Designing social media for informal learning and knowledge maturing in the digital workplace

Designing social media for informal learning andknowledge maturing in the digital workplacejcal_485 235..249

A. Ravenscroft,* A. Schmidt,† J. Cook‡ & C. Bradley‡*CASS School of Education and Communities, University of East London (UEL), London, UK†Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Karlsruhe, Germany‡Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI), London Metropolitan University, London, UK

Abstract This paper presents an original approach to designing social media that support informallearning in the digital workplace. It adapts design-based research to take into account theembeddedness of interactions within digitally mediated work-based contexts. The approach isdemonstrated through the design, implementation, and evaluation of software tools supportinga particular type of informal learning called knowledge maturing. The paper: introduces andpresents the rationale for, and concept of, knowledge maturing; presents a new design method-ology for developing social media that support informal learning and knowledge maturing;focuses on one prototype, for ‘people tagging for organisational development’, that was pro-duced by the methodology (and concisely describes two others); presents the formative evalu-ation of the highlighted prototype; and finally, discusses the implications and insights arisingfrom this work.

Keywords context, design-based research, formative evaluation, informal learning, knowledge maturing,work-based learning.

Designing social media for informal learning inthe digital workplace

Informal and situated learning at work is being givenincreasing attention within national research and devel-opment agendas, and throughout Europe in particular.This is because it is well attested that informal learningplays a key role in improving an organization’s capabili-ties (Eraut 2004). This position is now combined withthe possibilities for catalysing, amplifying, and exploit-ing informal learning through social media, whichis also becoming the focus of much attention inrecent research literature (e.g. Ravenscroft et al. 2009;Hatzipanagos & Warburton 2009). However, designingsocial media for informal learning within work-based

contexts also poses new and significant challenges fordesign processes. With the variety of different forms ofinformal learning, it is not a clearly defined concept orprocess with clearly defined boundaries. As a conse-quence, the design process is not only a process ofdesigning social media for a known purpose andcontext, but is also a practice for better understandingthe phenomena and features at play. The design processitself becomes a collaborative learning process, andits results are not limited to digital artefacts, but arecoupled with an evolving understanding of how theseartefacts mediate human activities in particular con-texts. Another way of looking at this is that designingsocial media is an intervention within existing digitalcultures that promotes, optimizes, or catalyses desirabletechnology-mediated processes and practices.

One way to tackle the somewhat diffuse and poorlydefined nature of informal learning processes isto define models or frameworks that more clearly

Accepted: 4 January 2012Correspondence: Andrew Ravenscroft, CASS School of Educationand Communities, University of East London (UEL), London E15 4LZ,UK. Email: [email protected]

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doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2012.00485.x

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© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2012), 28, 235–249 235

characterize these processes, link these processes tochanges in related social and knowledge-building pro-cesses (e.g. Scardamalia & Bereiter 2003), and link toconcrete contexts and communities. This position isillustrated below where we introduce informal learningas knowledge maturing in the digital workplace.

Promoting informal learning and knowledgematuring: the MATURE project

One type of informal learning linked to emerging sociallearning practices in the digital workplace that is well-defined is knowledge maturing (Maier & Schmidt2007). This adopts a perspective of looking at informallearning not only from an individual, but also from acollective point of view. It can be understood as ‘theadvancement of knowledge (i.e. learning) on a collec-tive level’ (Kunzmann & Schmidt 2009) where knowl-edge ‘becomes less contextualized, more explicitlylinked, and easier to communicate’ (Schmidt et al.2009).

The main idea within this framework is to exploreand promote the interlinkage of individual (informal)learning processes and collaborative (organizational)learning and knowledge management processes. Thekey dimension for assessing the harmonization of these(individual and collaborative) processes and practices isthe changing nature of knowledge according to differentphases of ‘maturity’ that have been identified and speci-fied within an empirically derived model of knowledgematuring (Kaschig et al. 2010). This organizes knowl-edge maturing processes into five main phases (Maier &Schmidt 2007): (1) expressing ideas, in which newideas are developed by individuals from personal expe-riences or in highly informal discussions; (2) distribut-ing in communities, in which a common terminologythat is shared among community members is developed;(3) formalizing, in which created artefacts are trans-formed from being inherently unstructured to beingmore purposive and structured; (4) ad hoc learning, inwhich material is prepared in a pedagogically soundway, enabling broader dissemination; and (5) standard-ization, in which individual learning components areput together to cover a broader subject area, and thusbecome teachable to novices.

The first three stages are particularly important to thematuring process, as these phases, unlike the latter two,are not well supported by current knowledge manage-

ment and technology-enhanced learning (TEL) tools. Inparticular, the transition from expressing individualideas to their taking roots within a community, and inturn their transformation into formal and reusableknowledge, is crucial to the success of enterprises.

