Month: September 2003

Copyright cops in the NYTimes

“You Coulld Be Next”. A Cartoon in the NYTimes?

“On copyright – the Copyright Cops – outlining many of the favorite examples of just how pervasive copyright (and copyright infringement) has become in modern life.” [Furdlog]

And make sure you’re reading Furdlog daily because Frank is doing a fantastic job covering filesharing and copyright issues.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Ridicule may be the most effective tool available to address copyright in its current incarnation. And listen to Jenny; Furdlog should be in your aggregator.

MP3s Are Not the Devil – Orson Scott Card on copyright

Orson Scott Card weighs in on copyright from the perspective of record companies vs. those who actually create something:

So it’s pretty hilarious to hear record company executives and movie studio executives get all righteous about copyright. They’ve been manipulating copyright laws for years, and all the manipulations were designed to steal everything they could from the actual creators of the work.

Thanks to Slashdot for the pointer.

Knowledge at Work – Denham Gray's new blog

Where are the KM discussions?. There seems to have been a dramatic drop in the level of on-line KM discussion across all the key forums since the end of the first quarter '03. Let's take a tour: The EU Knowledge board has closed its forms… [Knowledge-at-work]

Denham Gray starts a blog, Knowledge at Work, in addition to his KMWiki and his frequent thoughtful comments on existing blogs.  I've certainly benefitted from his generous contributions to my thinking. I've subscribed to his feed and am looking forward to being able to follow his contributions more easily.

Denham is focused on the interactions between knowledge workers level of knowledge management, so it's intriguing that he's picked up on a drop in activity in discussion forums and email channels devoted to KM. Certainly, in my own case, I've found a blog to be a better forum for striking a balance between developing my ideas about knowledge management and knowledge work and sharing those ideas with the broader community of interest/practice around the topic. I find the signal to noise ratio of blogs much higher and much more susceptible to management than in threaded discussions or mailing lists.

Making the Case for the Case Method

For those of you who are interested in the case method as a tool for teaching and learning, David Garvin of the Harvard Business School has an excellent article in the September-October issue of Harvard Magazine. Better yet, it is available online:

All professional schools face the same difficult challenge: how to prepare students for the world of practice. Time in the classroom must somehow translate directly into real-world activity: how to diagnose, decide, and act. A surprisingly wide range of professional schools, including Harvard’s law, business, and medical schools, have concluded that the best way to teach these skills is by the case method. [Making the Case: Professional education for the world of practice]

Garvin’s research and writing have focused on organizational learning long before it was a popular buzzword. This article offers extensive background on the origins and history of case method teaching as well as insights into how it is evolving.

Recommended reading from Ray Ozzie – Power to the Edge

Power to the Edge:  A new book by Dave Alberts and Richard Hayes – open sourced in its entirety by CCRP. 

This book is truly a must-read for anyone interested in decentralization and the social and organizational relevance of shifting power to the edge, whether in a commercial or a defense context.  As you read about the technology enablers of the edge, it'll become clear why products such as Groove – as COTS enablers of the fully-networked collaborative environment – have such immediate relevance to the defense community.

A debt of gratitude goes to John Stenbit and Lin Wells for catalyzing the creation of this tremendously timely, useful and relevant piece of work. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Something to add to my high-priority reading list (as opposed to my much longer “get to it someday” readling list). There's certainly major new possibilities in organizational design that make it feasible to distribute decision making more widely and the competitive environment makes that distribution much more strategically relevant.

Rolling Stone's classic coverage on Spacewar and computing

Classic Video Games And Computers. While looking up music lyrics i found myself clicking on one 1980s site's link to classic video games. They turned out to be implemented in Flash — yuck, but in the usual Net way it lead to me reading up on early VideoGameHistory. The real gem on that front is Stewart Brand's 1972 article from Rolling Stone, on Spacewar and computing in general:

I asked Alan Kay if Spacewar had been played over the Net.

