 |
 |
 |
Mathemagenic ...giving birth to learning... |
|
|
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
Mathemagenic
|
 Change: patterns and leverage points
New pointers to ideas about change. 1. Mike Lee about Patterns for Introducing New Ideas into Organizations [via James Robertson]: Over the weekend, while revisiting some citations on patterns, I landed on Mary Lynn Manns' and Linda Rising's Introducing New Ideas into Organizations, which is a web page of papers and resources on the patterns of practice they and many others used over several years to introduce the concept of patterns for software design in organizations. As you might imagine, any radically new way of thinking is a tough sell, and their collection of patterns (123 page PDF) for introducing patterns is really a comprehensive cookbook of tactics that can be used to sell any new technology-related ideas in an organization. 2. Dave Pollard summarises Places to Intervene in a System by Dana Meadows (in increasing order of power/difficulty): I liked both the summary and the original article that brought me back to my last year in university - reading Forrester and thinking about world in terms of leverage points. The following two pieces are from the article by Dana Meadows: Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in "leverage points." These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. More on: change
|
Friday, August 29, 2003|
Coping with complexity: how do you read other weblogs?
Olaf Brugman on downside of blogging: ...skimming through blogs for gems is laborious, timeconsuming and ineffective. Firstly, because it is impossible to keep track of even a couple of interesting blogs. And if you monitor them, most bits and pieces are not relevant to you. Furthermore, the collections of info are unstructured, although some blogs offer channels, chapters and other means to structure (and what is the difference then between a blog and a MS Frontpage managed site, contentwise?). When following links to blog friends, things become more ineffective, since all blogfriends are crossreferences, and bloggers LOVE duplication of info. In fact, a blog is a hyperlinkmultiplier. May be one day we will start fighting hyperlink pollution of the internet. Olaf makes a point that contradicts widespread views that weblogs filter noise. This makes me thinking… As blog-writers we try to provide our readers with good ways to find useful posts in our weblogs (e.g. Tools to digest your own blog), but I also wonder what do we do as blog-readers to cope with information overload. I have three main goals when reading other weblogs: staying updated, following a conversation and problem-solving. I will try to explain what I do in each case. 1. My main way to stay updated is my news aggregator. I would like to follow more blogs than I do, but it would take too much time, so I have to make choices. At this moment I subscribe to weblogs falling mainly in one of the following categories:
Criteria to find out if weblog stays in my news aggregator
For example, I really value a weblog of Dave Pollard, but somehow I find his writing style difficult. From another side I know that many in my news aggregator read his weblog, so I feel safe to unsubscribe: all relevant posts will come to my attention anyway. This is something I had to learn: trusting that weblogs I read will connect me to all relevant posts (from interesting weblogs I do not subscribed or those that "scroll down" before I have time to read and comment). 2. Following a conversation is different. In this case I'm interested to see how idea from one weblog (my own or one I read) develops across weblogs. In this case I use mainly tracking tools: comments, trackbacks, Technorati, referrals. 3. Problem-solving. If I have a specific question/problem in mind I use search. Could be anything between searching my weblog/ weblogs I read/ all weblogs/ all internet. Would be interesting to know how other people read weblogs… |
Tuesday, August 26, 2003|
Case Research Methodology course
This are some of my notes from Case Research Methodology course by Robert Scapens and Chris Humphrey. I started writing this during the course and revised/published a few days later. Overall impression. I liked the course and would recommend to take it to people at the early stages of their PhD and thinking about qualitative research. Random insights (summary from different presentations/discussions):
There was more for me in this course than I'm able to write: methodological and writing insights are more difficult to put in my own words. It was good for networking and also contributed to my survival from "PhD crisis" I had last couple of months :) |
Sunday, August 24, 2003|
Date format problem in Radio
I had a problem in Radio: in html version dates were shown in Russian format with strange encoding. I tried to find a solutions and found only the cause of this problem: Radio is using the date format from operating system. This means two things:
More on: Radio
|
Friday, August 22, 2003|
Tools to digest your own blog