This model is the foundation of a large Euro-pean Commission-funded integrated project calledMATURE (Continuous Social Learning in KnowledgeNetworks), which is investigating how technology-mediated informal learning leads to improved knowl-edge practices in the digital workplace that, in turn, leadto better collaborative working and organizational per-formance. One of the project’s main motivations is to,within enterprises, reconcile the success of Web 2.0developments with the failure of top-down organiza-tional systems – such as learning management systems,competence management systems, or knowledge man-agement systems. The aim is to bring together (typi-cally) highly motivated bottom-up knowledge sharingactivities, and top-down guidance towards shared goals.We call this an enterprise 2.0 perspective on knowledgeand learning, which is characterized by enhanced col-laboration and a culture of employee participation(Schmidt 2008). As a consequence, informal learningactivities are the key activities to investigate, especiallywhen viewed through the processes required for knowl-edge maturing.

Investigating and developing these concepts (ofinformal learning and knowledge maturing) was thefocus of a large-scale 4-year project that started in April2008, which had its main objectives as:

• empirically develop a better understanding of real-world knowledge maturing practices and barriers, forexample through ethnographically informed studies,large-scale interview studies, and in-depth casestudies;

• conceptually describe and model this understandingof knowledge maturing as a ‘model landscape’ thatcan be used to analyse problems and develop solu-tions, which encompasses analysis instruments,descriptions of key activities, and indicators; and

• technically develop reusable services that supportknowledge maturing and provide a construction kit forcontext-specific learning and maturing environments.

Although this paper focuses on the design methodol-ogy for delivering the third objective, this design

236 A. Ravenscroft et al.

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

process was highly interwoven with the first two objec-tives. It ensured that the resulting designs embracedempirical findings and conceptual investigations, and inturn, added to both the empirical and conceptual per-spectives. Such technical support for knowledge matur-ing processes requires new approaches and tools for keyfunctions in organizations and enterprises, such as (1)community-driven quality-assured content manage-ment; (2) collaborative competence management; (3)bottom-up enterprise taxonomy management; and (4)agile business process management and task manage-ment. As (2) is a particularly important and yet sensitivearea of informal learning support, we have chosen the‘people tagging’ tool, which directly addresses thisissue to demonstrate our design approach.

People tagging for organizational development:collective informal learning about work-basedcompetencies

An important and clear example of a tool we developedto support informal learning and knowledge maturing,which will be used for exemplification throughout thispaper, enables people tagging for organizational devel-opment (Braun et al. 2010). Fig 1 shows a typicalscreen from the tool. Put simply, this tool addresses the

problems of finding out ‘who is competent in what’within organizations, and also the embedded mainte-nance of such knowledge in changing organizationalcontexts. It supports the informal learning required infinding the right person to talk to, who can help with anactivity or solving a problem. For example, in a careersguidance context, we might need to find who has themost recent knowledge and labour market informationrelevant to a particular occupation (e.g. advisors onteenage pregnancy in Fig 1), or experience with spe-cific situations (e.g. advising young people in a particu-lar area in Fig 1). This is a ‘lightweight’ approach basedon collaborative tagging that is used to gather informa-tion about people inside or related to an organizationalong with related documents. Individuals collabora-tively tag each other according to the competencies andtopics they associate with one another. In this way, acollective and situated review of existing skills andcompetencies is gained. These tags can also be collabo-ratively evolved into a (bottom-up) taxonomy thatcan act as an alternative to static competency or skillscatalogues.

This particular tool represents a twofold knowledgematuring process: (1) collective knowledge aboutothers becomes more explicit and refined within awork-based community, and hence more mature; and

Fig 1 A typical return from a search in thepeople tagging tool.

Media for informal learning 237


(2) knowledge about how to describe others’ expertisedevelops from informal tags to clearly defined conceptsand stable relationships in a taxonomy. This corre-sponds to the first three phases of the maturing process.Ideas are expressed (phase 1) about the competenciesthat people have, these are distributed in a work-basedcommunity through collaborative tagging (phase 2),and these competency assignments become formalized(phase 3) through acceptance and use for collaborativework-based practices, and links to related content,documentation, and organizational competence tax-onomies. Fig 1 shows the people who were returnedfrom a typical search using this tool, who areanonymized in this example. Following a search onteenage pregnancy and vacancies in a specific area(Ashington), it shows the people, on the right-hand sideof Fig 1, and the topics (such as job vacancies) andcontent (such as relevant documents) that werereturned on the left-hand side. The person who has per-formed this search is now in a position to approach,communicate, and collaborate with the returned peopletowards a common purpose, avoiding timely and lessaccurate ‘asking around’ about ‘who does what’. Thisis fine-tuned by the fact that additional specific subtop-ics and resources are associated with the returnedpeople to further refine the people-searching process.Similarly, they have Web links and documents that willalso be useful.

At a general level, this tool formalizes the communi-cation and knowledge exchanges that operate withinhuman networks, by using a social media approach tomake explicit and public that which is often conveyed inephemeral and personal communications.

Challenges for design: why innovate design processes?

In considering the issues raised our introduction and thepeople tagging example above, we can draw out fourkey challenges for designing tools to support informallearning processes in digitally mediated, or digitallyrich, contexts. These are the following:

• Informal learning processes are subtle and complex,so we need to actively investigate, define, and designsimultaneously in context, or we ‘investigate bydesign’ (Ravenscroft & Pilkington 2000).