Since I was looking for emulators anyway, I also dug up the most recent version of VICE, which among other things emulates the CommodorePet, my first computer. [AbbeNormal – Abbe Normal]

Another example of all the good stuff you can find on the web. Brand's Rolling Stone article is one of those classics that I've been wanting to lay my hands on for a while.

Of course, this is available as a labor of love. While you're at the site, check out the rest of the coverage about the original Spacewar.

Dan Bricklin adds an RSS feed

RSS feeds galore.

Dan Bricklin has finally attached an RSS feed to his blog.  Thanks, Dan.  Over the past year, the number of Web and eMail holdouts has been steadily (and thankfully) decreasing.  A few remaining that I'd love to see embracing RSS in their subscriber notification & distribution models:  Mark Anderson's SNS, Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, Dave Farber's IP.  C'mon, Mark, Esther & Dave … it's truly a “reader-friendly” approach. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

I've been reading all my news exclusively via my Radio aggregator for sometime now.  One site I really miss – is “Good Morning Silicon Valley“. I really wish they had an RSS feed.

[Marc's Voice]

Another blogger sees the light.

As Ozzie says, RSS is “truly a 'reader-friendly' approach.” If making it easier for your readers is one of your priorities, there's no excuse for making them come to your site if they want to focus on your words and ideas in an aggregator.

I'm not waiting up for the semantic web

Semantic Web. Semantic Web, proper noun: An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy. [The Devil s Dictionary (2.0)] [Seb’s Open Research]

Finally, something that captures why I can’t get terribly interested or excited about discussions of the semantic web. It’s fundamentally a recapitulation of the neats v. scruffies arguments from the early days of AI research. I am firmly in the scruffy camp despite my deep respect for librarians.

Dolly Levi as the patron saint of the knowledge economy

Apropos of the gift economy of weblogs, here’s a great little story courtesy of David Gurteen on courtesy among scholars.

The scholar’s courtesy. A few weeks back I met with a very interesting woman called [Shane Godbolt] who works for the National Heatth Service (NHS) in the UK.

As she valued my website and newsletter – she brought me several ‘knowledge gifts’ in return as a ‘thank you’. This is just what I love about Knowledge Sharing – you get back as mcuh as you give – if not more [Smile!]

Amongst these gifts was a beautiful little story about the importance of acknowledging the sources of your ideas – regardless of whether they are in ‘print’ or not.

I received an early lesson about acknowledging others from my mentor George Spindler. The Spindlers were houseguests visiting me after I took a full-time academic appointment upon completion of doctoral studies. I eagerly shared an early draft of a chapter I had been invited to write, tentatively entitled “Concomitant Learning”.

Spindler was up early the next morning, but to my disappointment I found him looking through materials he had written (my library contained many of them) rather than reading my new draft. He had already read and enjoyed my article, he explained, but he expressed disappointment at my failure to credit him as a source of inspiration for the concept that provided my title and rationale. He had been searching for the citation I should have made. “But you’ve never written about it ,” I explained, reaffirming what I already knew and he was beginning to suspect. “I got the idea from you, but you only suggested it in a seminar. There was no publication to cite.”

Technically (and luckily ) I was correct, as his search revealed. That wasn’t the entire lesson however. “No matter where or how you encounter them,” he counseled, “always give credit for the sources of your ideas. It’s so easy to do so : so appropriate to good scholarship … and so appreciated.”

Never again have I limited my acknowledgements only to people whose ideas are in print. And I, too, have “so appreciated” that courtesy when extended to me!

Harry F. Wolcott, Writing up qualitative research, 1990, pp.72-73). Quoted in Blaise Cronin, The scholars courtesy, the role of acknowledgement in the primary communication process. Taylor Graham 1995, p122. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

Na ve though it may be, I continue to believe that knowledge hoarding and information hoarding are fundamentally pathological behaviors that have little chance of surviving in the face of healthy organizations. People who really know stuff are always willing and eager to share their interests and knowledge with others. Those who feel compelled to hoard their knowledge do so because of the meagerness of their holdings not because of their riches. Dolly Levi is the patron saint of the knowledge economy not Ebenezer Scrooge.