13:51 11/06/2004 Mathemagenic: Mathemagenic
Mathemagenic
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Mathemagenic

  Monday, March 31, 2003


  Listening, learning and innovation

Matt Mover cites Listening Leader newsletter:

Continuing success comes from value-creating innovation stimulated by disciplined listening. Occasional surveys are insufficient. Organizations need to build listening systems that capture, summarize, and disseminate the unmet dreams and unfulfilled wants of multiple customer groups, including existing, prospective, and internal customers (employees).

[...]Listening leads to learning, which sets the stage for innovation. Innovation is more likely when employees are well informed about the customer, unafraid to try something new, and committed to the organization's success.

Sebastian Fiedler comments (bold is mine)

I believe that any learning environment design should address this issue too. A network of learning project (action and reflection) logs can provide a powerful "listening system" for everybody involved. Facilitators can use it as a diagnostic device that allows them to step in with counselling and mentoring offers, learners can tune in to the projects of their peers, project members can listen to their team members's contributions and comments, people on the periphery can tune in for a variety of reason, lurk, listen, and make themselves heard whenever they feel they could contribute.

Again, the biggest issue are the "learning myths" of everybody involved. Parents who think they cannot contribute much, learners who believe they should only listen to a single educational authority, domain experts who feel they cannot learn from people who are novice to a given domain, peers who do not expect to gain from looking at each others efforts, ... these are the people we have to deal with in almost any given context. ... no matter what tools and technologies you would like to apply. We suffer from a general lack of reflection and activity on personal learning.

More on: innovation 

  E-learning completion rates and choices between KM and e-learning tools

Do Completion Rates Matter? by Will Thalheimer

When knowledge is applied immediately after learning, completion-rates don’t matter, but ease-of-access and simplicity do. When the on-the-job performance situation follows the learning by more than a few hours, additional instructional supports are needed to ensure that knowledge and skills are retrievable from memory. By completing a well-designed e-learning course, learners provide themselves with the instructional supports they’ll need to maintain their learning until they can use it on the job.

As usually Will provides good input for thinking (you can subscribe to the newsletter too). The arguments provided in the article can help to make choices between e-learning and KM tools.

  • In most cases KM systems usually support access to information, sometimes help to understand it, but usually do not have more advanced instructional support to help long-term remembering or practicing with application. So, I would say that KM systems are good for those learning situations when learner have a problem to solve.
  • E-learning systems provide more instructional support, so they would be better choice for those case when learning is needed for a future goals.

This also explains why corporate on-line communities work so well in Q&A mode or to provide awareness of what's going on, but fail when it comes to support longer-term learning. E.g. orientation training for newcomers would work better than hope that they can find out about certain topic from community discussions. (In this piece I talk only about learning about certain topic, not co-creation in dialogue, apprenticeship or building own network).

  ACCENT Principles for effective graphical display

Gallery of Data Visualization: The Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics [via McGee's Musings]. Good source to reflect on the use graphics in your own work :)

Also: ACCENT Principles for effective graphical display

The ACCENT principles emphasize, or accent, six aspects which determine the effectiveness of a visual display for portraying data.

  • Apprehension:
    • Ability to corectly perceive relations among variables.
    • Does the graph maximize apprehension of the relations among variables?
  • Clarity:
    • Ability to visually distinguish all the elements of a graph.
    • Are the most important elements or relations visually most prominent?
  • Consistency:
    • Ability to interpret a graph based on similarity to previous graphs.
    • Are the elements, symbol shapes and colors consistent with their use in previous graphs?
  • Efficiency:
    • Ability to portray a possibly complex relation in as simple a way as possible.
    • Are the elements of the graph economically used? Is the graph easy to interpret?
  • Necessity:
    • The need for the graph, and the graphical elements.
    • Is the graph a more useful way to represent the data than alternatives (table, text)? Are all the graph elements necessary to convey the relations?
  • Truthfulness:
    • Ability to determine the true value represented by any graphical element by its magnitude relative to the implicit or explicit scale.
    • Are the graph elements accurately positioned and scaled?
    More on: research 

      Friday, March 28, 2003


      Blogs as an ugly term

    Jim McGee:

    Given the match between weblogs and this broader trend toward decentralized and distributed solutions, the lameness of 'blog' as a term might actually be one of its primary strengths. It reflects that weblogs are tools coming into organizations from the grassroots, not something imposed from a central source. That may be more important than usual for organizational innovations when we're talking about an innovation that is in sync with the demands of knowledge economy organizations.

