The Shifted Librarian: Tuesday, May 20, 2003.
Steven Vore found the online video for the Ad Council’s chilling commercial about the potential consequences of the federal government tracking what you do at your library. “Chilling” because it appears to be quite prescient.
A little reminder of the fragility of a free society. Worth keeping in mind.
Kevin Kelly’s Recomendo. Before Kevin Kelly was the executive editor of Wired, he edited Whole Earth Review. I became hooked when he took over WER, and loved his Whole Earth book, Signal (which was based on an issue of WER that turned me on to Factsheet Five and the zine world). For the past few months, Kevin has been quietly publishing the wonderful Cool Tools email newsletter. It consists of reviews of “cool stuff”:
I include any books, tools, software, videos, maps, gadgets, hardware, websites, or gear that are extraordinarily handy or useful for individual and small groups. The best items are those that open up new possibilities. I depend on friends and readers to suggest things. Generally I try something out first if I can. I only recommend things I like and I ignore the rest. Tell me what you love. Suggestions for tools better than what I recommend always welcomed.
I bought a first aid kit for my trip to the islands based on Kevin’s review in Cool Tools. You can see all the past picks from Cool Tools on Kevin’s Recomendo site. Also, if you email him, he’ll put you on the Cool Tools list. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
Kevin Kelly’s Whole Earth Review was one of my favorite reads. The tools perspective was (and still is ) a powerful one, especially because it demands a level of mutual respect between tool and tool user. Tools are multi-purpose and what you create with them depends on the skill and discipline of the user as well as on the quality of the tool. That’s a lesson that gets forgotten in the marketing speak that makes empty promises of pushbutton ease of use and productivity for nothing.
Turns out that the Recomendo site also has an RSS feed, although it is titles only.
Creative Computing 1976 archive online. Stefan sez, “From the primordial depths of personal computing history: A collection of scanned pages from the pioneering educational/entertainment zine, Creative Computing. I read a lot of these pieces in the original magazines, circa 1976. It has a BASIC listing for one of the very first computer games I ever played, DEEPSPACE. Volume 1 is also available on the site. Look for the advertisement by Roger Crumb!” Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Lots of great stuff here. For example, look for Terry Winograd’s Reactive Engine paper. Still worth reading and thinking about.
KMPro with Mark Clare. Mark Clare argues that KM needs to step back and define knowledge before plunging forward with the “next wave” of knowledge management approaches or applications. [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]
I disagree.
I think that most efforts to define knowledge get hopelessly bogged down. The reason this happens is that the discussion is locked in an assumption that there needs to be a centrally managed agreement (at a minimum) about the definition.
I take a different approach. Focus instead on knowledge workers and knowledge work. Work on eliminating friction and hassles in their ability to do whatever it is they think matters. Attack the problems that are preventing knowledge workers from being as effective as they would like to be.
There’s an old story that I’ve heard described as a Russion proverb. It says that if each one of us takes care of sweeping the sidewalk in front of our own home, we won’t need streetsweepers. It’s worth thinking about how that might apply to the world of knowledge work, both on the level of being an individual knowledge worker yourself and on the level of helping make the other knowledge workers that surround you more effective.
qotd june 11. Paul Beatty: “If all the world’s a stage, I want to operate the trap door.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]
This is the kind of twisted mind that appeals to me. My other favorite along these lines came from a t-shirt long since gone. It read:
“If all the world’s a stage, I want better lighting.”
Essay. At the risk of being blogged under by many postings from the Jupiter weblog conference, I submit my thesis on weblogs: Copy-Paste Culture [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]
The nut graf:
Weblogs are a combination of a copy-paste word processor and relay station
I don’t know if this is better than Dave’s WMAWAW essay, but it’s more fun. The difference between Harvard and MTV I suppose.
Part of me is missing the Weblogs and Business Strategy conference in Boston, despite the excellent liveblogging going on from so many of the participants (topic exchange channel and Denise Howell in particular). My aggregator is overflowing with great input from the conference. On the other hand, the distance and the need to focus on my work at hand also provides a valuable filter for processing that input.
While my last several large posts have focused on wikis (part 1 , part 2, part 3) and the social dimensions of knowledge work, I want to shift back to the personal level of blogs. There’s a thread to the use of blogs inside organizations that I want to spend some time exploring.
