The question that came into my mind: what happens with your ideas that you posted to a weblog inside certain boundaries (e.g corporate blog or course blog) after you leave these boundaries. Both Martin and Sebastian suggest that it should be your property and you have to be able to take it with you as your own learning resource. Ideally, I would say the same, but I don’t think that it’s going to happen easily in practice.
Companies and educational institutions are recognising that they could benefit from aggregating ideas produced by people (e.g. course assignments from previous courses could be reused in a new course). An individual knowledge worker, from other hand, wants to have access to his own thought, may be throughout his whole life. This is not interesting for a company (it’s competitive advantage!) and it should be ideal educational institution to take care of it (at the end no any educational institution is responsible to your own life-long learning).
In one paper knowledge workers were addressed as investors bringing their knowledge for corporate use. This is good metaphor, but unlike real investors knowledge workers can not take their investment back. Even worse, if you leave treads of your knowledge work in corporate context they are likely to belong to a company (often copyrighted), so they in fact risk loosing some of their investments.
In a long-term this could be a problem to weblogs adoption in a corporate context: I’m more motivated to write something down if I know that it stays with me and I can come back to it than if it’s locked in a corporate knowledge management system or e-learning system (see more about motivation to post in order to keep track of your learning – Why I blog more than use discussion tools).
This is also somehow related with the discussion on institutional versus personal speech by Ross Mayfield.
Later: some directions for solutions could be found by operationalising ideas of Andrius Kulikauskas on copyright.
Tags: BlogTalk, citedCh3, content ownership, motivationArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/05/23.html#a619; comments are here.
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