Dave Pollard on The Future of Knowledge Management

THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT.

kp

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.

[How to Save the World]

Continuing to catch up on old material in my aggregator. Another keeper from Dave Pollard.

Jay Cross's Controversial View of Meta-Learning

A Controversial View of Meta-Learning. Imagine you are the Chief Learning Officer of a successful high-tech firm in SIlicon Valley. You hear about a new eLearning title, “Mavis Beacon Teaches Reading.” It takes four hours to complete. It’s self-instructional. It’s delivered via the web. A learner can take it in… [Internet Time Blog]

Nice rant from Jay Cross I just got a chance to follow up on (one of the reasons I’m biased toward RSS feeds that provide the whole post instead of a teaser, but that’s a rant for another time). Jay’s summary:

School classes and corporate training would be more effective were learners initially told “This is our best thinking. It might be wrong. How do you see it?” That’s a meta-learning tactic that would improve results without adding costs. You could preface all eLearning with a reminder that learners should look for ways to improve the content, drop thoughts in the electronic suggestion box, and that they organization is always on the lookout for ways to improve its service. Positioning a learning event as inquiry instead a recounting of someone else’s truth puts a touch of humanity back into eLearning that’s often sterile.

Getting the concept of meta-learning to take hold requires acceptance that nothing is set in stone. There are no givens. The world is uncertain. Everything is relative. People can learn to learn better by taking a long term view in which learning answers the inevitable query of “What’s in it for me?”

The only thing controversial here is that this attitude is so hard to find in practice.

Censorware Blocks This Site

Censorware Blocks This Site. Simon Phipps alerts me that one of the big censorware outfits, SurfControl, is blocking this and other blogs as a… [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]

Hey, I’m hanging in a better neighborhood than I thought. Just checked McGee’s Musings at SurfControl to discover I’m blocked as well. Good to know that SurfControl’s rigorous methodology has carefully classified my blog as Usenet News. Won’t you sleep better tonight knowing your children are safe from my thoughts?

RSS = “push locally, pull globally”

RSS = “push locally, pull globally”. (SOURCE:The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Reeling in what you want from the Web)- Excellent redefinition of RSS: “push locally, pull globally”. thanks

QUOTE

RSS, an acronym that doesn’t expand to any one definition, is better described as “push locally, pull globally.”

Getting past blacklisting

Many news sites have adopted RSS as an alternative or replacement for e-mail lists, or listservs, which are more and more frequently the victim of unintended spam filtering. Many lists which send subscribers information in the form of electronic newsletters or messages find themselves temporarily blacklisted or they learn after a mailing that double-digit-percentages of legitimate subscribers never received the message.

That problem is avoided with RSS, because you don’t provide personal details to a Web site you’re following not even an e-mail address or password. Instead, the RSS news aggregator software, which is installed on your computer, regularly checks a special file on a Web site feed to which you’ve subscribed

UNQUOTE
[Roland Tanglao’s Weblog]

This is a really nice way to describe RSS quickly.

Some empirical support for the magic number 150

Two things:In the paper Co-evolution of….

Two things:

  1. In the paper Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans, Robin Dunbar predicts that the maximum group size that humans can maintain as a cohesive social unit, based on the ratio of neocortex volume to brain volume, is 147.8 (100.2-231.1 at 95% confidence). Consulting the literature, he finds that there’s a trimodal distribution of group sizes: bands at 30-50 people, tribes at 1000-2000, and an intermediate one. The mean size of the intermediate level group societies is 148.4.
  2. The AOL Instant Messenger servers impose a hard limit on the number of people you’re allowed to put in your buddylist: 150.

(For more, and a better summary of Dunbar’s paper, read The Magic of 150. Malcolm Gladwell also refers to the number 150 in his book The Tipping Point.)

[Interconnected]

I’ve been looking for a good link to this paper from 1993. Although there is a wide variation around the magic number 150 it is a really interesting conjecture. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]

Good to have a link to some empirical support for notion that certain group scales are hard-wired.

J. Boyle on the 2nd Enclosure Movement

J. Boyle on the 2nd Enclosure Movement. I came across this article as I was putting together the reading list for TP5: The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.(pdf file) This is a terribly interesting article that uses a fair amount of the history of intellectual property thought and economics to raise the … [Furdlog]

More for my reading pile on intellectual property. Maybe I should have gone to law school after all.

Ruth McGee 1925-2003

Mom passed away last week. I've gone back and forth over whether to post something here or not. What finally tipped it was this write up from yesterday's memorial service that my Dad put together.

Thank you all for coming today and thank you all for your loving care and support. Ruth is delighted.

She firmly believed that we are all created in the image and likeness of Christ so she was convinced that He too was a collector (pack-rat?) of memorabilia (Crayola art, cards, pictures, “Good” report cards, awards, diplomas, knick-knacks, various “can't live without” items from her many travels, etc.). As a result she believed her first assignment would be to clean out all His closets and storage spaces before she could set up bridge games and our rooms. So if you see muddy rain and hear noisy thunder don't be surprised. It's Ruth organizing the clean-up crews. Wear a hard hat. The hail may be rather heavy and odd-shaped.

Thank you again for everything and listen for her infectious laugh.

So now you have a sense for where my occasionally off-center perspective comes from. We're all doing ok. And my hard hat is close at hand.