As blogs and news aggregators move from fringe activity to leading edge phenomenon, it becomes possible to talk about the design of knowledge work. Tom Davenport, for example, has a column in the most recent issue of CIO Magazine [via Internet Time Blog] that says it’s time to look at improving the effectiveness of knowledge workers. He talks about a new effort by the Information Worker Productivity Council to study knowledge work tasks with an eye toward how Accenture and HP and Xerox can help (possibliy with an eye toward selling us something). That’s great and I’ll be following their work with interest. They’ve certainly assembled an all star list of researchers. I wonder if they’ll be blogging their efforts?
Meanwhile, I’m interested in following the radically decentralized action research program now underway in the efforts of all of us knowledge workers beginning to narrate their work and share in their collective experiments at making knowledge work more effective.
Some of us are lucky or talented enough to roll our own tools. Moreover, they’ve been willing to invite the rest of us in as co-designers . Now, many of the tools already in our toolkits theoretically allow us to participate in a design process. They’ve been built by programmers, after all, and programmers almost always prefer to solve general problems with tools rather than provide highly specific solutions to specific problems.
Unfortunately, most of those programmers work in organizations where the marketing staffs graduated from the “have solution, will travel” school of marketing and really aren’t terribly interested in having active customers who actually are interested in co-designing their tools.
In the blogging community, however, the offer to participate as co-designers is serious. Blogging tools represent my favorite class of tools–ones that can be abused in interesting ways, even by ordinary users. They grew out of their developers needs to solve their own problems. What becomes interesting now is the alignment between the problems of developers and the rest of us doing knowledge work.
Taking advantage of that alignment does demand that we take an active role in the design process. Knowledge work is craft work brought into the 21st century. As many have observed, knowledge workers own their own means of production. If we are craft workers and we are judged by the quality of what we create, then we have an obligation to be mindful about how we use our tools and how we fit them to our own needs. To be most effective, we need to take design responsibility for our own knowledge work environment. I’ll grant that we are still only at the Visicalc stage of blogging and aggregators. But that does not absolve us of the responsibility to understand and capitalize on what today’s level of technology can do for us.
There continues to be great dialog on wikis in the mix of knowledge work in organizations. Ross Mayfield, of socialtext, has an excellent summary post on Group Voice that makes a good point to pick up this thread.
Its not a choice between one or another. The temporal structure of weblogs and logical structure of wikis are a complement for lasting effects. One of the more powerful patterns in an organization is how an opportunity is published in blog, possibilities are swarmed upon in blog conversation and then driven to consensus and outcome in a wikified document. After the outcome, the knowledge and its social context remains.
Both tools together create powerful effects for publishing, communication and collaboration.
Denham Gray calls attention to the key differentiating aspects of wikis in a comment he posted. His key distinctions:
- The power to contribute BOTH to content and structure – other genres require you post within a predetermined structure (blogs, bulletin boards, guestbooks, IM….)
- True equality – blogs have an implicit posting hierarchy – some get main board status, the rest are relegated to buried comments (if allowed)
- Collaborative writing at the most fundamental (text) level – this is very different from annotation, editorial commentary or letters to the editor!
- Open edit – you can change anything at anytime – no attributation, notime/ date stamps in wiki- just pure flow
Stuart Henshall recommends a look at NexistWiki and also offers several interesting reports on the use of wikis in working sessions (see The One Hour Wiki). Doug Holton at Ed Tech Dev offers a pointer to Tiki (and other CMS tools) for Teaching. One curious thing I’ve noticed is that wikis appear to be very popular in the Smalltalk/Squeak community. Here’s one directory, for example, of Smalltalk Wiki Webs.
Next steps for me will be to begin frequenting a few wikis, installing a wiki somewhere I can play with, and looking for appropriate group opportunities where I can apply wikis. As if I had spare time I was desparate to fill :).
Fill Life
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes.”
The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.
“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things your family, your health, your children, your job, your friends, your favorite passions things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else the small stuff.”
“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. “The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house, and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented. The professor smiled and replied, “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of beers.”
I’ve heard this one before, but that doesn’t make it any less pertinent
Size Matters. via Subtraction.com: “Starship Dimensions” is a phenomenal piece of work and a staggeringly detailed attempt to apply metrics to imagination. [All topics]
Starship Dimensions is one of the wonderful places that only the web can make possible. From the site’s description:
For those of you who are new to the site, this site is intended to allow science fiction fans to get an impression of the true scale of their favorite science fiction spacecraft by being able to campare ships accross genres, as well as being able to compare them with contemporary objects with which they are probably familiar.
Haven’t you always wanted to know how bit an Imperial Star Destroyer was relative to the Enterprise?