Theory
Constructivist learning theorists such as Vygotsky, Leidner and Jarvenpaa have theorized that the process of expressing knowledge aids its creation and that conversations benefit the refinement of knowledge. Conversational knowledge management software fulfills this purpose because conversations, e.g. questions and answers, become the source of relevant knowledge in the organization. Conversational technologies are also seen as tools to support both individual knowledge workers and work units.
Many advocates of Social Software assume, and even actively argue, that users create actual communities. They have adopted the term "online communities" to describe the resulting social structures.
Read more about this topic: Social Software
Famous quotes containing the word theory:
“The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)