Sebastien Paquet asks about value/problems of using Trackback in Radio and use of other add-ons too. This is what I think about it: 1. In spite of Trackback in Radio bugs and features it was easy to install and it works. It just doesn't make all the things I want. No breaking Radio in my case. I agree with Stephen Downes who is "not sure trackback is the way to do it, because it means that we listen only to those with specialized software". I'm not relying much on incoming trackback, but I don't mind pinging others (especially Movable Type users) who use it more. For me the main value from using Trackback would be in tracking connections between your own posts. For example, if you write something now and link to your earlier post there is no way that readers of that post know that there is a follow up. Trackback can solve this problem. I'm not sure if it does now because it worked for some of my posts and not for others. Will try to get some clarity on this. 2. This brings me to the broader issue: tools to digest your own blog. I use my weblog as a learning diary. In this case connections between posts (=development of ideas) is one of the most important things (Jay Cross about this) and one of the less supported. Do you have the same pain of finding earlier posts relevant for your current "to be post"? I have, even with many ways I use to seach my weblog. Yesterday I tried to find posts that I could use for my PhD literature review. It pains. Just think about this: if I (the author and the person who uses these pages most) have problem of tracking ideas how easy then it is for others? 3. On of the tools I use to track ideas in my weblog is liveTopics. It works well, although it's not bugs-free and it's not supported any more since Matt Mover works on k-collector. I wrote earlier about it in comments to one of my posts: I believe in work around k-collector, but I think that it serves totally different goal - discovering emergent connections between people. I use liveTopics to provide an alternative navigation for my weblog and I value this aspect as well (especially given not-easy-to-find-a-way chronological structure of blogs). Both aspects are important for me and it's really pity that I have to make choices between these two tools. May be one day k-collector guys will also provide "one blog" functionality next to "group" functionality. The only reason I'm not switching to k-collector is simple: I have news aggregator, Technorati and long list of other tools to track my connections with others, but I don't have many ways to connect my own posts. liveTopics is one of the tools that makes it possible. |
Thursday, August 21, 2003|
If you are a node in knowledge-sharing network, what is important?
If you think about yourself as a node in knowledge-sharing network, what is important (having in mind both: your own interests and being a part of the network)?
Brainstorming and struggling... More on: knowledge networker
|
|
Lessons learnt implementing expertise locator system (2)
Jack Vinson (bold is mine): As part of his discussion on expert databases last week, John Chu shared a report on the topic from Outsell, Trend Alert: Connecting People to People - Expert Databases (abstract only). Outsell surveyed a number of companies with expert databases and said some things about knowledge management and setting up expert databases. It was the conclusion that was most telling: |
Wednesday, August 20, 2003|
First derivative, knowledge workers and PhD
Jim McGee makes my day. The morning started with his pointer to Career Calculus by Eric Sink. I loved this piece. It's about simple formula behind someone's career: Cluefulness = Gifting + Learning*Time And as Eric notes, "your career success is determined by three variables, only one of which you can control". It's not about how smart you are, it's about the speed of learning. The first derivative. Two small pieces: ...We want learning to be a process, not an event. Making your first derivative constantly positive is not just about formal training. It is a posture which you bring to your job each day. It is a posture of teachability, a constant willingness to learn. That was a good start. Then I scrolled a bit and found From managing knowledge to coaching knowledge workers: The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker's perspective of What's in it for me?. It attempts to squeeze the knowledge management problem into an industrial framework eliminating that which makes the deliverables of knowledge work most valuable--their uniqueness, their variability. This industrial, standardizing, perspective provokes suspicion and both overt and covert resistance. It also starts a cycle of controls, incentives, rewards, and punishments to elicit what once were natural behaviors. These two posts got me out my "I'm lost in my PhD" mood. I'm still lost, but now I see the light :) More on: knowledge networker learning learning informal PhD
|
Tuesday, August 19, 2003|
Lessons learnt implementing expertise locator system
Lessons learnt implementing expertise locator system by Jack Vinson: C. The information within the system needs to be self-maintaining as much as possible to reduce the likelihood of info-rot reducing the value of the system. John did not discuss using tools that automatically populate expertise information based on reports and communications, such as Tacit Mail. More on: knowledge mapping
|
Monday, August 18, 2003|
Site statistics for weblogs (2) and tracking tools
A follow-up to my earlier post about Site statistics for weblogs. Finally I've got statistics for my weblog: it's server-based free The Webalizer. It collects data taken from server logs every night. Don't ask me how to install and tweak it - my husband did all the work :) Next to it I got a comment from Lis with pointer to her collection of sites that track links to your weblog. Lis suggests to replace her weblog url with your own. I adapted her list for my weblog, added few services and some specific comments.