• We cannot fully anticipate the behaviour of instanti-ated informal learning tools, and any network effects,

etc. without actually deploying them in a community(i.e. you cannot separate social media design frominstantiated social media processes). Therefore,exploring, understanding, and articulating emergentcollaborative processes and practices are crucial.

• The adoption and use of these sorts of tools, in turn,reformulates existing communication and knowledgepractices, and emerges new ones. This means that weneed to foreground the ‘human reality’ of the digitalintervention, for example, how individual differencesmight influence levels of acceptance.

• Collectively, these (1–3 above) mean that we cannotdesign and evaluate in traditional ways, such asthrough assessing the degree to which a technologicalintervention is a clearly defined solution to a clearlydefined problem. Similarly, in a similar sense,ongoing evaluations are implicit in the design processitself, and not conceived as separate and discreteactivities. Design is inherently an ongoing and itera-tive process, and involves an ongoing dialogue amongall stakeholders.

These challenges necessitate a new, agile, and socio-technically sophisticated approach to design thataccommodates the co-evolution of human behaviourand the development and use of social and semantictechnologies. In addressing this challenge, we com-bined relatively recent ideas in design-based research(e.g. Barab & Squire 2004; Wang & Hannafin 2005;Ravenscroft et al. 2010a) with another approach of deeplearning design that is particularly focused on design-ing TEL in the Web 2.0 landscape and beyond in waysthat are particularly responsive to issues associated withcontext (e.g. Cole 1996; Boyle 2002; Ravenscroft &Boyle 2010).

Design-based research and context

Our initial inspiration for a suitable design approachwas evolutionary prototyping within a design-basedresearch framework.

According to the design-based research collective ina seminal issue of Educational Researcher (2003):

The challenge of design-based research is in flexiblydeveloping research trajectories that meet our dual goalsof refining locally valuable innovations and developingmore globally usable knowledge for the field (Design-Based Research Collective 2003).



This approach is particularly relevant to our designproblem, as we are exploring and aiming to promote andrealize learning as a process of knowledge maturing inparticular workplace settings, and also uncover moregeneral insights. Specifically, this has involved develop-ing systems within careers advice (in the UK), trainingfor the construction industry (in Spain), and a large soft-ware company based in Germany (SAP).And more gen-erally, we have developed a generic framework, a modelof knowledge maturing, that can potentially apply totechnological approaches to the continuous develop-ment of social software and knowledge networks withinany knowledge worker context.

The related approach of deep learning design alsoinformed the design process through its emphasis on‘context’, a focus explicitly stated by Ravenscroft andBoyle as:

Deep learning design is, ostensibly, an approach for pro-ducing enhanced contexts for learning. (Ravenscroft &Boyle 2010)

The following section explains how we adapted ideasand methods from design-based research to take greateraccount of context and the embededdness of socialmedia interactions to produce a methodology for devel-oping social media supporting informal learning andknowledge maturing.

Overview of the design process

Design-based research for informal learning has to takeinto account a particular challenge that the design

process itself is a learning and problematizationprocess that interweaves the deepening of understand-ing of underlying features of informal learning and thedesign of supportive tools that promote it. We built uponprevious research, including the ontology-centreddesign approach in SOPRANO (Service-oriented Pro-grammable Smart Environments for Older Europeans)(Klein et al. 2007) and AGENT-DYSL (Accommoda-tive Intelligent Educational Environments for DyslexicLearners) (Schmidt & Schneider 2007), that designedsystems for people with special needs, which in certainways mirrors the complexity of designing informallearning support, in that key features and issues emergeduring the design activities. The process is an iterative,spiral-shaped approach where in each cycle we have thesame recurring generic activities (prioritization, learn-ing and problematization, design, and evaluation), butthese may be realized by different methods that willdeliver differing and evolving features and outcomes, sothat design methods are appropriate in addressingemerging and evolving requirements. Or putting thisanother way, design is an ongoing and creative processincorporating mixed methods, not the application ofpredefined methods, to produce predicted designs.Afterintroducing the design process in this section, wedescribe it in more detail in the next section, with refer-ence to the development of the previously introducedtool (in Fig 1) that enables ‘people tagging for organisa-tional development’.

Similar to agile development processes, the first stepof the design cycle that is visually represented in Fig 2 is

Fig 2 Overview of the MATURE designprocess.



prioritization. In this important phase, the objectives aredefined (or refined from the previous cycle). This priori-tization is either the result of an initial interpretation ofthe problem space or a reflection on the results from aprevious cycle. The outcome of this reflective process istransformed into a vision for the next cycle (and usuallyalso reaching beyond), which also contains concreteobjectives representing what the design team attempts toachieve, along with open questions that need to beanswered. These objectives are not concrete develop-ment objectives (e.g. feature X for component Y), butrather more general objectives about which aspects tofocus on.

In the people tagging example (Fig 1), the initial pri-orities related to exploring the influence of the peopletagging of competencies within organizational cultures.This was a top-level priority issue that raised importantquestions such as: Do employees understand the peopletagging approach? What if people do not like beingtagged? Does tagging conflict rather than complementtraditional competency records?

