Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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Noticing the past to manage the future 123
An interesting feature of the work of support units is that services such as troubleshooting,
monitoring and repair of systems in many cases are possible to carry
out at a distance. The physical localization of the support is thus not dependent on
proximity to clients. Hence, technology becomes both the substance of professional
knowing and skills, and the means through which services are delivered. For the
operations of such units, problem- solving is at the core of the activities and such
skills are decisive elements of the competence needed. The number of possible
problems and disturbances are almost infinite in this environment. Members of
helpdesk teams thus continuously have to be prepared for the unexpected.
The overall aim of the empirical study to be reported in the following is to document
and analyze how an IT helpdesk team operates in its everyday practice, and
how members develop and maintain collective and individual knowing. The kind
of work they engage in requires not only that they learn how different tools and
technologies function, but they must also learn how to use them flexibly in the
practical course of coordinating communication and collective action to accomplish
their tasks. New hardware and software are, as well as updates, also introduced
at irregular intervals. Since problem- solving is the core activity in this kind of
setting, continuous learning is a necessity for achieving continuity. To paraphrase
Wittgenstein, the members of the team we have studied have to understand in
order to know “how to go on.” In the following we will present our theoretical
premises and summarize some previous studies that focus on the organization of
knowing in complex, high- technology work settings of this kind.
On the social organization of knowing
From a sociocultural perspective, processes of learning and knowing are analyzed
at the intersection of individual and collective action (Wenger, 1998; Säljö,
2005). Learning is seen as an emergent property of involvement in social practices.
Collective knowing is embedded in, and mediated through, language and the artifacts
used in a specific practice (Vygotsky, 1986; Vološinov, 1973; Wertsch, 1998).
Knowing is thus dependent on familiarity with material semiotic tools (Olesen &
Markussen, 2003) available in technologies, classification tools and administrative
routines (Mäkitalo & Säljö, 2002).
In the helpdesk studied here, the kinds of queries and failures the team has to
attend to are very diverse. The products they support are complex and a high
degree of unpredictability characterizes the work. In such a situation, the building
up of collective knowing is essential. Earlier incidents and interventions must
be remembered and made available to team members, and new experiences have
to be documented and kept within the system. Such collective organization of
knowing in teamwork is the focus of the work by, for instance, Hutchins and his
colleagues (Hutchins, 1993; Hutchins & Klausen, 1998). In these studies issues
of how problems are solved collectively through mobilization and coordination
of knowing in complex activities have been explored, such as when navigating
on board naval ships and when flying an aircraft. In such settings, the functional