Jim McGee in Weblog as my backup brain (bold is mine):
The notion of personal knowledge management hasn’t been explored enough. Maybe I’m sensitized to it because of my aging brain cells and general absent-mindedness. But I can’t see how organizations are going to progress with knowledge management unless the individuals in those organizations learn how to unpack what they know. Think back to the heyday of expert systems in the mid 1980s. The show-stopper was not the limitations of the AI technology (although that was an issue). It was the huge challenge in getting experts to figure out what they were expert at and make it accessible.
Adds to my rethinking of my PhD ideas: I knew that I was passionate about getting people smarter (=creating an environment there people are learning), but then went on a bit wrong track.
Now I’m trying to approach the same thing from another side: embedding KM into daily routines.
From conferences and talks around I’ve got an impression that often people don’t share knowledge or don’t learn not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t have time or it doesn’t fit their way of working. I think about several conditions that would enable “good KM behavior” (which is learning+sharing+creating). So far I will call it personal KM, but I’m not sure that it exactly what I mean.
I suggest that people would learn themselves, share their knowledge with others or innovate if they have:
Need or motivation. It seems from informal learning studies that learning is quite natural for people. And, it’s often triggered by tasks we have to do. Learning “ahead”, for the future, as well as knowledge sharing (=articulating) and innovation (=reflection and critical thinking) are more tricky processes: motivation is not necessary will be there.
Space and time. KM behavior often comes on the top of our existing tasks, and perceived as “extra”. Only those with high motivation and priorities can make time for it. (BTW, if you write job-related blog, how much of your free time it takes?)
Low threshold instruments. I think “instruments” in a broad sense: ways to do it. It’s easy to talk with a colleague in a corridor, so this is our common way to share knowledge. Blog is an example of easy “articulating/sharing/finding”. I believe that finding own “low threshold” way of doing personal KM can help doing it much better.
Skills. Follow-up thinking from several discussions: you need certain skills to be able to learn, share or reflect effectively. E.g blog is nice tool for knowledge articulating, but you need blogging literacy to do it well.
I wonder if someone has already invented this or it still worth further exploring in a PhD?
Tags: embedding, KM & learning, knowledge networker, PhDArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/09/19.html#a238; comments are here.
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