Prioritization is followed by a phase of learning andproblematization about experiences and constraints inthe context. This is an exploratory phase in whichdesign teams investigate the key features in the targetcontext, and requires the involvement and participationof target users as much as possible, for example obser-vations and interviews prior to implementations anduser tests. This is an important, although frequentlyneglected, step in design processes that is often seenas requirements engineering. But unlike traditionalsoftware engineering, a main goal of this activity isthe deepening of the understanding of the contextand design space among design team members, andnot necessarily the explication of formal require-ments. Therefore, it is important that any usual divi-sion of labour between those doing requirements engi-neering and software development does not decontex-tualize experiences and lose important insights anddepth.

In the case of the people tagging tool, this involvedcomparative field studies in different organizations (asdescribed in Braun et al. 2010), a large-scale interviewstudy (as described in Kaschig et al. 2010), and focusgroup interviews. These facilitated the collaborativeconceptualization of the way in which social technolo-gies could address individual and organizational prob-lems and opportunities.

The next design phase involves creative technicalprocesses to devise and provide potential solutions ororiginal social media processes linked to technicaldesign and implementation activities. This also requiressignificant communication and dialogue with users. Thenotion of ‘requirements’ is also important in this designphase, but in our (embedded social media case), thesebecome ‘requirements-in-action’ instead of a ‘contract’between those understanding the context or problemand the developers aiming to address it. The goal is alsoto obtain early and ongoing feedback on importantassumptions in the technical design process, forexample that certain functions will support certainaspects of informal learning.

Evaluation is an ongoing activity throughout thedesign process that becomes less exploratory and moreconfirmatory as development proceeds, where particularmethods map to these changing roles for evaluation. Inpractice, this means that early evaluations are similar toparticipatory design approaches, using open-ended andexploratory methods, such as workshops around con-ceptualizations and mock-ups. Later evaluations willinvestigate the performance of tools against criteria,such as usability, suitability, and performance accordingto informal learning objectives (e.g. groups are workingtogether and sharing knowledge more effectively).

In the example of the people tagging tool, this invol-ved close collaboration with representatives of a careerguidance organization. Early mock-ups and prototypeswere developed and demonstrated in workshop set-tings, where both open and structured feedback werereceived, and these findings were incorporated intosubsequent developments in an ongoing fashion. Thesetechnical design studies were also coordinated andinfluenced by the shared and instantiated conceptualmodel for informal learning and knowledge maturing(Kaschig et al. 2010). This informed the technicaldesign activities, and was itself evolved through thesedesign activities.

Applying the design approach: design cyclesand methods

The following subsections describe the two designcycles that have been performed within the MATUREproject according to the design framework describedearlier and in Fig 2, through mapping these to specificmethods that were used in the project as the social media



tools evolved. These cycles are also described in greaterRavenscroft et al. (2010b). The project adopted threekey techniques to realize its design process, namelydesign studies, use cases, and demonstrators. Thesewere all influenced by, and adapted to account for, over-arching principles about organization and prioritizationthat were derived from the conceptual model of knowl-edge maturing and emerging user and contextualrequirements. In the subsections later, we describe thedesign process and highlight (e.g. through the use ofbold type) those aspects that refer to the developmentand use of the people tagging tool.

The first design cycle was exploratory and investiga-tive in nature. It collaboratively specified contextual-ized design spaces (e.g. through use cases) along withthe proposal of candidate approaches (e.g. throughdesign studies) for supporting informal learning andknowledge maturing. The evolution of the overalldesign can be seen through changes during the secondcycle, which represented the informed narrowing downof design activities (e.g. through prioritizing and aggre-gating use cases) towards tools (the demonstrator proto-types) that could be used and evaluated in relevantcontexts.

Cycle 1: design studies, initial evaluationsand use cases

The starting point for the first design cycle, which lasteda year, was an initial version of the knowledge maturingmodel and various visions for its technology-enabledinstantiation. So the first design cycle focused onexploring the design problem and solution space frommultiple perspectives that incorporated conceptual,technical and user orientations.

PrioritizationDuring the first prioritization phase, two methods weredeployed in parallel: ethnographically informed studies(empirical) and design studies (design-oriented).

The empirical studies (Barnes et al. 2009) immerseddesign team members into the workplace reality ofseveral organizations, such as a large hospital, a soft-ware company, and a career guidance organization, togain an in-depth understanding of problems in knowl-edge maturing processes, and individual and organiza-tional needs in this respect. The design studies wereearly and critical ‘experiments in design’ that explored

key aspects, and ‘played out’ prioritization candidatesand ideas that needed to be validated prior to embarkingon further design activities.

For the design studies, initial design ideas were col-laboratively developed, and design teams were formedfor each of these, which included technical, conceptual,and user partners. In total, eight design studies weredefined, three of which are listed below as examples:

• A semantic media-wiki for maturing career guidanceknowledge in action (a participatory and community-based approach to the quality control of documents);

• A knowledge maturing dialogue game (providing themeans to link collaborative ontologies with dialoguesabout them); and

• People Tagging for Collaborative CompetenceDevelopment1 (a participatory approach to compe-tency assignment and development that is high-lighted throughout this paper).

