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23 March 2007

Sharing knowledge about vacations

One of the exercises in my Building Organizational Social Capital Class to illustrate the benefits and challenges of accessing the “knowledge in the network” was to have students post where they have vacation relevant knowledge on a Google maps mash up (at www.socialight.com). The way socialight works is that you can put “stickies” up on a global map in particular destinations—e.g., if you know about London, you put a sticky on London with some comments. Everyone who belongs to your channel can see the stickies in the map and can thus see what is known, and since each sticky belongs to an individual, you can see who knows what. Finally, since this is embedded within a social network type of site, you can see who knows whom. The idea was to see whether individuals in the class who were going on vacation (this is spring break at Harvard) had classmates with expertise on their destination. The nice thing, from a pedagogical point of view, is that geographic knowledge (unlike many other domains) can easily (and literally) be visually mapped in a way that everyone understands.

A few interesting lessons:

(1) There’s a lot of knowledge in the network—in my class of about 30 for every single destination that people had, there were quite a few people in the classroom who had substantial knowledge about that destination, even for fairly esoteric destinations, like Jordan.

(2) This knowledge is fairly invisible—most students did not know about the locations that other students had expertise in.

(3) Face to face still beats the Internet—just asking people where they were going and who knew about those locations proved vastly more effective at linking individuals than having people look at the map. Some of this has to do with the still developing socialight interface—e.g., the fact that only 10 stickies can be seen at a time proved to be a problematic constraint when you have well over 100 stickies on the map. Further, there is no way to search geographically for stickies. Of course, face to face is often not possible, which presumably is the power of Web 2.0.

(4) The value of the stickies was not so much in conveying knowledge (even though people put some interesting information on the stickies) as conveying who had knowledge.

(5) Boundaries can be important to facilitate sharing of knowledge. Unfortunately, a number of students received rather offensive spam from the site. This reflected the fact that we could not block entry to the channel we created, which meant that we had some interlopers. If we had long term aspirations for the mashup, this might well have scuttled any such plans.

(6) (not so much a lesson, but an idea) It would be neat to be able to highlight particular geographic areas and find out who in your network knows about those areas (this relates directly to research that Nosh Contractor has done on network and knowledge).

I will let you know in some future comment on this posting whether any students came away with knowledge that proved useful in their vacations…

Posted by David Lazer at March 23, 2007 8:50 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Jen Schradie at March 26, 2007 8:43 PM