Pattern: Wear your skills on your shirt

Summary	Your appearance reflects on your abilities.
Status	alpha	Confidence	1
details...		Group	none

Problem

Potential collaborators need to know about each others skills and abilities to complete a certain task. The aim of this pattern is baselining skills among potential partners before a task in approached together.

Forces
Potential collaborators might not know each other except from what they can see or read in the online environment. However, they consider collaborating to become more efficient in achieving a shared task or goal. How do they know what another person is able to contribute? Collaborators might have difficulties to establish the truth about advertised skills by another user using words only. Unless a writing skill is sought for this task or goal, users need to find a way to validate the skills they bring onto collaboration. The form of representation needs to agree with the skills and abilities that need to be represented.

Context

This pattern can be used in visual virtual worlds and in virtual collaborative environments that allow a visual or multi-modal representation of the user. This also includes community environments or social network sites that offer customization of home pages for individual users or user groups. Depending on the need to represent a certain skill, such as writing or speaking, the pattern can also be applied to other collaborative environments, such as wikis for writing and sound fora for representing a speaking skill.

Potential collaborators in this context are non-anonymous users. This means, they need to be able and willing to show a part of them (as in skills and abilities), that forms part of their online identity in this context.

Solution

A user represents him or her and their abilities using their abilities (to represent yourself). This shows indirectly proficiency in skills that might be required to achieve a certain task. The visual representation of your avatar in 2D or 3D shows the extent of your visualisation skills and abilities to use tools in this particular environment. A skilful and original textual representation of your personality indicates the extent of your writing skills. The representation of your skills needs to fit the requirements that are sought by others to collaboratively solve a task or reach a goal.

Within a virtual game environment, the users’ skills might be gained or given, and be personal skills or avatar skill. The avatar might collect skills and show them as tools or the avatar might be designed or dressed in a way that shows a degree of skill in this environment.

Within social network sites, various visual representations of the user might indicate the proficiency of skills or wealth of experiences, such as pictures, links and written pieces. This allows drawing conclusions regarding the suitability of this user for a task.

Related Patterns

list other patterns related to this one, under categories such as component, assisting, conflicting, uses this, etc.

Extends (elaborates):

• Baselining Skills
• Collaboration follows Identity

Notes, Links and References

Liabilities, potential risks, extensions, expected side-effects

======= Related ========

Extends (elaborates):

• Baselining Skills
• Collaboration follows Identity
•  
• Leads to: Start With Introductions
•  
• ======= END Related ========
  ======= Rationale ========
  In terms of the Conversational Framework (Laurillard 2002) this pattern relates to the activity of learners presenting their own conceptions.

In terms of Black and Wiliam's (2009) theory of formative feedback, this is an example of key strategy 5 'Activating students as the owners of their own learning'.

There is a clear link between this pattern and ideas about self- assessment which form an important element of Black and Wiliam's account of formative evaluation, as well as theories of self- regulated learning. It is reflected in the 6th of Nicol's Ten Principles of Good Assessment and Feedback Practice namely 'Facilitate the development of self-assessment and reflection in learning' Nicol (2007), which are themselves initially derived from a consideration of self- regulated learning.

Boud (2000) develops the concept of sustainable assessment to argue the importance of learners developing self-assessment in order to support lifelong learning.

In terms of virtual teams knowing the skills of your co-workers enhances collaboration see:

Yide Shen. Transactive memory system development in virtual teams: the potential role of shared identity and shared context. SIGMIS-CPR '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel research, 228--230,ACM,New York, NY, USA,2007.
======= END Rationale ========

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.