    More on: blogs in business 

      Magic number 150

    Social Capacity of 150 [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

    In the Ecosystem of Networks, 150 is the defining limit of Social Capacity at the Social Network layer.  Steve Mallett  comments on the Rule of 150 and Communities, saying that recognizing this natural limit can enhance community design (this post is worth reading in full).

    From Steve's post:

    Consider another phenomenom we've all experienced. You join a community, whether it's an email list, website or other and it gains some popularity and so the members in the community grows into an unmanagable size. When I say manageable, I mean self-managing. And so you leave or become frustrated and you lament the 'good ole days' of what your community was.

    Weblogs don't really suffer from this potential growth since everyone act as their own entity.

    Steve also writes about ~150 blogs he reads. I read much less (11 people are my "regular read" roll and 30+ RSS feeds in my aggregator) and I don't feel comfortable increasing those numbers. Then, coming back to Ecosystem of Networks, it seems that my "comfortable blogging" range fits more creative network type...

    This post also calls another association - KMSS02 discussion on defining communities of practice: "corporate KM guys" use this term to address a wide range of structures, from 10 expert group meeting face-to-face to 2000 members on-line community. Last year we were suspicious that "magic number 150" could be used to find out how differently those communities operate. I didn't hear of much research in this direction, but may be it's due to the small number of my RSS subscriptions :)

    More on: communities 

      BlogTalk paper: would be bloggers

    BlogTalk panelists announced. Wow! "Lilia Efimova"'s, "Oliver Wrede"'s, and my own proposal got accepted. Very cool! Now we need only a few of the US based folks to come over and we could definitely stage a litte get-together of educational Webloggers. [Sebastian Fiedler]

    To be selected from the list of great people means that it's going to be a tough time to fulfil the expectations :)

    One of the ways to achieve paper quality is to have thinking/writing process in public (I refer to it as to micro-level peer-review). This is especially important if you don't have many people in house who understand your topic deeply enough.

    I don't know how much of work-in-progress I will post here, but there is one topic that was waiting for my writing for a long time. In the proposal I suggest to compare bloggers and "would be bloggers" and this raises a lot of questions:

    Denham Grey: Be interested to learn how you define your 'would be bloggers' ? People that have tried and failed?, folks that have written negatively about blogging?, people who are totally ignorant about blogging?, someone who preferes voice or cellphones to typing??

    How will you reach the 'would be bloggers' ?

    Many of these folks may not be on-line yet, tucked away in bulletinboards or obscure listservs or perhaps strictly e-mail users.

    0. Weblogs types to consider

    I would like to focus on professional weblogs and not on personal ones. So, I would ask people if they agree with the statement like:

    "I use my weblog primarily for professional reasons: for my work, professional network building, learning and sharing knowledge related to my occupation (paid or voluntarily)."

    1. "Would be bloggers" defined

    I could start from considering all non-bloggers as my "would be bloggers", but I wouldn't do so. I think of the common for many of us situation and people saying "it seems that where is something in it", but not actually doing it. According to the stages of acceptance of innovation my "would be bloggers" are between Curiosity - Envisioning - Tryout stages (bloggers are at Use stage).

    In the questionnaire I'm going to define two subgroups of "would be bloggers". I don't know if I will find any difference, but it seems logical to do so. So, I'm going to ask people to select one of the following:

    • I'm considering if I should start a weblog or not ("would be blogger - 1"; ~ Making decision)
    • I'm trying out blogging, but not sure if I will continue it ("would be blogger - 2"; ~ I'm not sure if I will be blogging in one year)
    • Blogging is part of my professional life and I will continue doing it (~ I will be blogging in one year if I have internet access).

