“Email is where knowledge goes to die”. What a great line. (This piece by Bill French might be the original source.) Via Lilia, who reflects on asking questions in public.
[Seb’s Open Research]
Get’s my vote for meme of the week. I also think I saw a reference to this from Scoble as well. Thank you Robert, Bill, Lilia, and Seb.
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
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.
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.
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….
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:
Information architecture references. The University of Minnesota Duluth has published an excellent set of information architecture references, to a wide range of articles, sites and tutorials. [Thanks to InfoDesign.]… [Column Two]
A nice find from James Robertson.
Wiki – KM survey. Martin Cleaver and his fellow students from the Michael G. Degroote School of Business are running an interesting questionnaire on using TWiki for KM. BTW your inputs would be greatly appreciated by their class. KM surveys have become something of… [Knowledge-at-work]
Something to follow up on later this week.
Electronic Portfolio White Paper. Everybody is talking about e-portfolios these days, and this paper talks about them a lot, 68 PDF pages worth. With contributors from Blackboard, eCollege, EDUCAUSE and a bunch of universities, among others, this paper also carries some clout. The paper aims to provide “a comprehensive review of electronic portfolios, from a conceptual understanding of applications to identifying technical and interoperability requirements (and) to provide a conceptual overview exploring potential opportunities and challenges to electronic portfolio adopters and developers.” This it does, with a series of use cases and a good conceptual overview. Several architectures are proposed, but in the end, only the ‘peer-to-peer’ model is worth considering, since the others are tied to enterprise systems. Comprehensive references and resources. If you are interested in ePortfolios, I can’t think of a better place to start than with this discussion. By Gary Greenberg, ed., ePort Consortium, November 3, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
The notion of portfolios is relevant and applicable well beyond the campus. I routinely ask to see samples of people’s work when interviewing. We all produce portfolios of our work. The question is how well organized is your portfolio.
David Brett of Knexa, a friend of mine, just sent me this link, to consultants who look like they’ve put language to Drucker’s notion that knowledge workers own the means of production in an increasingly knowledge-based economy (see his article titled Beyond the Information Revolution, a central article to the creation of the concept of wirearchy for me).
I have spoken and written about this sea-change in the nature of work in terms of the “Mass Customization of Work“, which I think is the logical and very likely result of individuals’ knowledge and working styles (necessarily) interweaving with the structure and flow of large integrated systems for the distribution and manipulation of information.
I’ll have to check out in more detail the site of Volitional Partners, who say they are launching a revolution in the nature of work, wherein individual employees “own” their knowledge. It looks interesting, and also looks like they want to stake out some mindspace with their language and wordings.
There are many people, processes and applications purporting to do some or all of this, in terms of human capital, intellectual capital, social capital, relationship capital and so on. I think it’s all part of a very big and very permanent shift, in which conversations and dialogue between human minds, imagination, voice and purpose play a central role.
Nothing is more human than the capability to engage in conversation and dialogue, point and argue, push back and pull forward ideas into newer, more interesting, more stimulating, more coherent shapes. This will be central to work, to culture and to democracy as we believe it should be, in the next few years to come.
My first reactions to the site of Volitional Partners are more cynical than Jon’s. We have lots of perfectly serviceable language already. Anyone whose homepage is littered with neologisms, trademark symbols, and talk of “Proprietary Platforms” has dug themselves a hole that I am reluctant to explore.
It comes across as a hybrid cross between New Age Mysticism and MBA MarketingSpeak. I can only hope it’s a sterile hybrid. If there is something real and useful there, wouldn’t it come across without the noise?
Jon calls this another step along the way. I wonder in what direction?
Knowledge searching. It may be a little passe, but the Johari window in its many re-incarnations, remains a useful reminder when looking at personal or organizational knowledge. Knowledge assets There are a number of variations depending on where you are coming from… [Knowledge-at-work]
Another good resource from Denham
THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT.
Lately I've been talking to quite a few companies about Social Network Enablement, Social Software, Weblogs, the ineffective use of technology and knowledge by front-line workers (both because these tools are inadequate, and because they're not used properly), and what this all means for the discipline of Knowledge Management. I've blogged about all of these subjects recently, but if anyone is interested, I've put together this discussion paper in MS Word that captures it all in one place. I plan to produce a KM Future State Vision paper, as a companion piece, as well.
Continuing to catch up on old material in my aggregator. Another keeper from Dave Pollard.
