Re: Structuring Roles, Tensions, and Mutual Comprehension in Mailinglist Exchanges¹

Michele Minnis
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Water Resources Program
Economics Building, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131

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Involvement with KBEs: Research on Large-Scale, Long-Term Collaborations
My work with my own collaborators² over the past ten years has been to develop methods and a theoretical framework for studying complex, long-term, interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations in education, public health, and the environmental sciences. Our research is anchored in socio-cultural theories (Vygotsky, Leont’ev, Giddens, Cole, Engestrom, Wertsch, John-Steiner). We hope that it helps to ground and develop these theories while also being relevant, helpful to collaborators. Although we have not focused on classroom learning, we sense considerable overlap between classroom-based and our own explorations of collaboration. In any case, we wish to be aware of and conversant with collaboration researchers who investigate student learning.

At the moment, we are analyzing two years of message exchange on an electronic mailinglist. The contributors are 40+ key participants in a diversely-constituted water-use-planning effort in a region that is water-short and growing in water demands. Also, we are pretesting survey and interview items for a three-year study of school-university-community partnerships.

Generally, the goals of our research are to answer these questions: 1) When is large-scale collaboration an appropriate, cost-effective response to a problematic social, political, scientific, or technical situation? 2) How do the internal dynamics of a collaboration affect its sustainability and effectiveness? and 3) How do external events in the institutional setting for a collaboration augment or diminish its potential?

More specifically, we want to assess the knowledge-building processes and outcomes of collaborative interactions at the scale of the organization, the small group, and the individual. To date, these purposes have led us to focus on contextual variables for large-scale collaborations —e.g., cultures and priorities of participating institutions, resource adequacy and allocation, relevant political climate—and on collaborators’ motives, objectives, roles, engaged values, working methods, vocabulary, and patterns of discourse and interaction.

Workshop-Relevant Research Themes: Roles, Tensions, and Mutual Comprehension
Every proposed topic in the workshop description interests me. With our current e-mail study in mind, however, I am particularly intrigued by the topics concerning computer-supported discussions that diverge and dissipate, when they might have moved to a new level of integrating and clarifying their material. These topics feed into our assumptions about knowledge production in complex, goal-oriented collaborations. In such contexts, we assume that accomplishing the long-term goals requires the collaborators to co-construct and continuously refine a shared vision and to develop interdependence and trust. Achieving these objectives appears to hinge, in turn, on participants’ timely and deft enactment of “structuring” roles, productive use of group tensions, and mutual comprehension. Here, briefly, are related ideas and questions:

“Structuring” Roles
Group productivity depends on members assuming maintenance roles. Certainly this holds for the logistically- and conceptually-intricate group effort that is a complex collaboration. Such activity-dense systems tend to have multiple embodiments—e.g., as mailinglists multilogues,³ small working groups, or public assemblies. In each embodiment, maintenance roles might include those of moderator, facilitator, delimiter, synthesizer, interpreter, arbitrator, and reporter. We call these “structuring roles.” More and more, their functions are deemed essential to wide-ranging, strategic discussions of controversial subjects. At this early stage of our first e-mail study, we are struggling with how to detect, code, and interpret 1) structuring comments, 2) instances where structuring might have enhanced a discussion, 3) instances where structuring was inept, premature, or rejected, and 4) role constancy (or, from another angle, role distribution and flexibility across discussions and settings). Also, we wish to clarify the relative utility of a mailinglist as a place for structuring activity. For example, do exchanges on the mailinglist generate issues that are better worked through and integrated in other fora?

Productive Tensions
Predictably, complex, large-scale collaborations bring together people of widely differing perspectives. Dealing honestly and thoroughly with these differences may be vital to resolving the issues that are driving the collaboration. Here, however, the tradeoff may be group dissension, if not the kind of conflict that can split and ruin the whole endeavor. Thus, somehow, sustained, effective collaborations must recruit and engage divergent ideas and values, while turning the associated tensions to productive ends. How does a complex collaboration learn to tolerate open disagreement among participants? How does it optimize the return on this investment?

In terms of e-mail research, these are related sub-questions: 1) How do mailinglist contributors respond to expressions of strong feelings or disagreement? a) Do they distinguish idle venting from thoughtful probing of a sensitive subject? b) What is the online aftermath of heated discussion: residual commentary? synthesis of the discussion points? return to the status quo ante? introduction of new topics? silence? displacement of the discussion to back channels? 2) Over time, do mailinglist exchanges reveal developing or contracting tolerances for serious disputation? for expressions of feeling? 3) Are some contributors permitted greater leave than others to raise and explore tensions? If so, what determines that privilege?

Mutual Comprehension
One of the reasons mailinglist discussions so often “decay without closure,”⁴ without producing new concepts or consensus, may be that the discussants cannot get traction in their meanings. That is, they may be unsure that what they mean to communicate is heard and understood as they intend. As indicated above, we assume that collaborative innovation requires mutual comprehension. In this context, our e-mail research raises these questions: Do active contributors 1) acknowledge mutual incomprehension? 2) check their interlocutors’ meanings? 3) express their sense of others’ perspectives and rationales? and 4) appropriate each other’s phrasing and vocabulary?

No doubt, as we proceed with our research and consider specific e-mail-exchange episodes, the three main variables addressed abstractly and separately above will appear to be profoundly interlocked. At the KBE workshop, I would welcome discussions about how to disentangle such variables or fruitfully track their interaction.

¹ Position Paper for CSCL ‘99 workshop: Collaborating on the Design and Assessment of Knowledge-Building Environments in the 2000s.
² Vera P. John-Steiner and Christopher C. Shank.

³ Eva Ekeblad. 1999. “The emergence and decay of multilogue on a scholarly mailinglist.” http://www.ped.gu.se/ekeblad/writings/earli99/multdyn.html )