Later: this comment from Michael Fagan deserves "lifting": Almost all of these can be accessed from my Page Info Viewer http://www.faganfinder.com/misc/site.shtml . The ones that can't will be when I upgrade. More on: blog ecosystem blogging tools
|
Wednesday, August 13, 2003|
Random observations from user studies
Recently I thought about several associations between discussions in the blogoshere and user studies we do at work (trying to undestand how people search and find in-house expertise). The parallels I found interesting: Blogosphere: many people seem to be interested in How Technorati works? User studies at work: Any search system does some filtering and ranking. Users are usually curious about the criteria used for it as it helps to understand reliability of search results. Blogosphere: Google comes up with built-in calculator and synonym searching. User studies at work: It seems that Google sets up search standards that users start applying to all their search experinces. Many compare internal search engines with Google (and you can guess which side wins ;) Blogosphere: Dina Mehta discusses impact of joining focus groups on client's understanding of customers User studies at work: it's so nice to observe the power that user feedback has. You can spend hours talking to system developers without much effect and then one hour meeting with users makes a difference. More on: synchronicity usability
|
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
The greatest risk is in hanging onto what seems safe
The paradox is that in a turbulent time, the greatest risk is in hanging onto what seems safe. The greatest safety - to reach into the unknown. This is surely not only true for each of us as individuals but also for organizations. More on: change
|
|
Trackback in Radio (2): bugs and features
As many others I'm happy to have Trackback in Radio, but I have bugs too. Bug 1. Shortcuts are not expanded. Except from my post that TrackBack sends contains my shortcuts instead of full text. This will make me thinking twice about using shortcuts next time, which is stupid, because I really like this Radio feature (btw, for Radio guys: I stopped using categories because shortcuts are not supported in categories RSS feeds). Bug 2. It doesn't work with KMpings. I tried to ping KMpings (as their instruction says - sending ping to this page). It doesn't work. Also I would like to be able to define use of trackbacks per category:
Do I have any chances to be heard? Please. More on: Radio
|
Monday, August 11, 2003|
Knowledge networker needs (2)
Thought for the day [Conversations with Dina] You wander from room to room Have forgotten: knowledge networker needs a mirror too :) More on: knowledge networker
|
|
Knowledge networker needs
Just a quick brain dump. What knowledge networker needs?
