Mathemagenic

Matt Mower raises some unresolved Klogging issues:

• Klogs can overlap with existing formal systems - does klogging means that the same thing is not reported in formal way?
• Decentralised klogging vs. organisational trends to control. 
• Does klog makes it easier to control you?
• As klogs are not really secure, could you post anything anything sensitive?
• Are big-KM vendors missing the point?

I love this issue popping up again and again: how control and formal structures can coexist with natural informal networks. I'm not sure that I want to tackle the whole issue, but at least I want to look at the learning side of it.

[from my PhD proposal] Learning is best described by the metaphor “you can lead horse to the water, but you cannot make it drinking”, or as Joseph Kessels says “you cannot make people smarter”. Even in the case of formal learning an organisation does not have control over employee’s brain and heart, so in order to benefit from employee learning, companies have to find the way to support and encourage it without full control. The author believes that the answer lies in supporting interplay between individual and organisational needs by relating and integrating employee-driven informal learning and organisation-driven formal learning.

Professions in the blogosphere: is there a pattern? from Seb's Open Research:

Thinking about the professions that are well-represented in the blogosphere...

• software developers (too many to list)
• journalists: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/cyberjournalists.html
• librarians: http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html
• educators: (anyone know a good list?)
• lawyers: http://radio.weblogs.com/0104634/outlines/Law%20Blogs.html (with a subsection on academic law blogs)

I've been trying to articulate out what these professions have in common that could explain why weblogging has become an especially popular practice in those areas. I'm not finished thinking about it yet, but I think the commonality has to do with uncovering the implicit. 

Software developers patiently explain to a machine things for which humans wouldn't need an explanation. Journalists take threads from different places and build a coherent story out of them. Teachers patiently explain to students things for which trained specialists wouldn't need an explanation. Librarians gather and organize explicitly material that is only implicitly connected. Lawyers, whenever they seek to correctly interpret the intent of a law, need to uncover its spirit which is almost always implicit. All of them are not just pattern recognizers, they are also pattern explainers.

Great!

I would add KM people who are trying to uncover and understand grassroots knowledge flows and then enhance them to add business value. I also thought about usability professionals (for me Alertbox was a starting point to think about something like blog), although I'm not aware if there are a lot of blogs by them.

For me, blog is something for articulating ideas. They get some shape once they get out of my brain, and it becomes easier to deal with them. Blog is something for catching those difficult to catch things...

I'm thinking why such articulation is so powerful? I guess this is something to do with another thing: teaching someone else is the most effective learning method (don't have the reference). Explaining things is the best way to understand them...