    2. Finding "would be bloggers"

    I'm aware that it could be difficult to have good sample (especially "would be blogger - 1" are difficult to find), but it's exploratory study and I'm not looking for controlled variables :). I'm going to:

    • ask "would be bloggers" around me (and there are many ;)
    • ask bloggers to offer my questionnaire to "would be bloggers" around them
    • post invitation at KnowledgeBoard blogroll

    Given the fact that I'm not targeting at people who haven't heard about weblogs it should work.

    Any comments?

      Every layer of abstraction costs you 50% of your audience

    The cost of pushing abstraction [Seb's Open Research]

    Sean McGrath: "It's time for the Semantic Web proponents to stop trying to teach us to think at their level of abstraction."

    A thought-provoking piece that deals with a very real problem ("every layer of abstraction costs you 50% of your audience"), though I wish the author had spent more space developing his alternative vision of "semantic shadows"."citc"

    More on: tools 

      Wednesday, March 26, 2003


      Plans

    This is late night and I'm in the thinking mode... I think about those things that I want to do when I have time (I have much longer list of things that I have to do :)

  • Collect all the bits I write/talk/present about "how weblogs work?" and "how do I start one?" and make a good story out of it (so next time I link to the story instead of writing it again :)

  • Fix everything around liveTopics: install new version, review the list of topics, add topics to earlier posts, fix templates.

  • Make CSS version of my weblog, give it more personality and make it more usable. I have drafts of my logo-to-be for a couple of month already, but the way from paper to digital format is too difficult and I guess I will have to ask someone to help.

  • Find out how Movable Type works and make a weblog in Russian (I gave up with Ciryllic in Radio). Then invite several Russian colleagues to start their weblogs.

    • More on: life 

      Blogging software: looking for suggestions

    Today I made presentation about weblogs to my project team. This resulted in a lot of questions, some enthusiasm and some scepticism. I expected so, I know that I'm "enthusiastic early adopter" and others are different :)

    I guess it's time to work on a more specific proposal. For that I have to make some suggestion about blogging software to use. This is a bit difficult - I'm more familiar with Radio and Blogger , but suspect that they are not a good choice for us. Could you suggest what blogging software fits best the requirements below?

    The requirements I have in  mind:

    • server-based software (not everyone has rights to install new software), running on our intranet server
    • support multiple weblogs and/or multiauthor weblog, RSS feed generation per weblog
    • support multiple categories, RSS feed generation per category
    • commentaries
    • search is very desirable
    • "subscribe by e-mail" is desirable
    • embedded news aggregator is desirable or, another option, something that can aggregate several RSS feed into one HTML page

    To note it somewhere:

    Later: I know that Manila, Movable Type and Drupal fit most of my criteria. I wonder if there is something else.

    More on: blogging tools 

      Tuesday, March 25, 2003


      KB blogroll and its aggregation, Association of Knowledgework, and better blogging

    My support of the KnowledgeBoard blogroll has several effects.

    First, it helps to discover new interesting blogs. For example, recently I discovered Jerry Ash's Plain Talk News, which led me to Association of Knowledgework (AOK) and drafts of their book on personal KM.

    Second, it gets me involved into all kinds of discussions about "what blogging is" and "how to do it". I started to collect them these writings in Better Blogging collection.

    Also: Gary Lawrence Murphy provides view on latest posts from KB weblogs at one page

      Sunday, March 23, 2003


      Hewlett-Packard discovers communities of practice by analysing intenal e-mail exchange

    E-mail reveals real leaders [via Column Two]: how Hewlett-Packard discovers communities of practice by analysing intenal e-mail exchange. Contains reference to the paper, which describes the algorithm in more details:

    Tyler, J. R., Wilkinson, D. M. & Huberman, B. A. Email as spectroscopy: automated discovery of community structure within organizations. Preprint http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0303264, (2003).

