0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition  (Page 23/32)

Likewise, Christopher M. Hoadley and Peter G. Kilner have asserted that conversation is the method by which information becomes knowledge, suggesting that “knowledge-building communities are a particular kind of community of practice focused on learning,” where the “explicit goal [is] the development of individual and collective understanding” (2005: 32). Adopting this definition, PReE models a knowledge-building community of practice by combiningcontent with communication through the use of social networking tools.

5.2.3. user and content management

Searching, retrieving, classifying, and organizing research material is a primary activity of professional readers. Expert readers employ a variety of strategies ranging from simple filing systems to elaborate systems of classification and storage. Reference management tools allow users to find, store, and organize research materials online. The use of folksonomy tagging in reference management tools can improve on a reader’s existing research strategies by providing him or her with a flexible and easily accessible way of organizing research according to his or her own criteria. For the origin of the term folksonomy and its use to describe the practice of socially derived content tagging, see Vander Wal (2007). These tools also allow users to share research collections with colleagues and find material relevant to their interests in other collections. Moreover, as Bryan Alexander has observed, social bookmarking functions in a higher education context as a tool for “collaborative information discovery” (2006: 36). As Alexander suggests, “finding people with related interests” through social bookmarking “can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations,” and that “the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible” (2006: 36). User incentives for tagging include the ability to quickly retrieve research material, to share relevant material with colleagues, and to express an opinion or make a public statement about one’s interests (Marlow et al. 2006: 34-35). The planned inclusion of similar tools in PReE extends expert readers’ existing management strategies by simplifying the organization process and creating new opportunities for collaborative categorization.

5.3. designing the pree interface

When the original interface was designed for the proof of concept of REKn in .NET, very little consideration was given to further use of the code. The focus was solely on producing a down-and-dirty prototype. The decision to translate PReE from a desktop application to a web application promised a whole host of new benefits: superior flexibility in application deployment and maintenance, the ability to receive and disseminate user-generated content, and multi-platform compatibility. These new benefits, however, came with new challenges.

Migrating the application from desktop to Internet also offered us an opportunity to completely rethink the appearance and functionality of the interface. This gave us the chance to consult with prominent researchers working in the field of professional reading and designing such interfaces, as well as the opportunity to conduct our own usability surveys in order to better accommodate professional readers of various disciplinary backgrounds and levels of expertise.