Roderick R. Klein
2005-1-23
SysCom Savoie
Keywords: Case Study, Cross-cultural, CSCW, Content Management, Innovation, Movie Industry.
I. INTRODUCTION
The research program METIS is built upon a structuralist philosophical approach. It seems to be able to facilitate the link between the Oriental Chinese culture and Western European and North American cultures. This approach is based on a sound study of the French Sinologist-Philosopher Francois JULLIEN's work about MENCIUS and the Mediologist Regis DEBRAY's philosophical work.
Although Western innovation lies on a conception of rupture based on the religious concept of Creation ; in China it seems that innovation is rather following a Process of continuity rather than radical changes.
In the West the radical innovation process seems to be the result of a very rational division of scientific and technological knowledge. This division stems also from a social structure which stimulates individual initiative, leading often to a lack of contextual awareness. Indeed, this powerfull approach can give access to an ultra specific innovation process without any capacity to link the small detail to the overall picture. In China, although much influence is felt from the West, the recent collectivist culture together with a rather holistic ancient view of the world, still vivid, inventors are invited to a contextual innovation approach. It is a kind of cultural investment, favoring undirect approach to the world with a strong amphasis on the global picture, which might hamper the analysis of distinct and selective aspects of phenomenon. As such radical technological innovations tend to originate in the West or other more Westernized Asian countries and so their effects are not well controlled by the Chinese people. We must admit that in the West as well as China we are often facing desperately some ecological threat directly caused by our own technological, scientific and industrial development.
These two approaches of innovation, Chinese and Western might be an invitation to complementarity, mutual understanding and help and finally mutually beneficial cooperation. Now a day, radically innovative technologies are expanding rapidly throughout the world for the better and for the worse. In a perspective of respect for diversity and ecology, we wish to understand better how to articulate Chinese and French Innovation processes with appropriate Research, development and use of New Information Technologies.
METIS Project is inscribing itself in a perspective of sustainable scientific and technological development. It is our vision of practical intelligence for a scientific and technological research program growing together with intercultural cooperation between China and the West.
II. SCIENTIFIC QUALITY OF THE PROJECT
METIS project aims to contribute to scientific and technical know-how about whether collaborative building of knowledge with the help of new technology could be used to facilitate better learning achievements and development of new cognitive competencies in European education. The objective of the project is on developing and testing design principles, and learning scenarios of collaborative knowledge building.
At present, the current understanding appears to be that collaboration is a synonym for good learning and good educational technology; almost any web-based application is labeled as 'collaborative.' This loose usage is common because there is no established way to classify the variety of tools that might be considered as collaborative, and moreover, because almost any technological application, could, in some way, be used in support of collaboration, i.e., by people working together on something. Hence, it might be meaningful to make a distinction between collaborative use of technology and collaborative technology.
Typical Internet chat or bulletin board systems or e-mail do not organize conversations well for learning. These applications are not, in the first place, designed for pedagogical purposes of building collaborative knowledge. However, with advanced pedagogical practices, these applications can also be utilized for collaborative learning. The most "pure and original" applications of CSCL and collaborative technology are, perhaps, networked learning environments (or 'groupware'; for a history of groupware, see Grudin, 1994), such as CSILE, which are designed especially for educational use and for collaborative knowledge building. A common feature of advanced network applications designed for educational purposes is that they support users' cognitive activities by providing advanced socio-cognitive scaffolding, by offering many ways to structure discussion to create collaborative representations and by including communitybuilding tools. "These tools all scaffold learning by pre-structuring the kinds of contributions learners can make, supporting meaningful relationships among those contributions, and guiding students' browsing on the basis of socio-cognitive principle" (Pea & al., 1999, p. 33).
