=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=The Impact of Patterns on the Exchange of Practical Knowledge
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-709/paper01.pdf
|volume=Vol-709
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ectel/Arnold10
}}
==The Impact of Patterns on the Exchange of Practical Knowledge==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-709/paper01.pdf
The Impact of Patterns on the Exchange of Practical
Knowledge
Franziska Arnold1
Knowledge Media Research Center, Konrad-Adenauer Straße 40,
72072 Tuebingen, Germany
(f.arnold@iwm-kmrc.de)
Abstract Organizations often face the challenge that practical knowledge
cannot easily be transferred between practitioners with different degrees of
expertise, as there is no way of directly observing good practice, and practical
knowledge often only exists in implicit form. This PhD project focuses on the
question of how the exchange of practical knowledge can be supported for
becoming adaptive to all practitioners. In this regard, we describe how
patterns may be used to support sharing practical knowledge. We present the
results of a case study that supports the efficiency of patterns. Patterns
facilitate the exchange of good practice by leading to more explicit and
understandable descriptions.
Keywords: Knowledge Exchange, Practical Knowledge, Patterns
1 Introduction
Organizations are under pressure to use their financial and staff resources efficiently
and to improve their own practices constantly. An exchange and reflection of good
practice is crucial for raising the occupational qualification of their personnel to the
required level and to work successfully [3,9]. But knowledge of good practice is in
most cases implicit and not easy to externalize because it is based on experienced
work routines which are often carried out unconsciously [8]. For this reason, it is
difficult for practitioners to ensure an efficient exchange of practical knowledge,
especially when they are dispersed over many different places. A process of reflecting
of one’s own practice and of advancing practical knowledge will need to be assisted
by the organization itself. So the main question of this PhD Project is: how can
practitioners be supported by providing conditions for a web-based exchange of their
practical knowledge?
This PhD project takes place within the research project PATONGO (Patterns and
Tools for Non-Governmental Organizations). The aim of PATONGO is to investigate
1
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ulrike Cress, see also supporting letter
1
and optimize the web-based exchange of good practices and to develop a common
knowledge base using Web 2.0 technologies2.
2 Theoretical Background
The known approach storytelling which is used for the exchange of implicit
knowledge in the context of narrative knowledge management includes the issues that
you need an expert for conducting the interviews and face-to-face contact between the
interviewer and the interviewee [12]. Furthermore, it is difficult for practitioners to
externalize practical knowledge adhering to very specific situations. They need
adequate cues for an efficient externalization. Thus, we assume that so-called patterns
are a more qualified method for the exchange of practical knowledge in an online
context. Patterns are an established form of templates with solutions for recurrent
problems and frequently used in software development. They are, so to speak, a re-
usable example of problem-solving in similar contexts. Because of the fact that
patterns contain a given structure for guiding the processes of writing and reading,
they can make exchange of practical knowledge easier.
Exchange of Practical Knowledge. Generally, the larger part of practical knowledge
will consist of implicit knowledge about sequences of action [8]. The externalization
of such practical knowledge is laborious because practitioners have to be aware of
their individual sequences of action. From their own concrete knowledge, they will
have to draw general conclusions which can then be presented as abstract knowledge
and transfer that to other cases. Moreover, internalization processes are also a
complex procedure and not easy to perform in the everyday working life of people
working in the field. They will have to transfer information from an abstract level to a
very specific and concrete situation in order to make it adaptive. Both externalization
and internalization are indispensible components of what constitutes collaborative
knowledge building. Sharing knowledge and consequential collaborative knowledge
building (especially in an online context like the project PATONGO) are complex
procedures which can be facilitated and supported by patterns.
Patterns for Sharing Practical Knowledge. When experts are confronted with a
problem, they will resort to solutions which have proved in the past that they work
under conditions with similar problems. The invariant aspects of this solution
structure, abstract fragments of individual cases, can be considered as a mental
pattern. This unchangeable structure is based on specific problem situations, and the
result of repeatedly applying a procedure of abstracting single experiences.
