mic khoo and tacit knowledge

in a talk at FIS about tacit knowledge and communication in the context of an NDLE project Mic Khoo wondered why attempts to compensate for acknowledged different perspectives didn't result in a successful project dynamic.  He posited that failures to express 'tacit knowledge' became significant barriers in communication between the Principal Investigators and the participating teachers.

It's an interesting thought ... that if you don't express all your assumptions, and if you are not conscious about what you know, and what others don't know, that you won't communicate most effectively. And it certainly rings true with my experience in inter-disciplinary collaborative projects.

But I think there was a bigger problem here. There was a significant amount of role-shifting in the project. Information Scientists were being librarians (managing the creation of  a digital teaching resource). Teachers were being cataloguers (describing the resources that comprised the "digital library". Neither initially fully understood those roles (or were unable to act on an incomplete understanding) in the initial stages of the project. The process-based tools solidified the distinctions between collections development (definition of areas of the subject to work on) and cataloguing (describing the particular sites).

Both the PIs and the Teachers were doing what they thought ought to be done... but their language revealed that their motivations for doing so likely coloured their participation. One of Mic's charts showed [and I hope I've got this right in my memory] that while the PIs talked about a "resource" the teachers talked about a "site". So the PIs thought the teachers were describing resources, while they participated in the development of a digital library. But the teachers focus on the content -- the sites themselves -- reveals a focus on their classroom activity. Finding things that they can teach with was their goal, not building a digital collection for the sake of learning about the nature of digital libraries.

This resonates with my experience as Executive Director of AMICO, where the museums thought about collections and the teachers thought about images of works of art. Museums focused on the collective resource; Users on its constituent parts. Recognising and understanding this difference was key to communicating with, and motivating, such diverse participants in a collaboration.

There's other question lingering in my mind about communications dynamics and analyses ... do traditional methods developed for hierarchical (Weberian) bureaucracies work when applied in the context of inter-disciplinary, ad hoc and dispersed teams doing project-based work?