The cognitive system that I am part of is the service desk staff at Noyes Community Center on west campus. A task that we perform regularly is staff meetings. At staff meetings, our goals differ with every meeting. Staff meetings at the beginning of the semester tend to go over the specific hours we want on which days for the entire semester. For staff meetings throughout the rest of the semester, we go over new procedures at the service desk. For example at the beginning of the semester we swiped everybody's Cornell ID card, except for ones that needed to use the ATM. But at the staff meeting, we found out from now on we have to swipe everybody's card even if they want to just use the ATM.
There are both internal and external representations used at the staff meetings. Our boss, the director of student staff at Noyes, has ideas in her mind of what she wants to over while we meet. Those ideas become an external representation in the form of a handout, which she gives at the beginning of every meeting. These ideas become internal representations for us because we have to carry out these procedures while we work behind the desk. They also become external representations because in case we forget, a handout of the new procedures will be put in our staff folder.
These meetings are tightly coupled as we all sit around a table and discuss new ideas or new ways Noyes could improve. For example, one of the big events at Noyes is called "Take out Tuesday" where we have local restaurants come in and provide free samples to students of their menu. This event was produced at one of the student staff meetings where we collaboratively decided that this would be a good event for Noyes.
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One thing that jumped out at me was the transition of meeting information from internal (boss’s mind) to external (handout) to internal (memorize policies) to external (copy of handout). There really is no way to skip from internal to internal if one were to assume that verbal communication is a form of external representation. It’s interesting to think that any information being transmitted from one person to another MUST at some point have an external representation. So the moral of the story: a secret is never really safe?
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the staff relys heavily on their external representation, a handout, to make sure that their jobs are done. This can be problematic when dealing with jobs that require many tasks; however, based on the tasks described, it seems that very little knowledge and experience is required to complete tasks.
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