From [[http://cpsquare.org CPsquare]], the community of practice on communities of practice.

Definition

A scratch pad allows participants to keep notes or a journal about their activities in a system. Issues addressed by feature set include the nature of the notes you can keep, sharing with others, and compatibility with other contexts.

Uses in communities of practice

Good when a space is complex and communities are long-lived so that members want to collect a more personal "summary" than the community's archive. Alternatively a scratch pad may allow a user to collect materials in preparation for posting or use elsewhere.

Polarities

• Together/apart, Synch/Asynch:
• Interaction/publication:
• Individual/group:

Key features

• A streaming journal is one single piece of text that can be long, but is not subdivided physically.
  • Good for shorter-lived events.
• Having multiple separate notes allow people to write notes about different topics at different times.
  • Easier to capture one's participation over a long period of time or on different subjects.
• A notepad can allow people to copy objects from the space into notes, such as postings, multi-media files, etc.
  • Often people find something they want to remember, and importing into a note makes this easier.
• A notepad can organize notes according to some criteria other than chronology, such as topics, association with specific conversations, etc.
  • When the system has a number of different topics and conversations, it is useful to be able to see all notes associated with one of them.
• A notepad can be a private area visible only to the participant.
  • The interplay between private and public notes can make a shared space more flexible and inviting.
• A public notepad is an area that others can see and perhaps contribute to.
  • Good for creating connections among community members. Notepads then become meeting places for interchanges among members like a blog.
• Ability to share notes with others allows people to send elements from the notepad to others, for instance, in an e-mail or IM.
  • A compromise between a private notepad and the value of sharing one's reflections.
• The material in the notepad is portable across contexts. It can be exported to other programs that people use in other contexts (e.g., into a Word file) preserving formatting or other characteristics.
  • Useful when members are not online but need access to their notepad material.

Related material