Mathemagenic

This is the last keynote by Gerhard Fischer from Center of long life learning and design

He speaks about "the end of the beginning" and changing paradigms. His papers could be found at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers.html

Gerhard distinguishes between communities of practice and communities of interest in a new (for me) way: in community of practice people share same practice and the it drifts towards a shared language (groupthink is a drawback), while communities of interest cross several communities of practice and bring them together based on the interest. The primary goal then is "integrating diversity" and making all voices heard.

I'm too tired for detailed notes, so just things that caught my attention:

• gift culture - social statues is determined by your sharing (paper with more details)
• media-competition - using the easiest media to communicate (instead of the one intended by designer)
• informed participation
• "remembering lessons from the past and archiving information is necessary, but not sufficient, because the information needs( specifically in design) of the future will not be the same as they were in the past"
• Knowledge sharing: motivation of a group is different of motivation of an individual.
• Challenges in KM systems research: testing not in experimental, but in real settings. (This is something I always say to my colleagues when we are discussing evaluation strategy for KM tools we work on :)

My talk (paper, presentation). In brief: I presented the examples of partnership/joint work between KM and HR/training/e-learning teams from several studies we did, summarised them as three themes and illustrated with scenarios.

As usual presentation can be polished more, but I'm happy that I managed to finish 1 minute before the "timeover" and had some interesting questions:

• Are there any studies showing effects or ROI of integration?
• What are the most important/most common barriers between KM and HR teams?
• What can be done for providing "blended learning" type of environment if training is outsourced?

Dietmar Paier (www.zbw.at) provides a good overview of using SNA in KM based on a case-study.

Some points

• Wetzstein 03 study: both formal and informal structures are important for creating knowledge in organisation.
• Informal structures of information and communication flows shape the patterns of information exchange and knowledge processes
• Zack 00: use of information and knowledge tends to follow existing social structure
• Providing SNA back to an organisation is a great source for the reflection and change
• No theoretical framework of using SNA for knowledge networks is available (Is it true?)

Questions

• What are the indicators of healthy knowledge network?
• How does it (SNA) scale?

David Hicks talks about applying ideas from structural computing to KM. I didn't got it totally (and in any case it's too technical for me), but someone may be interested to look at their prototype at http://cs.aue.auc.dk/construct/

I'm missing some presentations because I'm finishing my slides (I present a paper in a couple of hours). It's quiet in conference "e-mail room" and I'm happy to have a bit of time to check my news aggregator and to think.

Yesterday evening our discussions were jumping to blogs from time to time (at least after yesterday's presentation of Jay Cross people know the word :) I talked about my experiences and most common reply was "it sounds interesting, but I don't have time". I tried to explain that I don't have time too and that blogging works for me when it integrates with or takes place of other activities. But still people are sceptical and don't see the real value of blogging. I'm used to it and this just confirms my earlier observation: blogging value is difficult to explain to non-bloggers.

It's pity that I'm not presenting about weblogs :) There are a couple of nice examples:

1. Dina points to post of Microsoft employee, John Porcaro, who says:

Frank Maslowski, another stellar Microsoft employee (who happens to report to me) started up his blog. I'm officially adding blogging to all their review objectives for the new fiscal year! I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say, you'll want to stay tuned to this one. And I expect a good dose of humor sprinkled throughout.

2. This is a nice illustration of speed and feedback loops in the blogosphere: David Buchan comments on my conference postabout ontology building. David, thanks, I'll come to it later.

Something else: I love this conference as it's not only about KM (and blogging), but also about meeting great people, dancing, learning how to make sushi and a lot of fun. Will turn back to my presenytation now...