Transferring a Question-Based Dialog Framework to a Distributed Architecture

Abstract

Inquiry skills are an essential tool for assessing and integrating knowledge. In facilitated face-to-face settings, inquiry skills were improved successfully by using a “question-based dialog” and its resulting visual representation. However, groups that work without a facilitator, or in which members collaborate asynchronously or in different geographical regions, such as Communities of Practice (CoP), cannot schedule face-to-face inquiry meetings. This paper summarizes the unmet requirements of CoPs for a collaborative inquiry tool found by previous research on the Noracle model and proposes a distributed Web architecture as a solution. It mitigates the need for a common infrastructure, central coordination or facilitation, addresses the evolutionary nature of communities of practice and reduces the cognitive load for the individual by filtering and organizing the representational artifacts with respect to the social network of the community. The implementation we envision in this paper aims at applying the concept to a much broader audience, ultimately replacing the need for local meetings.