Internalization

For Nonaka (1994), internalization or embodiment occurred in application and practice, as a full-body experience rather than an intellectual knowing. The artificial setting of the IELTS exam limits time for reflection, combination or socialization, and instead provides a concentrated, physical experience, or performance, with

candidates expected to remember a web of grammar, vocabulary, and organizational strategies as well as cultural and rhetorical patterns to support their ideas.

Exercising ba supports doing in real life or simulations – or even the artificial experience of the exam – and transforms explicit knowledge into embodied or tacit knowledge. In practice, in tests and resits, or in subsequent academic writing, recently-acquired awareness becomes automatic or tacit from practice and

application. Knowledge conversion does not stop at the internalization phase, but spirals upward in the members’ use of writing at higher levels.

Based on the previous sections, Figure 18 suggests forum interactions for particular modes in Nonaka’s original SECI framework.

Figure 18: SECI Framework and Feedback in a Discussion Forum on Writing (Adapted from Nonaka & Konno, 1998; Nonaka et al., 2000)

While the interactions in Figure 18 maintain the characteristics of each of Nonaka’s modes, this study proposes a further slight modification in layout only to emphasize the core role of socialization in the online setting (see Figure 19) and to address the difficulties suggested by Hosseini (2011), Haag and Duan (2012), and Bryceson (2007), among others.

Socialization is key because it provides the ba for all other interactions to occur. It cannot be dispensed with simply because the setting is online (Haag & Duan, 2012), or a by-product of discussion (Bryceson, 2007). In contrast, in Figure 19‘s proposed layout, socialization is presented as underpinning the other forms of knowledge conversion. This does not remove its primarily tacit form: it is in the socialization mode that feelings, experiences, trust, goals, and empathy are shared.

Socialization is used in the forum in its everyday meaning of meeting, greeting, friendliness, and acknowledgment of others, and also with the meaning of being socialized or acculturated into learning or preparation for the test (Martin-Niemi & Greatbanks, 2010; Mickan & Motteram, 2008) and for new academic and

professional communities (Brown et al., 1989; Rea-Dickins et al., 2007), with communication in the L2 strengthening members’ identities as new language users. Through active participation and through observing the community, forum members were thus both learning about the domain, i.e., writing for the exam, and learning

about the forum, including how to get help, post successfully, and manage interpersonal relations and group functioning – all in the L2 (Brown et al., 1989; Collins, Newman, & Brown, 1987; Singh & Holt, 2013; Suthers, 2006).

Despite the lack of purely social posts and the high degree of task-orientation, a sense of community was palpable through politeness, greetings, use of names (particularly by more active members), generalized reciprocity, and citizenship behavior evidenced in the painstaking feedback of many members. The disappointment at the forum closure, the requests for Skype speaking partners, and the suggestions for

improvement also indicated social presence (Garrison, Anderson, et al., 2010), with participants identifying with the community, trusting each other, and (to a lesser extent) developing interpersonal relationships. Bayliss and Ingram (2007) found that self-confidence improved performance during IELTS preparation: along with

lowering anxiety (MacIntyre, 1997) a perception of social presence or support may have increased member engagement and confidence, addressing the lack of agency found by Mickan and Motteram (2009) among many IELTS test-takers.

While these forms of socialization may lack Nonaka’s indwelling or close physical proximity (1994), the trust, care, and commitment associated with originating ba (Nonaka et al., 2000, p. 15) allowed members to contribute and to move from individual tacit understandings of writing and the test to a shared externalization mode, combining and ultimately internalizing their new perspectives in a knowledge- creating spiral.

Visitors to the forum encountered a huge amount of information, opinions, and essays, and a group of learners sharing similar goals. This is contrast to Bryceson’s ESCIE model (2007), in which visitors first met course content or ‘explicitization’. In the forum, visitors and members had to make sense of interactions among writers centered around essays as vehicles of discourse (Waldron, 2012), therefore entering into a milieu at once both task-oriented and social rather than separately social or task-oriented, and to some degree paralleling Bryceson’s simultaneous socialization and combination.

Figure 19: Modified SECI model for online discussion

In the modification in Figure 19 above, apart from the central role given to online socialization, the essential characteristics of Nonaka’s knowledge conversion modes remain unchanged, with knowledge about academic essay writing being converted from tacit to explicit, combined in new explicit forms, and internalized again as tacit knowledge. As well as establishing care, trust, and commitment and an environment of sharing and empathy, socialization allows for gradual acculturation (Martin-Niemi & Greatbanks, 2010) and for lurking and less visible forms of participation as an active learning strategy of members and visitors.

Having socialization underpin and permeate the other forms of knowledge creation and conversion allows for more fluid interplay of the different modes. Encounters with the forum can begin at almost any point, but always with some element of socialization. Instead of a rigid sequencing, knowledge conversions can occur almost simultaneously: rather than being fixed in one mode or proceeding rigidly through modes, a criticism leveled by Gourlay (2006) and Engeström (1999), interactions in

the forum were more fluid, with participants moving quickly through multiple modes of knowledge conversion.

Socialization and Lurking

Lurking and socialization have a paradoxical relationship. Nonaka’s model

emphasized physicality and a sense of being, action and involvement, and Takeuchi stressed that participants need to engage in the flow of ideas and “cannot be

onlookers or bystanders” (Takeuchi, 2006, p. 89). The reference to engagement is key: lurkers, although not contributing written artifacts, were nevertheless engaged in the flow of ideas and interactions, empathizing, reading, reflecting, or rejecting, and perhaps writing and editing offline.

As described earlier, lurking occurred as members waited before their first posts, suggesting a gradual engagement with the ideas of the forum and a socialization process with the forum dynamics, member identities, and content. Members then lurked selectively during their membership, particularly before giving feedback, and changed participation again after final posts. The large number of repeat visitors shown in server logs suggested an audience much larger than the active membership, suggesting that socialization must have occurred to some degree at least (Baumer et al., 2008; Blanchard & Markus, 2004), although probably to a lesser extent than for active members (Black, 2005a; Smith et al., 2009).