    Later, via comments to this post

    Denham Grey:

    In two recent projects I noticed a strong bias when comparing e-mail derived mappings against ethnographic observations. e-mail 'tend to favor distance, the exchanges are far more reflective and structured, the level of trust and open sharing is mostly lower and the boundaries are different, i.e. e-mail identified communties have a tighter core and almost no periphery.

    Question the claims of 'mining tacit knowledge' via e-mail analysis and experience suggests you will get a highly skewed 'picture'. Network data analysis can be very different depending on local practices and habits e.g. subscription to listservs, use of BCC and 'passing' (forwarding) from node to node.

    Ian Glendinning:

    Good communicators (inc real leaders and managers) tend to maximise individual telecons or face to face contact. E-Mail traffic is skewed based on people's between-the-lines motives for using e-mail. Self-aggrandisement, lack of courage and arse-covering are three to think about.

      Friday, March 21, 2003


      War in Iraq

    To be fair it's more scary than September 11 - to see dividing international community and powerless international organisations. It's scary to see that time stops and that there is no way we can turn it back. I believe that this war is a big mistake. I hope we will be able to correct it and to learn from it. I hope...

    More on: life 

      Tuesday, March 18, 2003


      Power of articulation, weblogs and KM

    Different people about the power of articulation, weblogs and KM.

    Jim McGee in Sharing knowledge with yourself (bold is mine)

    Stephen Downes responds to my recent post on weblogs and passion with the following observation:

    Weblog tools are just another input device. Great. With a lousy search and user interface. Weblogs get data into the system, but that's never been the problem with knowledge management: no, the problem is in using the data in any meaningful way. Will weblogs help with this? Not until something thinks seriously about the other end of the equation, thinks of the harried user rather than the inspired blog writer. [OLDaily]

    While I agree that the current generation of weblog tools have some serious limits in terms of search and user interface, I disagree with his contention about where the problems lie in knowledge management systems. [...]

    The problem with getting more leverage out of knowledge work isn't somewhere out there in the organization. It's looking back at me in the mirror every morning. Worse than that, it's that lazy slob I was looking at in the mirror six months ago who was too busy then to put a halfway decent name on a file or save that really great diagram as its own file.

    What does this have to do with weblogs? Weblogs put the emphasis where I believe it belongs; on the individual knowledge worker. It encourages them to begin thinking about their own knowledge work more explicitly and systematically. It helps them realize that they are the problem and the solution. You have to learn how to share knowledge with yourself over time before you can begin to share it effectively with others.

    Dale Pike in Freeze-frame on the tacit 

    I often take an introspective tone as I write--the journaling aspect of weblogs can be theraputic and quite constructive when pulling together deep or disparate ideas. When I force myself to just sit down and write, I always discover a bit more about myself in the process. While it seems a bit egotistical to some to hang such introspective ponderings on the collective network flagpole, I can't help but think that as I learn and grow, a portion of the recipe for my personal learning and growth will be frozen in my weblog. It might be between the lines, but I believe it may hold value at some point in the future. Making transparent the process of progress. Can I look over your shoulder, too?

    Jon Udell Technical trends bode well for KM [via Roland Tanglao]

    What k-loggers do, fundamentally, is narrate the work they do. In an ideal world, everyone does this all the time. The narrative is as useful to the author, who gains clarity through the effort of articulation, as it is to the reader. But in the real-world enterprise, most people don't tend to write these narratives naturally, and the audience is not large enough to inspire them to do it.

    More on: blogs stickiness 

      Weblogs and passion Weblogs and passion [McGee's Musings]
    Discussions about knowledge management in organizations always raise the issue of sharing with the argument that people will be reluctant to share out of fear that their efforts will be appropriated by others. This is rooted in a industrial product metaphor of knowledge. See knowledge work as craft, however, and the sharing issue dissolves. Craft workers exist to share the fruits of their creating. A true knowledge craft product embodies something of the soul and personality of its creator. You share it with others not so they can copy it but so that they can find inspiration in using it in their own craft.