Knowledge of this structure distinguishes an expert from a novice [6]. But often such
2
The co-operation partners include: FernUniversität Hagen, EKD (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland,
i.e. mainline Lutheran Protestant Church in Germany) and the Knowledge Media Research Center at
Tuebingen.
2
practical knowledge is only available in implicit form. This means that experts may
resort to this knowledge but are not aware of the problem-solution pair. The aim of
the pattern approach is to reduce these complications by externalizing practical
knowledge and allocating this knowledge to others.
Based on examples of good practice, patterns collect the know-how of
experienced practitioners, including invariant components of recurring problems and
their successful solution within work routines [1]. This means that a pattern describes
a frequent problem “and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in
such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing the
same way twice” [1, p. x]. Thus, patterns of successful solutions are used as samples
for solving recurrent problems in similar contexts, and they make it possible to
externalize implicit knowledge by providing structures to fill in. They support the co-
evolution of a user’s practical knowledge and of the common knowledge base as they
provide the stage for successful communication between these two systems.
The pattern concept is derived from architecture and based on Christopher
Alexander’s idea to collect samples of good practice as problem-solving examples for
their purpose of designing houses and streets by the respective communities [1]. The
concept of a ‘good practice collection’ has been already implemented, e.g., in the
fields of object-oriented software development [5,10]. Assuming that using patterns
for describing complex software problems leads to improved externalization of
knowledge, it seems to be a good idea to share and reflect practical knowledge by
using patterns as well.
The documentation of practical knowledge in terms of patterns has been described
in an increasing number of contexts but in many cases only based on some inductive
theoretical justification of their potential. Only few, not very systematic studies exist
reviewing the practical implementation of patterns in a specific field. Although some
practical derivations of a pattern concept exist, and it is plausible that the pattern
approach is efficient, there is no theoretical framework so far and no empirical
evidence of the mode of operation of patterns. What has been missing so far is an
explicitly cognitive point of view at the pattern approach and its practical
implementation in different fields.
Patterns from a Cognitive Point of View. During the act of composing their texts,
writers are guided by distinctive processes of thinking, like rhetorical considerations,
their own long-term memory and individual writing processes. The main difficulty of
such a writing process is to become aware of one’s own rhetorical situation. Relating
to the exchange of practical knowledge, the authors of good practice descriptions will
first have to become aware of their own knowledge in order to be able to externalize it
effectively. But retrieving information from the implicit part of one’s own long-term
memory is a difficult process. For this reason there is a need for “finding the cue that
will let retrieve a network of useful knowledge” [4, p. 371]. We assume that patterns
can support these awareness processes by preparing structures for reflecting and
scrutinizing one’s own actions and behaviors. But to be able to do that, writers have to
reorganize the retrieved information because it contains an individual structure and
may in this form not match what readers need. Authors of good practice descriptions
have to review and edit their practical knowledge in such a way that this knowledge
3
may be adapted by other practitioners. In this context, research on representational
guidance has shown that people will process represented material in a more intense
way if they get it in the form of graphs or matrices, instead of an unstructured text
[11,13]. And, in turn, applied to the pattern concept, representational guidance would
imply that the inherent structure of patterns will guide and support practitioners when
they write down their own good practice.
Flower and Hayes often observed a coherent underlying structure behind the
writing process, although the writers themselves believed that their writing processes
were disorganized and chaotic [4]. These results seem to be evidence for the existence
of “patterns in mind”. According to Kohls and Scheiter, patterns may exist in the form
of mental representations [6]. Such “patterns in mind” will include a problem-solving
schema which activates adequate solution structures when a known problem is
recognized. So patterns can serve as a structure for problem-solving. Problem-solving
processes are actions aimed at achieving some target state. Individuals who solve a
problem will arrive at their destination by passing different sub-goals and recalling
the required knowledge from memory in order to solve a current problem by analogy
to an example [2,7]. In the same fashion, patterns may support finding the best
possible way of solving the problem. They act as an operator to proceed from one
sub-goal to the next one, and may be considered as analogies and worked examples
[13].
