Mathemagenic

Digging Ideas Out of People's Heads via McGee's Musings

I worry sometimes about the public expression of information that should be kept confidential, but I worry more about the exponentially worse problem of keeping confidential that which should be publicly expressed.  I can think of ways to solve the first problem, but I can't dig ideas out of people's heads.  They must be expressed to be used.  [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

See also Interorganisational communities and knowledge leaking

McGee's Musings here

I find that creating knowledge is hard work. And, I've found that keeping a weblog is one absolutely essential tool for helping me catch ideas before they slip away and then working to develop them into something useful.

Making people smarter isn't the point (commenting You cannot make people smarter):

The question of whether you can make people smarter or not isn't the point. That suggests that only smart people can benefit from knowledge management or other initiatives?

No, that suggests that at the end people learn by themselves :)))

It's Alan Kay's old point - point of view is worth IQ points (the actual number being in dispute as is the relevance of raw intelligence to the discussion). Maybe it's a philosophical point. For me, if you're still alive, you're learning. If you're learning, you're at least potentially getting smarter in some practical sense.

Curiouser and curiouser! describes klogging by sale reps.

We are discussing problems with establishing communities between sales/marketing peopls. I wonder if klogging could be an alternative?

In any case I expect motivation to be the main problem...

John Robb's Radio Weblog:

I really didn't expect weblogs to change the way I met with people.  This was a surprise.

You already know them. Similar as googling changes dating :)))

The discussion continues here

Something to add to my question about "can we support informal learning". Supporting often means formalizing... [Mathemagenic]

For me, supporting informal learning largely means making it easier for people to find and pull whatever knowledge they need at a given time. It means giving them the freedom to select the ways that suit them. It means providing a varied array of powerful tools, but not forcing any particular one on them. Putting a learner in a wagon on a predefined track is not the way to go. Sadly that's what they still do in schools everywhere. That's the price to be paid for maintaining (a semblance of) order. [Seb's Open Research]

A piece from my (not finished) report:

Contrary to formal, informal learning looks as something that organisation can't manage. This is only partly true: research on informal learning says that a lot can be done in organisation to facilitate and to steer informal learning:

First, informal learning can be influenced. It is occurring virtually all of the time; because we know why it occurs and what direct and contextual factors affect it, we can create opportunities for it to occur as well as remove its obstacles. Secondly, this research tells us which skills are learned in each specific daily work activity. This means that then a particular skill is lacking in an organisations, we know which activities, if properly incorporated into daily work, will provide a forum for learning that skill (Center for Workforce Development, 1998: 257)

This study suggests several interrelated ways to support informal learning: 

• alignment of organisational and individual goals, so individual motivation to learn is naturally focused on organisational needs for employee competency development,
• embedding learning opportunities and learning facilitation within working activities,
• changing contextual factors (e.g. organisational culture and norms).

I would love to hear more ideas, examples or thoughts about informal learning.

John Udell about on the writeable web, the uses of storytelling, and project weblogging (via Radio Free Blogistan and KMpings):

Nice "sanitized picture" of the projects weblog with a commentary

•  Time line. In the weblog tradition, recent items appear at the top, and older ones rotate out to archive pages.

• Commentary. Entries on the time line refer to, and comment on, landmark documents.

• Categorized items. The time line generates narrative flow, but it doesn't categorize items along other important dimensions which are, at the moment, hot issues to resolve, and agreements on how to resolve them. So, these appear in their own columns, and expand on the teasers that appear in the time line.

• Directory. Names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers.

• Files. These include PDFs, spreadsheets, Word documents, HTML documents, and -- crucially -- selected e-mail messages that I have intercepted and promoted to the status of landmark documents.

It looks like a newspaper and, indeed, serves a similar purpose...

As a klogger, over the past 3 months or so, I have recorded & published tens if not hundreds of thoughts.  I doubt if I shared one quarter of output during the last 6 years I worked at various companies.  Oh I would probably have emailed here and there, spoken up during meetings.  But I wonder just how much knowledge is being lost, second by second, in most companies by each employee.  Then multiply up...

But even if they would catch those thoughts, it's going to be very difficult to find something relevant and to understand it our of the context. More or less like forum discussion: you have to follow for some time to make sense of it.

Going through blog archives is not easy... So far I benefit more from the distributed dialog and from the collective filtering. So, blogs is more for sharing, rather than capturing...

...That said, these guidelines are good, common sense guidelines for weblogs. Of course I'm not going to spill confidential info on this weblog (conversely, I am very careful about what I allow to be classified as confidential). And of course I am respectful to my employers - not because of any guideline, though, but because they deserve it. But these are rules that ought to apply everywhere, including, for example, the corner pub - and you don't see guidelines for pub behaviour

"guidelines for pub behaviour" sounds nice :)))

Weblogs and the people that write with them, copy each other's words frequently, sometimes even automatically, and have an informal crediting system of mentioning sources. RSS even carries 'source' information.

This system works by power of the hyperlink. If you don't credit me as a source, then I can stop linking to you, or write you up on my weblog etc. In the end, we both know that Hyperlinks are the Currency of the Internet.

Wow, an organic digital rights management system! Beautiful. [Adam Curry, via John Robb's Radio Weblog]