    Weblogs hold so much promise in the organizational realm precisely because they amplify this connection between craft and creator. Your record is there to be seen and to be shared.

    This is also why weblogs are so confusing in the organizational realm. You have to move beyond the notion of reusable and reproducible product as the putative goal.

    More on: blogs stickiness 

      Monday, March 17, 2003


      Are k-logs hyped? (2)

    Denham Grey comments on Are k-logs hyped?

    To be sure the distinction between community and networked individuals is diffuse and there is much overlap. I think you have to look at the 'discourse' - the conversation patterns, the ownership of spaces and containers, the context and power relationships.

    Agree that the borders are diffuse and we talk about the same but with different focus: on the social (community space, dialog) or individual (person in relation to others, listening and storytelling) side of it.

    I would agree with Sebastian that the unit of analysis depends on your goals. As knowledge worker I have limited opportunity to improve collective spaces I'm involved in, but I can improve my own space for connecting my experiences from those spaces.

    Bloggers (bless their collective hearts) are selfish souls at the core - they need to own the space. They tend to be unwilling to venture onto another's turf.

    Agree. My reasons to comment in my blog and not somewhere else are:

    • I want it to be captured where I can find it.
    • I want to have a line of my own thinking. Sometimes this means that I brake the line of community discussion - I try to avoid it or at least link to the comment in my blog.

    I guess that the need for "my own space" is something very natural for a human being.

    Deep dialog happens best when we come together and reciprocate in the same space, when we engage on a level playing field, when we take turns in the development of shared thinking rather than pushing our thoughts out there for everyone to see - hoping to enhance our personal brand.

    This distinction is subtle, but important I feel - it is all about equality of publishing rights - not, hey if you do not buy my thoughts, go and start your own blog - rather let's agree to engage around a topic in a space where we have equal control, equal, display rights, equal 'voice'.

    I wouldn't make firm connection between the equality of publishing rights and deep dialog. I feel that community norms, real or perceived, could be a bigger problem for engaging into conversation than technical limitations - "I'm not sure if I can post my stupid questions to bother all you experts".

    More on: blogs stickiness 

      Friday, March 14, 2003


      Butterflies and early adopters

    Walking to the office I saw a butterfly. It was not very beautiful and it was so fragile trying to fly in a cold wind. But it was a sign of true spring.

    I wished it luck and thought about early adopters: their ideas may be not so appealing and probably will not live long, but they are signs of coming changes.

      NALL resources on informal learning

    Collection of papers (mainly on informal learning) from NALL (New Approaches to Lifelong Learning) research network. See also for survey on informal learning.

     

    More on: learning informal 

      Thursday, March 13, 2003


      Are k-logs hyped?

    Could Blogging Assist KM? by Amy D. Wohl is one more introductory article about blogging, but it provokes Denham Grey comments (note, this was posted earlier than Ton's blogs and knowledge sharing I and II):

    At times I think k-logs are hyped by a few evangelists (converted bloggers). If you look closely at the record, things are not all that rosy

    * reciprocity is very poor - bloggers tend to say this does not matter, it is more important to be heard, to 'voice' or 'push' and publish your view
    * 'community' happens from individual enclaves - bloggers retreat to their spaces to reply the common 'space' is then fractal, distributed and walled - it lacks cohesion
    * the 'record' is fragmented even categories and RSS feeds do not produce a coherent easily readable discourse
    * empathy is low - most times it is about branding and spreading my memes

    To be fair, I don't 100% understand why Denham streeses 'community' so much. I believe that knowledge is socially constructed, but I don't understand why community and not networked individual should be the unit of analysis.

    Later: Sebastian Fiedler comments 

    • 'community' happens from individual enclaves...
      And how is this different in other parts of life? "Commom spaces" in modern societies tend to be "fractal", "distributed", and occassionally "walled". Why should I even expect cohesion? I would say that cohesion needs to be constructed and imposed by the individual.
    • the 'record' is fragmented...
      So are all of my records. Do you hold "a coherent easily readable discourse" with anyone - including yourself - over time? If you go about any personal learning project do all the books, websites, conversations, etc. quickly add up to "a coherent easily readable discourse"?