More on: knowledge networker
|
|
Who owns narrated experiences? (2)
Comment by Scott Leslie to Best Set of Tools to Support Communities: One capability that may be specific to the type of communities I support (though I expect applies more widely) is the ability for a community member to easily extract their contributions (and possibly also the contributions of others) so that they can use them in other parts of their online lives. Alternatively, the ability for a community member to easily contribute materials that have been developed elsewhere. I think this is important not only because we are members of multiple communities, but also because we are taking more responsibility for our own learning and we need traces of our thinking to reflect and to learn (recent example: Circadian Blog Rhythms). This need also explains why weblog can take place of participation in forums. See also related post: Who owns narrated experiences? Btw, definition of social software in the same comment: This is why I think the whole 'social software' movement is in fact different from many of the collaborative technologies we've seen before - it's software that is centered around individuals (instead of the community 'site' or server) but that creates conjunctions of these individuals by accepting various interfaces, feeds and formats from those individuals and coalescing them. More on: community straddling content ownership
|
|
NetWORK and knowledge work
Nardi, B., Whittaker, S, Schwarz, H. (2002). NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Volume 11, Issue 1-2, 205-242. Abstract. Through ethnographic research, we document the rise of personal social networks in the workplace, which we call intensional networks. Paradoxically, we find that the most fundamental unit of analysis for computer-supported cooperative work is not at the group level for many tasks and settings, but at the individual level as personal social networks come to be more and more important. Collective subjects are increasingly put together through the assemblage of people found through personal networks rather than being constituted as teams created through organizational planning and structuring. Teams are still important but they are not the centerpiece of labor management they once were, nor are they the chief resource for individual workers. We draw attention to the importance of networks as most CSCW system designs assume a team. We urge that designers take account of networks and the problems they present to workers. Authors use ethnographical research to document personal social networks in the workplace or, as they call them, intensional networks. We choose the term intensional to reflect the effort and deliberateness with which people construct and manage personal networks. The spelling of the term is intended to suggest a kind of tension and stress in the network. We found that workers experience stresses such as remembering who is in the network, knowing what people in the network are currently doing and where they are located, and making careful choices from among many media to communicate effectively with their contacts. At the same time, 'intensional' also suggests a 'tensile strength' in network activity; we found our informants endlessly resourceful and energetic in their everyday collaborative activities within their networks. (p.3) The authors define "an ongoing process of keeping a personal network in good repair" (p.9) as netWORK and suggest that it "tends to be hidden work, unaccounted for in workflow diagrams or performance evaluations" (p.5). Then they elaborate on specific characteristics of netWORK and illustrate them with examples from the study. Key netWORK tasks: 1. Building a network: Adding new nodes (people) to the network so that there are available resources when it is time to conduct joint work; Key actions: remembering and communicating. See also for comparison with related research on: communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), actor-networks (Law and Callon, 1992; Latour, 1996), networks of strong and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973), knots (Engeström and Vähäaho, 1999) and coalitions (Zager). From conclusions: The reduction of corporate infrastructure means that instead of reliance on an organisational backbone to access resources via fixed roles, today's workers increasingly obtain resources through personal relationships. Rather than being embraced by and inducted into 'communities of practice', netWORKers laboriously build up personal networks, one contact at a time.(p.25) This study highlights the increasing role of personal network in doing work without explicitly looking at learning and knowledge sharing. Studies we do at work show that many people tend to rely on their networks while searching for information (which is related to learning). Supporting knowledge creation and sharing in social networks study is about similar things as well. All of this convinces me more and more that there is something wrong in studying knowledge workers without their networks, but I'm still struggling to understand how knowledge work and netWORK are connected. See also: Knowledge networker |
Sunday, August 10, 2003|
Blog maintenance
As the title says - I'm doing some work for my weblog. 1. I've got some kind of statistics working (see also my questions about it). 2. I found out that relatively many people visit my outdated About page, so I updated it. 3. I made my weblog a bit better by following Dive into accessibility guidelines:
4. I finally added liveTopics to my item templates. This wasn't an easy task as liveTopics wiki is down and I had to use Google cache to find out how to call relevant macros. Still in to do list (not for today :)
More on: liveTopics Radio usability
|
Saturday, August 09, 2003|
Blogging tool wanted
Still in a questioning mode :) A friend asks: I have used Blogger for a while, but the blog is almost dead now. One of the things preventing me from putting more time in it is that a Blogger blog (the free version) is hard to organize and searchable. It is a long list of postings. I would like something with more navigation options (like channels or categories). Also, every time I put new features (blogroll, statistics, comments etc) into the Blogger htmlcode, the blog showed display errors, like showing the dates in scriptform, instead of normal writing. So I was not impressed with the quality of Blogger.I thought about TypePad. Do you have other options in mind? More on: blogging tools
|
Friday, August 08, 2003|
How Technorati works? (2)
David Sifry answers my question about Technorati: Here's the basics: Thanks for fast reply! And for fixing the category problem (I had it in my stats). I suggest that you add this explanation somewhere, so people know that inbound blog/link statistics are calculated based on links from homepages of other weblogs. (I guess I'm getting spoiled as a researcher: I want to know the method to trust results :)
See also more advanced version of answer in David's Technorati Tutorial, Part 1 More on: blogging tools
|
|
Introductory texts for would be bloggers
RSS A Love Story by Brian Lamb [via Roland Tanglao: KLogs] A Beginner's Guide to Blogs by David Wiley [via Brian Lamb] More on: blogs introducing blogs
|
|
How Technorati works?
