Mathemagenic

This is my selection of "OKLC04" papers (next to those I mention in other posts): mainly those that I was attending, so I'm likely to miss some great stuff. The proceedings are online, so you can make your own choice:

• proceedings homepage
• list of papers by topic (in many cases papers are classified where you woudn't expect them; there is no list of all papers, so you may need to check all topics to find some gems)
• list of authors (I wonder what do they think providing author e-mails for spam bots?)

Exploring the Dynamics of Knowledge in Practice: Comparing Bundles of Knowledge of Experts and Novices by Bou Elena, Sauquet Alfons, Bonet Eduard

Note: I'll be adding a bit more...

I'll write more about papers I liked, but these three made a good session...

Knowledge Creation and Learning in Translating a Novel into a Film by Bonet Eduard, Pons Catalina, Sauquet Alfons, Bou Elena

The paper is about a story of translating a metaphoric novel into a script for a movie, use of visual artefacts on the way and differences in interpreting them.

Thinking of:

• finding the novel as it should be interesting to read (Snow by Maxence Fermine; at Amazon)
• different ways to communicate tacit knowledge and ideas that can be hardly expressed in words
• translations as a metaphor for knowledge creating and learning

Developing Organizational Narrations - A New Dimension in Knowledge Management by Schreyögg Georg, Geiger Daniel

This work looks critically at storytelling practices in KM and suggests that stories are perceived as positive when in fact they could provoke negative results.

The presenters gave an overview of the literature on narratives (re: sense-making (Weick&Browning, 1986), symbolic reproduction of culture (Czarniawska, 1996), knowledge generation and sharing (Orr, 1996; Patriotta, 2003)). I'm not an expert, but I was surprised not seeing the references to the storytelling KM literature I know (e.g. names of Dave Snowden and Steve Denning).

• Narrations
  • natural non-reflexive/non-discursive
  • transfer facts, recipes, emotions, values and norms, etc. of communities
• Problematic aspects of narratives (referring to the Shell story)
  • various stories compete
  • dysfunctional side-effects
  • far reaching consequences
• Need for a transformation into a reflexive mode (re: Habermas, 1989), three steps of reflecting on a story (de-contextualisation, stripping off contexts)
  • step 1. does it fit other contexts of the same community?
  • step 2. could it be translated to other communities?
  • step 3. evaluation of content - reflection of assumptions and claims of the story

The presentation is good for mind-stretching, but I have many questions:

• "stories always have a teller and a listener"; "stories are told in a community" - Where weblog stories with their "telling to the world" attitude fit?
• "stories are not reflective" – Is it always like that?
• I don't think it's a story anymore when you stripped it out of context... It loses it's power and becomes "best practice" that has lot of problems.
• Why do you want to de-contextualise a story? Is there any other way to reflect on stories?

The bottom line

• I guess weblog stories are worth looking at: they are told to the world, reflected upon and checked without de-contextualisation (or, they are re-contextualised in new contexts :)
• I'm getting more convinced in the value of researching by experiencing rather than theorising :)))

A Narrative Aproach to Change Management by Bolin Maria, Bergquist Magnus, Ljungberg Jan

This paper is about using myths as a way to trigger changes. Just a citation: "Myth talks thought man without him knowing it" (Levi-Strauss 1995)

I was the last one to present in the session and the chair of my session wasn't organising it well: I had to fit in less than 20 minutes... So, I didn't have almost any questions and I'm a bit disappointed with that. Or may be I just have to stop expecting feedback during conference presentations :)  It seems that listening to others and talking during social events gives me much more ideas about possible improvements of my own work.

Anyway, useful links:

• slides for my presentation Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case, paper (my company web-site), paper in online proceedings, earlier announcement of the paper
• weblog reader for a collection of online resources and papers on weblogs

This post also appears on channel weblog research