    Dale Pike comments

    I believe that weblogs (whether for KM or not) will succeed or fail because of their open-endedness. They are messy, organic tools without any lockstep procedures for making comments. Lockstep procedures can be very helpful, but they must anticipate the needs of the user in advance. I think weblogs are intimidating to many people because there is no "wizard" that asks you to fill in the form and make your contribution. Ya gotta get a little dirty. Granted, the lack of anticiptory structure makes re-purposing the message more challenging, but we'll figure this out as we go along.

    More on: blogs stickiness 

      Micah Alpern's microblogosphere search tool (2)

    Micah Alpern is fast to fix and update his Trusted Blog Search tool, so now you can enjoy the results:

    More: about Trusted Blog Search in Microdoc News (it also points to Kartoo, a meta search engine which presents its results on a map).

    More on: Radio 

      Tuesday, March 11, 2003


      Why course blogs should be out of LMS

    Sebastian Fiedler in Please Excuse Me While I Snap for a Moment

    James Farmer askes in his new edu-blog:

    So why doesn't Blackboard or WebCT or, well, any of them offer effective blogging tools?

    I generally maintain an even keel here at Tuttle SVC, but let me shout in the direction of nobody in particular:

    It is because they are not paying attention!

    Can't the people who develop these applications be bothered to read O'Reilly Network? What do they do all day?

    Watch the alpha geeks and steal a march on the fearful! ["Tom Hoffman"]

    Hmm... even if they included blogging tools they would be left with the problem of "ownership". Would they allow their users to quickly download the content of a particular blog, move on, and host it with an ISP of their choice? I don't think so...

    This brings me two questions:

    1. What do you do if you want to have blogs next to LMS? If you want to make blogs part of the course then you should provide some support for them. Most likely solution is to provide some kind of blogging infrustructure, but then you run into similar questions: would your blogging tool allow their users to quickly download the content of a particular blog, move on, and host it with an ISP of their choice?

    2. Who owns learner-created content in LMS (e.g. reflections on readings, assignments, feedback)? How learners can take it with them after course ends?

    More on: e-learning 

      Have you ever used a blog?

    Go to CNN: Blogging goes mainstream and check the poll "Have you ever used a blog?" results. Then I voted 52% were saying "No and I probably won't" :)

    More on: blogs stickiness 

      Reading blogs in the morning I'm getting new morning habit: start Radio, get my breakfast and read what other blogs are saying. Usually I don't have time to comment, but this reading gives me some fresh ideas for the day...
    More on: bloggers 

      Monday, March 10, 2003


      Blogging: storytelling and listening (2)

    Sebastian Fiedler summarises Ton's reflections about blogging from learning perspective:

    Ton's post captures some of the most interesting aspects of personal Webpublishing for the self-organized adult learner. Ton characterizes his personal learning as...

    • an evolutionary process
    • sharing of information through dialogues
    • "listening" to multiple sources
    • pretty chaotic and semi-random

    Now how can personal Webpublishing support this kind of evolutionary and mostly undetermined learning process?

    Ton claims the following benefits of personal Webpublishing for his learning:

    • the telling of personal "stories" supports the contextualization of information
    • it supports the integration and interpretation of various sources
    • making the personal stories public invites "listeners"
    • a chronological "trace" of his learning process is created and can be revisited by himself and others

    More on: blogs learning 

      Sunday, March 09, 2003


      Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo

    Via Roland Tanglao: KLogs: ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo, June 9-10, 2003, Boston

    This two-day conference will discuss the evolution of blogs from a mere "log" of favorite URLs from the late '80s and '90s to a platform that the business world is taking seriously. ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo will present trends and analyses, expert opinions, case studies, and "how to" sessions that will help medium to large enterprises add Weblogs into their business strategies. Here are a few highlights:

    • The New Communication Channel of Blogging
    • Business Blogs - Hype or Opportunity?
    • The Success of Knowledge Blogs
    • The Revenue Opportunities of Blogs
    • A Blog Tutorial - Everything You Need to Start Your Own
    • The Trend Lines of Blogs: What's Next?

