Mathemagenic

As promised: Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks (written with Sebastian Fiedler, Carla Verwijs and Andy Boyd)

Abstract. In corporate settings one would like to enable employees to learn from each other even if they are distributed: ideally access to experiences of others should be available at any place (e.g. another part of the globe) and at any time (e.g. after the expert retires). In these settings traditional apprenticeship models do not scale. In this paper we describe a case where technology seems to provide a window onto practice, creating an environment where people can observe and "steal" practices of each other, engaging into distributed apprenticeship relations. We explore how weblogs can support apprenticeship-like relations between their authors by distinguishing between processes of articulating, "stealing" and refining practices one can observe weblog networks on Internet, and then reflecting on possibilities of replicating these experiences in corporate settings.

This paper will be presented special track on Integration of Knowledge Management & (e)Learning at I-KNOW04 conference (30 June - 2 July, Graz, Austria). It landed in a good company of Gabriela Avram and her colleagues presenting on weblogs and some people I don't know yet presenting on wikis (see the progam).

To make choices more difficult there is a parallel track on Hybrid learning with presentation of Priya Sharma and Sebastian Fiedler (guess the topic :) and a couple of other tracks with few interesting papers. You can see the whole program (and if you look carefully you'll find another paper I'm going to present :)

The bottom line: I-KNOW may be worth visiting, especially given that it's two days before BlogTalk and Graz is very close to Vienna.

See also: earlier abstract for the paper, more thinking about apprenticeship and previous posts about I-KNOW and BlogTalk.

This post also appears on channel weblog research