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?
Dave continues to tease us with the Weblog Outliner Tool. (SOURCE:Scripting News)-OK, Dave, please stop teasing us. I want this yesterday 🙂 for my Radio blog ! Ready to beta test anytime!
<QUOTE>Last year on this day I started work on My Weblog Outliner tool. I gotta get back to work on that soon. It’s a good thing. Outlining for Movable Type users. </QUOTE>
[Roland Tanglao’s Weblog]
I can see some pushing and shoving at the head of the line here. I already do 90% of my writing inside “Radio”‘s outliner and end up backing and filling a bit when I move something from there over to my blog. I would love to see “Dave” shift his attention back to this tool. Sign me up and Roland and I can start fighting offline to see who gets first dibs.
The Case Method. HBS teaches exclusively by case method- which goes well beyond just the teaching method at the school, but down to… [I have a brain cloud]
Adam does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the case method at HBS. I didn’t figure it out as quickly as he did, although I also chose to go there because of it. I didn’t really begin to grasp the case method until I began writing cases for use in the classroom while I was doing my doctoral work. Actually, I had to spend a year writing cases before they would even let me into the doctoral program. Something to do with some courses I managed to fail while I was getting my MBA–some people seemed to think this raised a question about whether I was qualified for the program.
Anyway, the key to the case method is that the goal is to help students develop a lasting skill, not pass an exam at the end of the semester. That skill is about finding and defining a problem, deciding on an appropriate goal, and then building a plan for moving from the problem toward the goal.
On paper that looks like a trivial process. Certainly not something clever enough to build a lot of fancy theory around that can get published in the right academic journals. But it does focus on the place where a manager or leader can have the greatest potential impact – defining the agenda. Moreover, because it is seen as a skill, it’s also clear that it needs to be developed and internalized with a lot of practice.
Sure, the place can seem like a collection of arrogant SOBs, especially from the outside. But it is one of the few places I know of that is absolutely clear that it’s central mission is to create an environment where the learner, not the teached, is the center of attention.
Great press for ActiveWords in USA Today: Information springs from your fingertips.
Like Tivo, Active Words is one of those things that doesn’t seem to make much sense until you try it – at which point you can’t imagine why others don’t use it. Check it out.
ActiveWords is one of those tricky products to market. I originally downloaded it on the recommendation of Ernie the Attorney, played with it a bit, and let it languish, after mentioning it on my blog. Shortly after, I got a call from the indefatigable Buzz Bruggeman, ActiveWords’s driving force. With some demoing and coaching from Buzz, ActiveWords is now one of the tools that sits quietly in the background and, over time, lets me tailor my computing environment to my own needs and work habits.
Let me give you a really simple example. I talk about knowledge management and knowledge sharing a lot. But I never type those words out anymore. Instead I type “km” and “ks” and ActiveWords does the rest for me. Better yet, ActiveWords (“aw” BTW) does it anywhere and everywhere I might want to use those terms. That alone is enough to justify the tool, but you can get a lot more clever than that over time.
I’ve been following the discussion and insight over at Invisible Adjunct with more than casual interest lately. There’s been some passionate and articulate discussion on the essential folly of getting a Ph.D. in the humanities (and many other disciplines for that matter). The problem being the huge imbalance between supply and demand for Ph.D.s in academic settings.
This discussion comes too late for me, since I already did the “piled higher and deeper” game (although to be technically correct my degree is not a Ph.D., but a D.B.A. – doctor of business administration, which has more to do with the academic politics of different graduate schools at Harvard than with anything else). I also went into the process with a clear notion of what the job market was likely to be.
I’ve actually spent the bulk of my post-doctoral career on the non-academic side of the fence and I’m headed back there again. You can see the details here, although I try to avoid wearing a tie whenever possible. I find that I’m happiest working in rapidly growing environments. Kellogg has been great fun and it was particularly rewarding to be able to develop a course on knowledge management, but what I’m interested in isn’t at the heart of what Kellogg does best. Time for a new adventure.
I’ve been at Huron now for a couple of months so I can say that I expect the blogging to continue. Managing knowledge work hasn’t gotten any easier and I expect I’ll continue to write down my questions, observations, and suggestions about how we can design our way into some useful answers. I just think of it as a participating in this colllective action research program from a slightly different location.
THE INCONCEIVABILITY OF GOOGLE, and the lessons to be drawn from that, are the subjects of my TechCentralStation column today, which carries the somewhat racy-sounding title Horizontal Knowledge: Just try this thought experiment: Imagine that it’s 1993. The Web is just appearing. And imagine that you – an unusually prescient… [Instapundit.com]
A great column from Glenn Reynolds over at TechCentralStation. Here’s the punch line:
The Web, Wi-Fi, and Google didn’t develop and spread because somebody at the Bureau of Central Knowledge Planning planned them. They developed, in large part, from the uncoordinated activities of individuals. [Reynold’s Wrap-TechCentralStation]
Glenn’s in one more voice in the growing realization that top-down planning and control strategies are relatively weak when set against the grassroots ingenuity of large groups. These are insights that have to be brought back inside organizations and put to use.