    More on: learning event 

      Blogging: storytelling and listening

    Ton Zijlstra is back from silence with two great posts.

    The first one is about Listening as the Road to Acquiring Knowledge.

    Now listening to me is a basic part of every interaction with another individual, even if the interaction is not based on verbal language but e.g. body language. My eyes can listen as well as my ears, which probably turns my definition of listening into the interpretation of my surroundings.

    Listening, using the above definition even wider namely also in instances where "surroundings" does not entail any other individual or only mediated as when reading texts, is then my only road to acquiring new knowledge. The storyteller, or the environment in general, gives me information, and my listening turns it into personal knowledge, by the act of placing the information into the pre-existing context of my mind.

    Summarizing listening has at its core the concepts of action ( I decide the things I pick out of a story), contextuality (only within my personal context does what I listen to gain value) and knowledge acquisition (the value gained from listening).

    The second is about Blogs and Knowledge Sharing (bold is mine):

    What do blogs do for me in this sense?

    It's a place where I can tell stories. Stories that originate from me, are packaged in the context of me. However I do not broadcast these stories, since I don't think my blog a broadcasting medium although a blog could well be. Ross Mayfield has some interesting posts on different settings for blogs from broadcasting to private channel (Blogging Bubbles, Repealing the Power-Law, and especially Distribution of Choice).

    My stories are stories I use to accomodate my listening, I recount, and thereby interpret and give a place to what I listened to in my own mental context. By telling these stories publicly I also put the information I can barter you as a listener for in the window. This is not something I can do in a forum, or on a bulletinboard, because there it is not only me that determines the context of my stories. In my blog I do, you can retrace my steps by scrolling down on this page, and see the amalgam of impressions that went into forming my opinion for yourself. I think that is important, more important than the actual outcome, to be able to see the road that led there, and which sideroads were passed. So that I, or someone else can decide that it is time to retrace my steps and turn into the sideroad. I hate minutes from meetings that only say what was decided. I can see that from your actions. I am much more interested in what made you decide: a blog works at making those processes visible. Wikis only make the (collective) product visible in comparison.

    Ton suggests new metaphor for processes versus products discussion (see also Jim McGee's agrument that blogs can increase visibility of knowledge work). I'm waiting to hear more from Ton:

    This text is not finished yet: I need yet to address relationships through blogging, and what the road of discovery and dialogue look like in the blogosphere. Especially because not all of that takes place on the face of the blog.

    More on: blogs 

      Micah Alpern's microblogosphere search tool

    Micah Alpern's microblogosphere search tool [via Seb's Open Research]: if you use Radio try it to search your RSS subscriptions. Most likely you will need to get Google license key (could be done within a few minutes, see Micah's instructions).

    This is something that I wanted so much! Now I have to figure out how to add the code to my blog...

    Update: I did it! Try to search my subscriptions. To do the same:

    • download this page
    • open it and change values of myweblog, mygooglekey, and myopmlfile (more in Micah's instructions)
    • save, upload to your blog and link

    Later: Micah comments

    You can also strip out the "prefs" part of the HTML and incorporate the feature directly into your template (see www.alpern.org/weblog for an example). Please let me know how it goes and if you have any suggestions.

    More on: Radio 

      Wednesday, March 05, 2003


      Captology, persuasive technologies and web credibility

    Last couple of days almost everyone points to Persuasive Design: New Captology Book. It's not common for Jakob Nielsen to focus his Alertbox column describing work of others so positiely :)

    So, the gem:

    It is a rare book that defines a new discipline or fundamentally changes how we think about technology and our jobs. Dr. B.J. Fogg's new book, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, does all of this. I highly recommend that you read it for two reasons:

    • The book's indispensable design advice will grow your business.
    • You must teach your children to recognize this new class of manipulation.

    Sam Adkins in Learning Circuits Blog points to the follow-up reading: www.captology.org with key concepts, examples, relevant groups, collaboration suggestions, events and newsletter. Good read before you can grad the book.

