Mathemagenic

One more KM blog natureklog.blogspot.com (via Gurteen Knowledge-Log). It's really sad that Ron Donaldson doesn't use something producing RSS feeds - I will be forgetting to check it regularly.

In KNOWLEDGE: FRAMES & CONTEXT (about The Society of Mind' by Marvin Minsky)

I like to think of knowledge as being stored in chunks or frames concerned with a specific subject or topic.

Minsky suggests that when you hear a story certain words or phrases resonate with your past experience and the relevant frames are excited and brought into focus. This is the point in a conversation where people chip in with their experiences or thoughts. In a presentation this is where you start to think that's a good idea or I remember something similar myself.

As the story unfolds against your own backdrop of frames, any new knowledge or ideas it may provoke are attached to all the currently excited frames. As these frames are then stored back in your memory they take the new story with them.

Excite any of these frames later in conversation and the story comes to mind.

Now consider how difficult the proposal to 'manage knowledge' is when you think of the very different experience and therefore frames which exist in our staff.

This is the book to read!

Knowledge management and Instructional Design (bold is mine)

The goal of knowledge management is "what?" It seems to me that the goal of knowledge management is to change knowledge into information. It is possible to manage knowledge, and it is possible to use information. I have no problem with the ideas of knowledge management and KLogs. In fact, I kind of like them. My question, maybe someone can send me a link to help, is how do you turn the knowledge into information via learning? My background is in instructional design, so maybe this is a natural question for me to ask. I see the instructional design process as having a large potential impact on the issues of knowledge management. I am still trying to wrap my head around this intersection of knowledge, information, learning, and instruction. I see them together complimenting each other, but I am working on how to produce clarity at this intersection. [Scott Adams: Instructional Design]

Seb's Open Research in The implicit that haunts us

Why Process Capture is Difficult. Subjectivity created by our knowledge and experience 'taint' our observations.  What seems obvious to one person is not to another and vice-versa.  If you've tried to write processes, you will know how difficult it is.  [thought?horizon :: non inferiora secutus]

And as long as you're only talking to people with very similar experience to your own, you may not even realize how much stuff there is between the lines.

Something to add to my thinking about Learning as building own context: I'm curious about the role of implicit knowledge in the knowledge sharing processes. 

I'm happy to continue KMSS discussion about Context sensitiveness. I belive that one day these "bits of thinking" with result in something valuable.

Learning for yourself, or for the company?. In her introduction, Janice Reid raises an interesting point about what happens if you focus too much on learning about the company you work for. I'll let Janet's words explain.

One thing that I've learnt recently is that there's a limit to what one's learning when working with a corporate.  After a couple of years you start to capture more about the company, rather than building your own functional knowledge.  You create a personal database of information which is very valuable to your work colleagues, but worthless to you once you move on.  In hindsight I would recommend 'job hopping' in order to develop your personal knowledge of different environments, ways of doing things, attitudes etc, rather than a prolonged period at any one firm, even if you are frequently changing roles.

[thought?horizon] [Seb's Open Research]

One more characteristic of knowledge workers - they go to find more learning. Would be interesting to study how knowledge workers work and what motivates them next to how one becomes a knowledge worker.

Sebastian Fiedler about using blogs as a learning tool with group projects

David Gurteen with links and ideas about Rewarding and recognizing knowledge sharing (bold is mine)

This is an interesting article on [Rewards and Recognition in Knowledge Management] from the AQPC. [...]

Speaking personally I am very much against extrinsic motivation to reward or encourage knowledge sharing. Its like saying 'this is not really part of your job' or worse 'this is a distasteful part of your job' and so we are we going to reward you separately to do it.

This is totally the wrong message to be giving and can only undermine knowledge sharing in the long term. Knowledge sharing is a fundamental and integral part of every knowledge workers job - not so different to breathing! Why the hell should you single out the key essence of a knowledge workers job - to mind what they are really getting paid for and reward them separately for it. It is just plain crazy.

Fully agree. But organisations are not full of natural knowledge workers, so it would be interesting to look how someone becomes knowledge worker: what education, culture, experiences are shaping "knowledge worker behavior".

Later in the day Sunday: Serendipity! Even [more] on this subject in an item on 'Knowledge sharing and leadership' in Jim McGee's blog. I love the [article] by Alfie Cohn - if you have any lingering doubts about the stupidity of rewarding knowledge sharing then read this article!

Also a number of other good links here on the subject e.g. the work of Hazel Hall. I have an article on Knowledge Sharing that is taking a long time in gestation but I must remember to come back here when I find time again to work on it!

Synchronicity :) I met Hazel at KMSS and I hope that we can get in touch.

On Being the Digital Job (via Matt Mover):

I'll try to do some blogging during the next couple of days, but it will depend on how well AT&T internet service behaves. In the meantime, I suggest you go out and buy some flowers and chocolate for your computer and talk nicely to it. I know I will be.

I have always thought that computers have feelings. They definetely react better if you do nice things to them :)

In any case I think that in the future computers will be much smarter and will be able to learn by themselves. People around can learn from our "not being nice" and do the same to us. Computers are getting there as well, so it's better for us to start learning now how to behave well :)))