These design studies were devised and specifiedduring the prioritization phase, and then performedduring the problematization and design phases. Theirnature and specification represented a balance of whatwas organizationally valuable set against what wastechnically possible.

Problematization and designThe problematization phase was realized through con-tinuing and extending the empirical studies and designstudies. The design studies, in context, gained feedbackon initial prioritization ideas, discovered integrationpotentials, gained experience with supporting knowl-edge maturing processes ‘on the ground’, and by impli-cation, elicited any ‘early warning signs’ that needed tobe considered and addressed as the project progressed.Practically, they were focused and time-limited, basedon existing tools with limited further developments,incorporated both conceptual and software develop-ment foci, and provided a mechanism to work with andinitially build relationships with the user community atan early stage of the design cycle.

In the case of the people tagging example, the designstudy consisted of two related approaches: developingthe conceptual and technical frame for a people taggingapproach that was combined with a collaborativevocabulary development; and field experiments (withpen and paper) in two different settings (a careers



guidance organization and a large research group ofapproximately 40 people (familiar with informal learn-ing and knowledge management issues) to learn aboutthe likely acceptance of, and barriers to, the peopletagging approach.

Initial evaluationFor the people tagging design study, the initial evalua-tion showed that, while there were initial concernsabout the collaborative approach to competency assign-ment the central idea was recognized as valuable inaddressing a clear need (for efficiently finding the rightperson to talk to) by the groups within the two contexts.The evaluation also highlighted individual and culturaldifferences that needed to be accommodated within thedesign. For example, while there were clear and negoti-ated visions for social media solutions and improve-ments, there was a clear variance in levels of socialmedia literacy within the user groups.

Having performed this initial validation of the designactivities across the project, the next step was to morethoroughly locate design processes within concrete userscenarios and develop applications within focusedinterdisciplinary teams, comprising technical develop-ers, conceptual experts and users. This necessitated a‘language of design’ that could be shared by the inter-disciplinary teams and communicated externally, whichlead to an elaborated and specialized use cases tech-nique (Bittner & Spence 2002) being adopted.

Preparing the second cycle: further prioritization andproblematization through use case developmentTo represent the bottom-up and user-oriented nature ofrelevant technology-mediated activities, we developeda comprehensive set of use cases as design-orientedboundary objects (Bowker & Star 1999). These wereelaborated to incorporate the conceptual model (ofknowledge maturing) and linked this to the technicalrequirements that realized the functional goals of theuse cases.

The use cases were developed iteratively. After initialdefinition in small groups, they were consolidated. Thisinvolved merging cases, structuring them into commonareas and elaborating them as appropriate. Top-downand strategic coordination of the use cases was realizedthrough clustering the individual cases according to keyactivities, or ‘areas’ for knowledge maturing, such as:

• Area I. Learning by searching for and exploring arte-facts for the task at hand

• Area II. Learning by finding and communicatingwith people

• Area III. Becoming aware of developments andchanges

For example, the second area, learning by finding andcommunicating with people, focused on improvingknowledge maturing by improving direct contactbetween people, and was represented by the followingspecific cases:

• UC II.1 Find people for a specific topic• UC II.2 Tag people for sharing the ‘knowing who’

At the end of the first design cycle, we had investi-gated whether proposed technical developments couldrealize the key aspects of knowledge maturing; mappedthe phases of knowledge maturing that could be sup-ported; established the priorities from a bottom-up userand top-down conceptual perspective; and outlined con-crete usage scenarios (in the form of use cases) linked tothe knowledge maturing model. This provided a plat-form for more considerable technical developments andtechnology-enabled knowledge maturing, within thedecided usage contexts, in the following design cycle.

Cycle 2: demonstrator prototypes and phasedformative evaluation

The second cycle of the design process, which also ranfor a year, retained the use case technique, but furtherprioritized and reassessed the cases, and linked them tothe next stage of technical development, which was fourdemonstrator prototypes. Adopting this approach ofdeveloping and evaluating distinguishable but relatedtools that could be combined later through a Web ser-vices approach avoids the criticism of what is called‘hill climbing’ in design-based research, which refers toan overly narrow focus that this methodology can giverise to.

Prioritization and problematization: reassessing andrationalizing the use casesAfter the eight initial design studies had been completedand evaluated, the use cases were reassessed, priori-



tized, and rationalized. The use cases were reduced innumber, from 47 to 33, by aggregating and combiningsimilar ones.

As part of the problematization step, the prioritizeduse cases were aggregated into coherent stories for end-users and their environment, which resulted in the defi-nition of knowledge maturing demonstrator prototypes,each of which concentrated on specific aspects ofknowledge maturing: content, people, processes, andsemantics.

