Knowledge sharing and creation in a teachers’ professional virtual community

Presenter: Che-Yu LinAdvisor: Min-Puu ChenDate: August 5,2008

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Lin, F., Lin, S., & Huang, T. (2008). Knowledge sharing and creation in a teachers’ professional virtual community. Computers & Education, 50, 742–756.

Abstract•A three-phased study on a teachers’ virtual community in

order to understand the knowledge flows among community members from different organizations.

•Portrays the process of knowledge sharing and creation for teachers participating in virtual teams of a teachers’ professional community.

•The resulting model articulates causal conditions, action/interaction strategies, consequence, and contextual environments.

•The concept of knowledge buckle is derived to connect the knowledge transfer among socialization, externalization, and combination activities.

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Introduction(1/3)•This study aims to articulate the causal conditions,

knowledge sharing strategies, and consequences under various contexts of a virtual community.

•A three-phased study guided by the theoretical sampling concept of grounded theory, and analyzed data from on-line interaction records and contents, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups.

• Identify factors influencing the knowledge sharing and creation process in a professional virtual community.

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Introduction(2/3)• Lee et al. (2002) identified four characteristics in defining a

virtual community: (1) built on a computer-mediated space, called cyberspace (2) are enabled by information technology (3) the contents or topics are driven by its participants (4) the relationship evolves through communicating among members•A virtual community can be viewed in two perspectives: (1) sociological viewpoint (2) business viewpoint

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Introduction(3/3)•The trace of knowledge flows in the settings of a teachers’

professional virtual community is easier than those of other organizations or communities for three reasons:

(1) the interactive activities are performed in a website (2) have no direct conflicts of interests between them (3) the profession has its own codified body of knowledge•SCTNet is a teachers’ professional community web site

established in March 2000.•SCTNet has attracted around 110,000 members and

formed more than 1500 SIGs(special interest group) by December 2005.

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Research methodology(1/4)•Grounded theory approach (1) has its uniqueness in inductive, contextual, and procedural traits, and holds long research tradition since 1967. (2) this study is exploratory research because research on virtual communities has still been in an initial stage•Activities in conducting grounded theory research in

organizations include note taking, concept discovery, concept definition and the preliminary elaboration of theory.

•Analysis in the grounded theory approach includes three coding procedures: open, axial, and selective coding.

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Research methodology(2/4)•A three-phased study on new-formed SIGs which aim to collaboratively develop lesson plans on adopting

information technology to pedagogy.•Adopted the triangulation approach, which utilizes

quantitative data or combines qualitative and quantitative techniques of analysis.

•Various data are collected and analyzed, including: (1) information shared in SIGs (2) activity logs of members in corresponding SIGs (3) semi-structured interviews to SIG leaders, one most and one least active members of the SIG at the end of Phase I study. (4) three questionnaires filled out in three phases

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Research methodology(3/4)•Phase I study (1) investigated six SIGs (A1,A2, . . .,A6) for two months (2) Each SIG is composed of 3–6 teachers (3) they did not know each other before forming their teams (4) action/interactional strategies are induced from the data gathered from the information logged on the SCTNet, face-to-face meetings, and the interviews by phone.•Phase II study (1) SIGs B5 and B6 are composed of teachers from two schools, respectively. (2) classified action/interactional strategies into three categories: collaboration strategies, using IT strategies, and knowledge sharing and creation strategies. (3) further classified collaboration strategies into two categories: task and maintenance strategies.

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Research methodology(4/4)•Phase III study (1) we prolonged the observation time period, and examined SIGs

with a larger group size (6–10 members in C1, C7, C8, C9 and C10). (2) members with obviously unequal professional status (C3 and C4) (3) SIGs C1, C5 and C7 were composed of teachers from the same

school, respectively.

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Research results(1/3)

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Fig. 1. The model of knowledge sharing and creation in professional virtual communities.

Research results(2/3)

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Table 1. Six types of knowledge sharing and creation in professional virtual communities.

高成就 低成就

Research results(3/3)

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Fig. 2. Consequences of three phases.

Conclusions•By tracing knowledge flows, we identified phenomena of

knowledge flow discontinuities, which are rarely addressed in the literatures.

•This study designates possible causes which contribute to these discontinuities, and proposes the concept of knowledge buckle to address these problems.

•A SIG’s members might communicate via various media which we cannot get hold of.

•The future research can empirically test theoretical findings from other kinds of professional virtual communities.

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