Last technical question before I move to other things. Does anyone knows how Technorati works? Do they process blog homepages only? Or only items in RSS feeds? Or only things "not older than ..."? I wonder because I usually observe some fluctuations in numbers of inbound blogs and inbould links. E.g. yesterday I had 100+ inbound blogs and today it's 80+. It would be interesting to know why these things change. I tried Technorati site and weblog of David Sifry with no luck. I guess this is a quite typical question that user has about systems that digest information: what are the criteria that are used?
More on: blog ecosystem blogging tools
|
Thursday, August 07, 2003|
Site statistics for weblogs
More pragmatic questions: what site statistics could you recommend to use with a weblog? I'm most interested to know the following about my weblog:
It's also interesting to know usual things (e.g. hits and visitors), but as far as I don't have ads it's not important :)
See also: RSS Flow, Measured More on: blogging tools blogs
|
|
Earning with your blog
My brother is very pragmatic young person, so after I had explained him how my weblog works he said that I should try to earn some money with it. This was never my goal (I thought only about reputation :), but his suggestion made me thinking. I may go for a couple of "ad" things that bring some money to cover my hosting if they fit what I do. But I'm not sure if this "commercialisation" effort is worth it. So, my questions for bloggers (A-list bloggers are not counted :)
Here I'm interested in direct use of your weblog for earning money. Cases of getting a job/project because of your on-line reputation or providing products/services are something else. And finally - what do you think about these ways of earning money with your weblog? Would you do this? In what cases? Or would you prefer to have it pure without spoiling your design/reputation with money issues?
See also: comments, In Search Of Blog Business Models [via Marc Canter], How to make money from blogging - by acting as a miner and getting domain specific nuggets [via Roland Tanglao: KLogs], The Economist: Golden blogs [via Blogads] |
Wednesday, August 06, 2003|
Bridging the gap between research and practice of communities
My colleagues are organising a workshop "Bridging the gap between research and practice of Communities of Practice" during C&T Conference (19 September, Amsterdam). The plan is to bring together presentations of a researcher and a practitioner for each topic, so there are opportunities to contrast their approaches and discuss them. The topics are:
These are some of the challenges around communities in corporate KM context and the last one is about one of my KM&learning interest. Hope to be there, but not 100% sure yet. More:
|
Monday, August 04, 2003|
Business blog links
Recent links about business blogging in my aggregator:
More on: blogs in business RSS
|
|
Natural selection
Volker Webers Quote of the Day [via Martin Roell] It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. More on: change
|
|
The future is in the hands of those who can operate a press
The Death of the Webmaster: Why Weblogs Bring a True Revolution to Internet Publishing [via Thomas Burg]: The future is in the hands of those who not only own a press, but that can also operate it.
Later: the post above was the one of many in my news aggregator linking to the web-site of Luigi Canali De Rossi. I've subscribed to his RSS, reading about Communication Agents Initiative and enjoying great quotes like this one: Stop surfing, Start Making Waves! |
|
Trackback in Radio
Finally. Trackback in Radio. One more brick to get better connections.
|
© Copyright 2002-2005 Lilia Efimova 
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: 6/25/2005; 9:36:40 PM.