Designing and implementing demonstrator prototypesThe demonstrator approach was particularly motivatedby the emergent issue that the design challenges forknowledge maturing could not be completely coveredby the use cases for a number of reasons. First, thenature of the requirements for the software that wasbeing developed, which is interlinked with complex andcontextualized knowledge worker practices cannotalways be pre-specified. Instead, many requirementsemerge ‘in action’ and inform development in anincremental way. Second, inserting another, somewhatabstracted step, between the use case technique and theuser’s direct involvement in the system developmentwas also problematic. It incorporates an ‘interpretativestep’ of linking technical requirements to ‘touchable’and ‘visualizable’ tools that would create ambiguitiesand differences in interpretation across stakeholders.Consequently, we used the use cases as a design ‘back-bone’ that directly linked to the development of demon-strators that, in turn, incorporated concrete knowledgematuring scenarios that could be easily understood byall stakeholders. So these demonstrators linked to theuser scenarios via this use case backbone and end-userfeedback, represented ‘live’ and evolving requirements.

So the ‘knowledge maturing design’at this stage con-sisted of a set of use cases clustered according to areascorresponding to the model of knowledge maturing thatwere then linked to specific demonstrator prototypesthat realized them. As the people tagging demonstratorwas described earlier, we will now briefly describeanother two to illustrate the breadth of our designapproach. These are based on descriptions given inBradley et al. (2010).

Prototype 1: assuring quality for social learning incontent networks. This prototype actively supportedsocial learning in a distributed and networked setting

with a focus on content aspects. It was designed forcareer services, for example to provide up to datelabour market information. Quality assurance pro-cesses are key issues in this context, and relate to indi-vidual advisors finding appropriate and up to dateinformation as fast as possible, and to meet the organi-zational need of achieving a coherent and high-qualityorganizational identity in the development of theirknowledge artefacts. Fig 3 shows the features of thistool that can be accessed through the ‘management’interface. This allows users to create new articles (textediting); organize and share resources (through visual-ization and tagging); search for relevant information(searching); contact other colleagues (through dis-cussion media); and provide quality indicators forresources (rating).

In brief, this tool (below) provided various sociallyinnovative and rich ways to find, understand, and estab-lish the quality of content that supported work-basedactivities. The following prototype, in contrast, paida greater attention to the development of sharedsemantics linked to dialogue.

Prototype 2: collaborative development of understand-ing. This prototype that is described in detail in Raven-scroft et al. (2010c) supported a community of practicein developing a collaborative understanding of theirdomain by interweaving the development of a sharedinformation repository and vocabulary (ontology) withdialogues about them. Technically, this was realizedthrough mashing-up a social bookmarking and collabo-rative ontology tool (SOBOLEO, Zacharias & Braun2007) with a dialogue game tool (InterLoc, Ravenscroftet al. 2009; Ravenscroft 2010). Fig 4 below demon-strates how the dialogue game approach scaffolded andsupported the ontological classification of resources,related to ‘aqueducts’ in this example. This wasachieved through specifying pre-defined moves andsentence openers of a dialogue game in terms of the keysemantic interaction actions within the ontology tool(e.g. ‘Is narrower than’, ‘Is broader than’, ‘Is relatedto’), and supplementing these with attested and moreargumentative or critical openers from existing dialoguegames (e.g. ‘I think . . .’, ‘Is it the case that . . .’, ‘I dis-agree because . . .’). The dialogue game transcripts (onthe right-hand side of Fig 4) are then stored with theconcepts that were discussed (accessible through a ‘Per-formed Dialogs’ section, on the left-hand side of Fig 4).



Phased formative evaluations and findingsEach demonstrator prototype underwent two phases offormative evaluation. The first phase (conducted duringthe first design cycle) emphasized participatory design,relationship building, and collaboratively exploring thefit between organizational knowledge maturing prob-lems or opportunities and potential social media innova-tions. These are reported fully in Bradley et al. (2010),and can be considered as, ostensibly, part of the partici-patory design process. The output of the first phase wasimproved prototype designs. A second phase of forma-tive evaluation was then performed for each tool thatemphasized an assessment of their acceptance by users;general suitability and ‘fit’ in introducing an informallearning innovation within their proposed contexts ofuse; and the degree to which they addressed, or werelikely to address, knowledge maturing in their contexts.

As we cannot cover all the second phase formativeevaluations in this paper, for exemplification, we focuson the highlighted people tagging tool. The evaluationof the other tools is given in Ravenscroft et al. (2010b),along with a more detailed account of the evaluation ofthe people tagging prototype.

Formative evaluation of ‘people tagging fororganisational development’User and expert evaluation. This prototype for ‘peopletagging for organisational development’ was forma-tively evaluated within a careers guidance service andby four human resource (HR) experts based in a Germanuniversity. In the first phase of formative evaluation thatlasted for 3 months, the prototype was introduced tofour and then eight careers guidance practitioners in aworkshop setting who fed back on suitability andusability, which led to necessary technical refinements.

A second phase of formative evaluation was con-ducted with 15 careers guidance practitioners who usedthe tool for 4 weeks as part of their everyday workingpractices. After this usage period, an intensive evalua-tion workshop was performed with six people, consist-ing of four key representative users of the tool, alongwith the technical lead and an academic expert in careersadvice. Due to the collaborative nature of the tool inwhich all interaction is public, this focused face-to-facefeedback involving four users was representative andalso fitted in with the reality of assembling distributedusers, with busy schedules, in one physical location.

Fig 3 Interface from the assuring quality in content networks prototype.



