HighNyammer Social Scanner: Continuous Visual Feed-back of Collaborative Community to Improve Collective Cognitive Responsibilities

Abstract

Collective Cognitive Responsibility (CCR) of individual members is important in knowledge-creation communities. There are some possibilities to improve CCR through feedback functions that implement learning-support systems; however, it is unclear whether such a function is effective in extracurricular activities. Our research target is “HighNyammer,” a bulletin board system (BBS) for student-staff members who are working in “Classroom-M” as extracurricular activities. We developed “HighNyammer Social Scanner,” a tool comprising three types of feedback functions based on social network analysis to improve community members’ CCR. To examine the functions’ effect, we conducted two types of analysis: trends analysis based on HighNyammer logs and a questionnaire survey with student-staff members. A comparison between nine-members in 2020 (with HighNyammer Social Scanner) and nine-members in 2019 (without it) showed that HighNyammer Social Scanner helped the student-staff members perform as the members with high-CCR, especially novice members. The results suggested that each member was helped to recognize their activities more concretely by comparing one’s activities with those of other members using HighNyammer Social Scanner. Furthermore, the comparison encouraged the student-staff members to improve their activities.