3 Studies
In this PhD project both three studies in the laboratory within the domain first aid and
three studies in the field with ecclesiastical practitioners have been intended. Thereof,
three (one in the laboratory and two in the field) have already been conducted. The
study in the laboratory and one of the two field-studies are finished and the data
evaluation will start in the near future. The second field study is analyzed and
presented below.
Patterns provide an adequate structure that can improve systematic descriptions of
experiences and behavior. From this point of view, we expect that patterns will
facilitate the externalization of practical knowledge and lead to a more
comprehensible and adaptive description of good practices. To test this hypothesis,
we performed a qualitative case study with ten vicars in the middle of their
apprenticeship of becoming pastors and compared two conditions (blank sheet of
paper and structured pattern in a wiki) of a good practice description.
The participants were asked to describe two different good practices of their
ecclesiastical daily work. At the beginning, they were requested to write down the
first good practice description in the form of an unstructured pen and paper version.
After each participant had described a project, they received a description of some
good practice from another vicar and acted as a reviewer. In this second round, the
vicars were asked to highlight all those points of the description which they did not
understand (requests). After that, in the third and last round, each vicar was
confronted with a new, previously unknown description of a good practice and had to
criticize constructively and highlight those areas which they thought could be
improved by their own ideas and experiences (suggestions for improvement).
4
The second good practice which each of the vicars was asked to report was meant to
be written down in the form of a structured pattern (provided in a wiki). The cycle of
writing down the own description and reading descriptions from two other vicars was
similar to the first good practice description in the pen and paper condition. On the
line of this procedure each vicar wrote two good practice descriptions. So the study
realizes a within-subject design with repeated measures (without pattern vs. with
pattern).
A good project description has to be complete, understandable and adaptive to
other situations. We determined the quality of the written practice descriptions by
analyzing the comments of vicars who had read and reviewed the project description.
These comments may be understood as a form of feedback from experienced peers
and as a valid evaluation of the quality of the respective practices. On average, there
were significantly more requests concerning the description of good practices if this
was written down in blank sheets of paper (M=9.2, SD=4.36) than in the structured
patterns (M=2.0, SD=2.33, t(9)=4.72, p=.001). This can be seen as evidence for the
assumption that practices described by patterns offered a more explicit and more
understandable structure to practitioners with some routine than practices described
without the support of patterns. The results of suggestions for improvement were
along the same lines: in contrast to the patterns (M=0.3, SD=0.48), the paper versions
received significantly more suggestions for improvement by the vicars (M=2.3,
SD=1.7, t(9)=3.72, p=.005). What was frequently criticized was a missing
categorization of information and unavailable recommendations on what should be
done. In contrast to that, the patterns seemed to include all the required information in
their categories for a good practice description. This indicates that patterns lead to
fewer requests and suggestions for improvement because of their inherent structure,
which guides both the author and the reader of the good practice description.
4 Conclusion
These results lead to the assumption that an explicit structure, as provided by a
pattern, will facilitate an effective description of one's own practical knowledge and,
in this way, enable a successful exchange of knowledge between practitioners.
Patterns seem to support the difficult process of becoming aware of one's own
knowledge and guide authors in writing down their implicit knowledge. This may
lead to deeper elaboration and reflection of their own practice which will, in turn, be
improved.
The aim of this PhD work is to close the gap between theory and empiricism of
the pattern-concept. For this purpose, we apply the pattern-concept to the web-based
exchange of practical knowledge and provide a theoretical underpinning of patterns.
Consequently, this PhD project focuses on both a theoretical framework for
describing how a computer-supported exchange of practical knowledge takes place
and the empirical verification of the mode of operation of patterns.
5
Acknowledgement. This research was founded by the German Federal Ministry of
Education and Research, the European Social Fund and the European Union (support
code 01PF08005A).
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