A Hyperblog System for Representing and Structuring Knowledge from Research Activities

Abstract

In communities of practice, it is important for the members to share and learn knowledge and skill necessary for carrying out the authentic activities. However, such knowledge and skill could be often embedded in the context of the activities, and could not be sharable for the members. In this paper, we address the issue of how to represent and structure knowledge obtained from research activities within a lab in universities. Our approach to this issue is to provide each research member with Hyperblog that enables him/her not only to use Blog for representing his/her knowledge as blog entries but also to share the blog entries gathered from other members. This paper demonstrates a Hyperblog system that structures the Blog entries with three types of tags, which are system-defined, user-defined, and group-defined tags. This paper also describes a case study with the system. The results indicate the possibility that the system facilitates representing and structuring Blog entries.