Year: 2003

Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?

Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?.

Nice: Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?

[elearnspace blog]

A very well done and thorough introduction to RSS. Here’s one quote that nicely captures the payoff from using RSS as a core component of your personal knowledge management strategy:

Since I started monitoring RSS feeds from about 80 instructional technology weblogs in January 2003, I can without a doubt say I have learned of more innovations and information relevant to my field than I would have gotten from checking web sites and reading listservs.

There’s been some recent noise about the bandwidth demands imposed by RSS readers that poll sites too frequently or not intelligently enough. I’m sure there are technical issues to be dealt with, but let’s not forget my bandwidth as an individual. RSS increases my bandwidth for monitoring things that matter to me by an order of magnitude.

Say yes to taking control

Just say no to Microsoft.

Gadgetopia links to this tremendous resource: Just Say No to Microsoft

[elearnspace blog]

Just nice to be reminded that there are alternatives.

An implicit message that I want to highlight is the issue of taking control of your own work environment. It is a personal computer after all. Even if you choose or have to stay with Microsoft products, that shouldn’t preclude your taking the time to make them work the way that best suits your needs.

BTW, that’s the logic behind why I shelled out my own money to add ActiveWords to my computing mix. I don’t use it anywhere near to its full potential, but even the little productivity gains and friction eliminators mean that I pay for ActiveWords in about half a day.

A link-rich meditation on time from Jay Cross

Time.

It’s about time

Time is all we have. Most of us can feel time speeding up. Many of us are enslaved by time. But most of what we consider “time” is actually in our heads.

“What part of now is it you don’t understand?” –Zydeco… [Internet Time Blog]

A link-rich meditation from Jay Cross. Just skimming what Jay has provided and linked to could easily take days.

Jay Cross overview of knowledge management

Knowledge Management. Knowledge management is a high-fallutin’ buzz phrase for creating and sharing know-how. A hot item circa 1998, overuse watered down KM’s popularity as a category (although it’s still a hot item in Europe). To vendors, KM became “whatever I want to sell you,” be it… [Internet Time Blog]

A predictably rich and interesting review knowledge management from Jay Cross. A nice mix of links and Jay’s usual insights

John Patrick on Blogs.

CIOs wake up and smell the coffee. John Patrick on Blogs. Insightful. Eloquent. The guy oozes common sense. Heck, I’m almost quoting the whole interview.

I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say, “What’s the big deal? We had that in 1972,” like knowledge management or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of people said, “oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in the 1960s.” It’s true we did. But what makes IM different is that now we have the Internet the widespread sharing of information. That allows for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.

[…] Blogs have the power to introduce new voices into the mix, which will enrich the quality of information available. Voices not necessarily heard before, thanks to limitations of money, access or hierarchy you’re not the CEO, you’re just a guy with a big idea now you can bridge those gaps. Say you’re a CIO who wants to develop some thought leadership around the need to rethink the company’s approach to mobile workforce strategies. Blogs can give you access to the grassroots and to your peers that you might not otherwise have had.

[…] There are millions of people who are experts at certain things, have a point of view and are good communicators. They are not journalists in the traditional sense, but they will create large amounts of information that will be syndicated around the world. People will no longer just do a Google search to find information on a topic. Instead, they will search the blogsphere to find out what those in the know are currently thinking and writing on a topic.

[…] I suspect that blogging is already happening, in most major companies today, even though the CIO may not have ever heard of it. Run a search across the intranet and look for XML blog files. You’ll find them.

[…] We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that’s going on. “Just ask Sally. She’ll know.” There’s always a Sally, and those are the people who become the bloggers.

(via Internet Time Blog) [Seb’s Open Research]

Lots of fellow bloggers have been pointing to this interview with John Patrick. Seb has quoted quite a bit, but you really need to read the whole thing.

What's your Google Number?

What's your Google Number?. (SOURCE:Don Park's Daily Habit)- My google number is 45, 800.  What's yours?

QUOTE

Latest Google fad seems to be calculating Google Number (via Elliotte Rusty Harold). A person's Google Number is the number of results return by Google when queried with the person's name in double quotes like “Don Park”. Bill Gates and Michael Jackson are both around 2,900,000. Dave Winer is 194,000 and Don Box is 127,000. My google number is 83,700 which seems too high.

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

18,900 for me.

UPDATE: I found some more background on this in an interview with Valdis Krebs in the Star Tribune. Using the common variations on my name that I use pushes the number up over 25,000 although that's a bit high because there are a number of other Jim/James McGee's out there on the web. Still not a bad return on two years of blogging.

John Seely Brown on Stolen Knowledge

Stolen but unfinished. Prodded by Maish’s eLearningpost, this evening I re-read John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s wonderful article, Stolen Knowledge. More than ten years old now, yet people are still absorbing the message. I gained new insights from my return visit.

… the best way to support learning is from the demand side rather than the supply side. That is, rather than deciding ahead of time what a learner needs to know and making this explicitly available to the exclusion of everything else, designers and instructors need to make available as much as possible of the whole rich web of practice-explicit and implicit-allowing the learner to call upon aspects of practice, latent in the periphery, as they are needed….

[Internet Time Blog]

And, prodded by Jay, I just did the same.

The quote that opens the paper is also worth highlighting:

A very great musician came and stayed in [our] house. He made one big mistake . . . [he] determined to teach me music, and consequently no learning took place. Nevertheless, I did casually pick up from him a certain amount of stolen knowledge.

[Rabindrath Tagore quoted in Bandyopadhyay, 1989: 45]

Why is it such a hard step to give up on the notion of control? Or, put another way, why do organizations and schools insist on forcing certain content down people’s throats? You might want to take a look at Roger Schank’s thoughts about learning in this context. Take a look at Coloring Outside the Lines : Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules or at Designing World-Class E-Learning.

Or if you want things in a real nutshell consider the following bit of wisdom from Calvin and Hobbes:

Calvin and Hobbes for 27 Nov 1992