The user feedback workshop ran for 3 hours and wasscheduled according to personal statements aboutusers’ experiences of using the prototype: open groupdiscussion and design oriented recommendations. Theopen discussion followed up specific aspects that arosefrom the individual statements. Additionally, the devel-oping design framework was used as a guideline for dis-cussion about the appropriateness of previous designdecisions, current design issues, and future designideas.

The evaluation showed that the users accepted thetool, and viewed it as user-friendly and easy to under-stand, with its simplicity being seen as a specificstrength. The evaluation also confirmed the fundamen-tal design assumption about the ‘Web 2.0’ philosophy,as there was consensus about the value of a collabora-tive, democratic, and participatory approach to compe-tence specification and management. However, the

lightweight tagging-based approach did raise problemswith recognizing levels of expertise, with participantsbeing hesitant to judge who was an expert and who wasnot. Similarly, although it was generally well liked andthought to be a useful tool for improving collaborativeworking, especially when people were not happy withthe tags assigned by others, it was sometimes consid-ered as an intrusion into the ‘personal sphere’ of indi-viduals. In considering these potentially conflictingpositions, the practitioners agreed that there is a tensionbetween the collaborative, democratic, embedded, andbottom-up informal learning and knowledge manage-ment processes, and the more top-down, structured, andformal nature of organizational practices and compe-tency frameworks.

The expert evaluation (by two HR professors and twohigh-level HR practitioners) tended to adopt a broaderorganizational frame, in contrast to the more personal

Fig 4 Resources (about ‘aqueducts’)linked to a maturing dialogue game.



and experiential accounts from the careers guidancepractitioners. They pointed out that this people taggingactivity needed to be connected to other related func-tions and systems (e.g. existing enterprise resourceplanning systems). These experts also emphasized theneed for a suitable system-culture-fit that requires flex-ibility and a good understanding of the organization intowhich the software is being deployed. For example,they pointed out that the freedom of open participationand transparency of changes might be alienating withinmore hierarchical organizations. Similarly, they pointedout that restrictions to the vocabulary might be neededto map to more established competence managementapproaches.

These findings from both the user and expert evalua-tions echo the previous research reported in Ravenscroft(2009), which has pointed out the difficulty of reconcil-ing certain Web 2.0 features, such as collaborativetagging in this case, with pre-existing and more formalframeworks within pre-existing organizational con-texts, such as institutional competency managementsystems.Discussion and implications of people tagging. Theevaluation showed that introducing the people taggingapproach into an organization had to take careful con-sideration of its likely effects at an individual and orga-nizational level. While people tagging was welcomed asa democratic way to assign competencies on the onehand, it was also seen as an intrusion into the personalsphere of individuals. The way in which it transformsjudgements that are implicitly known by a smallergroup into explicit judgements available within a largergroup can be particularly sensitive. The reaction to thisnew level of transparency depends on the attitudes andbiases of the individuals and the culture of the group.Conclusions and key insights. Generally, the resultsshowed the complex interplay of this social media tooland related individual and organizational practices andculture. A main finding was that it was difficult to antici-pate how the effects of the system will ‘play out’ acrossdifferent people and practices, and instead, the impactneeds to be carefully observed during the introductionphases. Specifically, the results showed that: the sim-plicity of the system was attractive and important (beingperceived as a ‘Facebook for work’); although littleknowledge maturing could be observed within thelimited period of use (one month), there were insightsinto related notions of sharing and building expertise,

reflective practice, and the influence of social ruleslinked to technology use, and there is a need to carefullyadapt this people tagging approach to particular (organi-zational) cultural contexts.

Discussion and implications: design, social media,and informal learning

In this paper, we have shown how an original designapproach, incorporating design-based research, drivenby a conceptualization of a form of informal learning(knowledge maturing) within authentic work-basedcontexts has produced a range of demonstrator proto-types, with three of the four prototypes being presentedin this paper. These have been formatively evaluatedand used in various contexts, ranging from careers guid-ance to the construction industry where they have beenintegrated into working practices with varying degreesof penetration, popularity, and use. Arguably, the mostpopular and successful of these, ‘people tagging fororganisational development’ has been highlightedthroughout. What has been clear and striking is the roleof the design process itself in problematizing the designspace and emerging requirements in action, instead ofit being the development of a relatively well-definedsolution to a relatively well-defined problem. Weargue that this complex interplay of problem defini-tion, technology-mediated innovation, and ongoingco-evolution of technologies and practices will be a per-sistent feature of designing social media for informallearning. What ‘design’ is doing in most of thesesituations is intervening in existing digital practicesand reconfiguring them towards new and desiredtechnology-mediated practices (e.g. Ravenscroft &McAlister 2008). But what exactly is ‘desirable’ oftenalso emerges from the design process.

Through assessing and reflecting upon the success ofour design methodology in producing four demonstra-tor prototype social media tools along with their sub-stantial formative evaluation in work-based settings, wecan make the following points about designing socialmedia for the digital workplace.