    Between other links this site points to Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility (these guidelines are referred in the Alertbox column; references to supporting research are included).

    1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
    2. Show that there's a real organization behind your site.
    3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
    4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
    5. Make it easy to contact you.
    6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).
    7. Make your site easy to use -- and useful. Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).
    8. Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).
    9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g. ads, offers).
    10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

      Tuesday, March 04, 2003


      Why Content Management Software Hasn't Worked

    OLDaily 

    Why Content Management Software Hasn't Worked. The same could be said of the LCMS industry: "Content management software hasn't worked because it was badly designed and massively over-hyped. Software companies lied about their products, charging criminal prices for crap software. It hasn't worked because organizations didn't understand content. They wanted a quick fix. They issued specifications that bore little relation to what they actually needed." By Gerry McGovern, New Thinking, March 3, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

    More on: failures 

      New blog: Real KM New blog Real KM by "Luigi" Lugmayr points to Blogs from Microsoft Employees. Two new site to notice :)
    More on: blog new 

      Transdisciplinarity in KM

    Recent comments to “Emergent KM Research” – proposal from Quaerere to KAngels continue the discussion about multi-/trans-/inter-disciplinary approaches to KM. At this stage reading the discussion can make you totally confusing, so to pieces:

    Definition of transdisciplinarity (cited by Peter Troxler from Transdisciplinarity - New Structures in Science)

    a scientific (...) principle that is active wherever a definition of problems and their solutions is not possible within a given field or discipline.

    Boris Wyssusek

    I also want to reiterate my question: is there anyone seriously interested in methodological issues of KM? Please let me know.

    More on: research 

      Monday, March 03, 2003


      Why not renaming k-logs?

    Matt Mover discusses how to call blogging in a corporate context:

    So far we have:
    • business journalling
    • knowledge-logging
    • k-logging
    • corporate knowledge recording (from Christian)
    • professional knowledge publishing
    • enterprise weblogging

    any more for any more?

    I'm not against renaming k-logs, but I have a few concerns/questions.

    1. What is wrong with using "K-log"? I'd like to hear arguments (probably I miss them somewhere down in my aggregator :) I guess that the main problem is with explaining it to the people who never heard about it (e.g. busy line managers).

    2. What is wrong with other suggested terms:

    corporate knowledge recording, enterprise weblogging - focus on organisation, while blogging is personal (nobody records corporate knowledge, only "my own thoughts about it")

    business journalling, corporate knowledge recording, professional knowledge publishing, enterprise weblogging - too long to be used often without abbreviations. People tend to shorten things (e.g. CoP, KM), so I wonder if abbreviations we will get for those terms will be better then k-log?

    lack of flexibility for using it in different contexts. What we have with blogs: 

    • bloging (phenomena)
    • blog (product, "see it in my klog")
    • blogging (process, personal activity, "I started blogging", "I blogged it yesterday")
    • blogger (person who does it, "we have five bloggers in our company")
    • blogosphere (including it all, people + processes + products + more things like unwritten rules)

    So, what do we have with most the suggested terms? They address phenomena. Sometimes we can derive term for the product (business journal, corporate knowledge record? professional knowledge what?). It's more difficult to use it to address personal activity (I professionally published my knowledge yesterday?)  or to get right word for the person (business journalist? professional knowledge publisher? enterprise weblogger - the one who does it for the whole company?)

    To make it clear - I'm not against renaming, but so far I don't see the term that can catch up as good as blogging (or k-logging) does. The closest shoot would be "business journalling", but then we have to refine terminology that can derive from it (people need some words to describe what they were doing).

    And finally - if there is anyone there with knowledge about birth, spreading and "institutionalisation" of new words? I wonder how it goes usually (probably we can leave blogs and klogs and just have to wait till more people will start using them).

    More on: blogs in business 


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    This weblog is my learning diary. Sometimes I write about things related to my work, but the views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

    Last update: 6/21/2005; 8:50:38 AM.