Examples of scaffolding tools are CSILE's "Thinking types," a feature that scaffolds students' inquiry process. When students create notes, they are asked to identify the type of their note (for example, "Problem", "My theory", "I need to understand"). Another example is the CaMILE environment (Guzdial, 1997, Guzdial and Turns, 2000), which provides support in the form of distinct anchors through external Web pages, offering prompts that suggest what to write or how to start discussion. In addition, collaborative agents and other entities based on artificial intelligence are emerging. These intelligent agents may, for instance, use information from user profiles to help students working on same kind of projects to network with each other. Or they may search for and screen information that other students with the same background have found interesting and useful. Educational use of this kind of knowledge, semantic and group awareness tools probably can help manage a relatively large number of messages in databases, handle the threaded structure of discourse, and also facilitate community-building (Baek, Liebowitz, Prasad, & Granger, 1999; Hakkinen, Jarvela, & Dillenbourg, 1999; Ogata & Yano, 1998).
Moreover, one should also consider that discourse through collaborative learning environments is still mainly based on written language. In addition to writing, collaborative, representation tools, such as advanced visualization, simulation and modelling tools are needed to construct richer interchange of graphical and written representations (Roschelle & Pea, 1999).
This is where METIS project is active. Along with the work of Pierre Levy on Dynamic Ideography and the brand new design of Digitong Language for robots (Levy, 2004), we are trying to design not only a new global language highly graphic, with icons, animation, pictures and short movie. But we are also paying attention to the design of the virtual environment itself, through which this language is transiting. The relationship between language and context is likely to impact on creativity and innovation. Of course, there is no necessary, intrinsic connection between computer-based collaboration and any language. But our Groupware is meant to drive users toward connexion, communication, sharing and collaborative approach to knowledge production, innovation and creation.
We, as developers and promoters of virtual learning environments should do a better job making explicit the theories of learning and instruction that motivate our work and that are embedded within our designs. We are indeed explicitly implementing theories of creativity and innovation (Sternberg &Lubart) in the very design of our groupware interface in order to facilitate not only individual creativity but collective innovation. On the other end, with groupware tools we are likely to better understand the collective creativity mechanisms because we can easily trace interaction.
Technology itself does not solve the challenges of innovation, learning and collaboration. Scientific, technological or wider societal The scientific study of creativity in Europe is not very developed, especially in France where creativity is not yet a scientific concept and is rather perceived as a metaphor.This is the dominant situation of creativity and philosophy aesthetics in Europe (Rochberg – Halton). Innovation is becoming an important social and economic phenomenon and we have to understand better the creative processes. Computer supported Collaborative Learning tools have always been a challenge to develop, but it is a field becoming more mature, where Human Scientists have to work hand in hand with Technologists.
Environment wise, the global village is triggering more collaboration and because resources are limited, CSCL will develop steadily and facilitate sustainable development. Some people are even talking about Sustainable Olympics.
We are looking for a way to put the technology users at the center of the R&D process. This is a practice becoming very important nowadays. We are pushing the procedure to such an extent that we want to customize the groupware only for a single advertising project. It is expensive and is highly demanding in human resources and yet it is really the way to learn more about HCI, especially because we are dealing with the "creative process". Finally our project is not only looking at some ways to facilitate collective cross cultural innovation for virtual team around the world. We are looking at the rather specific situation of projects linking China and the Europe. And China is becoming an important partner for Europe in R&D and not only a good location for outsourcing. Our project is highly multidisciplinary and intercultural.
METIS project promotes a systemic approach of innovation (Csikszentmihalyi,1999) which should be embedded in the design of the new groupware technology to spread and yet test the theories of creativity originating mostly from North America. It involves a multidisciplinary and cross cultural research team of professionals and academics from China and the West: Innovation Management, Film Studies, Human and social sciences, Computer sciences, Olympics and Education. Scientific studies results will be implemented as an ongoing process to enhance CSCL tools and facilitate the virtual team creativity. This project is a very good example of matrification of science, technology, marketing and media content industry on a global scale.
III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Our methodology is secret for scientific and industrial reasons. Our Groupware research from SysCom Lab, University of Savoie has been the object of a recent transfer to commercial applications for Education.
And yet we can say this: