, a red rose to represent the beauty of a lady. The community network is analyzed based on the network itself, the time and space. The network analysis describes the structural aspects of the community in terms of its cohesiveness and communication pattern. The network can be shown visually using the time and space indicators. If A frequently communicates with B, then it has personal distance with the person. If A communicates to a group of people, then he has a public distance with the group. When A and B frequently
communicate in privacy, the system will recognize them having intimate distance. The gap between the two communicators will be widened if they have not been in touch for a while. The general architecture of the knowledge sharing system focuses on the people activities rather than technology and resources.
Conclusion The people are the main target in the process of knowledge management as they are the main object where knowledge transfer and knowledge creation should take place. Individual learning is important but in any organization, learning should exist and occur as a community such that they can understand each other, share the mission, work as a team and move forward as a single force. In order to achieve that, the community has to show the qualities in three aspects of knowledge sharing which are social communication, social learning and symbolic convergence. The organization that has the community attaining to the symbolic convergence is said to reach the peak of knowledge sharing pyramid. It is also imperative to measure the existence of these qualities through the computational method. We propose the general architecture that may support the knowledge pyramid activities and detect the occurrences.
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