First, developing or applying frameworks (whichcorrespond to the ‘conceptual model’ in our designprocess model) that clearly characterize informal learn-ing in particular contexts, such as knowledge maturing,will considerably assist the development of socialmedia tools that directly support informal learning



processes and practices. While this statement seemssomewhat self-evident, this level of definitional clarityis often absent in discourse about social media that tendto be predominantly about the features of particularsocial technologies. This paper shows three tools forinformal learning and knowledge maturing and high-lights the formative evaluation of one of these, for‘people tagging in the workplace’, where the emphasisis on the processes and practices they support (such ascollaborative competency assignment and develop-ment), and not just technical functionality.

Second, previous design-based research approaches(e.g. Wang & Hannafin 2005) need to be supplementedwith a greater emphasis on context, for example inways proposed by deep learning design (Ravenscroft &Boyle 2010). Consequently, the adopted methods needto concretely capture technology-mediated innovationwithin ‘lived contexts’. This means that during design,we will typically need to prioritize mixed methods thatwork within the contextual constraints over moredetached or experimental approaches that might avoidkey dimensions implicated within processes and prac-tices in play. The mixed methods that we applied in thereported MATURE project, including design studies,use cases, demonstrator prototypes and ongoing forma-tive evaluations achieved the necessary coverage ofclear conceptualization (of knowledge maturing)linked to technical investigation and innovation inwork-based contexts.

Third, the design-based research approach that hasbeen adopted (Ravenscroft et al. 2010a) has clearlyworked well and been appropriate to the challenge ofagile, user-intensive and conceptually coordinateddesign and evaluation needed for social media innova-tion. It has led to the successful development and phasedformative evaluation of four related demonstratorswithin 2 years that have a level of sophistication beyondwidespread social software, are usable, and embody anappropriate level of acceptability and contextual fitwithin complex working situations and practices.

Fourth, all prototypes experienced and overcameconsiderable challenges in achieving this appropriatelevel of usability and ‘fit’ within their contexts of use.Introducing the tools into authentic settings quite obvi-ously perturbs the organizational context, which needsto accommodate the changes in practices, ideas, andperspectives that a new social media brings about. Forexample, although there was a clear need for people

tagging at an organizational level, there were differentindividual reactions to its underlying philosophy. Inother words, the formative evaluations clearly demon-strated their role in negotiating and defining ‘require-ments in action’, instead of showing neat fits betweenclearly defined organizational problems to similarlywell-defined technical solutions. Collectively, this wasa clear example of the reality of integrating technicalinnovations within (often evolving) organizationalcontexts.

Finally, behind a major focus on usability, thereseems to be a more significant issue. While the designteams successfully made their applications usable, therewas a challenge in making the user experiences ‘under-standable’ in ways that will lead to take up within mean-ingful and embedded practices. The people tagging toolseemed to give some particularly useful insights in thisrespect. It was well liked and well understood by theusers because its lightweight semantics were intuitiveand its approach resembled, in certain ways, the featuresand functionality of Facebook. In other words, it builtupon accepted levels and features of users’ existingdigital literacies, in an incremental way, correspondingwith the importance of considering ‘proximal practices’in design that Ravenscroft et al. (2009) have previouslyemphasized. It also satisfied a clearly understood needto ‘find the right person to talk to’, which conforms withwhat Draper (1998) calls niche-based success. This alsoaccords with the approach to design that has been pro-posed by Ravenscroft and Boyle (2010), who havepointed out that good TEL designs ‘control’affordancesto produce enhanced contexts for learning. The peopletagging tool did this, controlling the affordances ofsocial networking to provide the more nuanced ‘peopletagging for organisational development’.

Conclusions

In this paper, we have presented and justified a method-ology for developing social media systems for informallearning and knowledge maturing among knowledgeworkers in the contemporary workplace. The resultingmethodology is tangible and reusable while beingunashamedly subtle. This is because we have genuinelywrestled with the reality of conjoining the latest genera-tion of social and semantic technologies, user-intensivedesign processes, embedding in authentic user sce-narios and responding to frequent and incremental



formative evaluations. This work has shown thatdeveloping next generation social media, nuanced formore sophisticated purposes than (just) social network-ing and media sharing, is far more complex than ourintuitions might suggest. Practices such as informallearning and knowledge maturing are embedded in lon-gitudinal and evolving relationships among technolo-gies, people, and communities, and influenced bypractical, personal, and contextual constraints. Perhaps,the latter of these features is most important – the defi-nition, role, and actualization of new technology-mediated contexts.

Practically, this means that future TEL design willnearly always co-evolve with related human learningpractices, so that conceptualization, development, use,and evaluation will be a constant and ongoing spiral-like process, and no longer discrete steps towards a‘final’ design. Perpetual beta is no longer a fashionableslogan but is now the widespread design reality thatinvolves an ongoing dialogue among all stakeholders.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to many members of the FP7 IPMATURE project (FP7, Contract No. 216356) whohave contributed to the work reported in this paper. Thework is co-funded by the European Commission.

Note

1Note that at this stage of the design process, this ‘Design Study’ was named

slightly differently from its eventual name as a ‘Demonstrator prototype’, which

reflected the evolution and refinement of this tool.

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Designing social media for informal learning and knowledge maturing in the digital workplace