Mathemagenic

I was about to write a post on procrastination that keeps me from writing, but now I have something better - a couple of comments my post on bloggers as public intellectuals to follow-up.

Jack Vinson [bold is mine]:

…what I take from this is the larger picture of how people work together to develop new and interesting ideas.  Academics, the focus of Lilia’s discussion, naturally talk to one another and hammer out ideas.  It’s hard enough to see where an idea truly originates even amongst a few people.

But when the conversation crosses tens or hundreds of people AND locations AND sources AND time, then the genesis of ideas is up in the clouds.  We know this - at least this seems like something I learned through my education.  But we still insist in our society on finding THE person who came up with some invention and pouring the credit upon her.

I guess those things happened before, but with current interconnectivity the process of “cloud idea generation” becomes wider and faster. It also becomes more visible - with so much of interactions being technology-mediated it’s now more easy to see how bits of ideas travel and change.

“Pouring the credit” is an interesting issue. As a person, I’m happy inventing ideas and even more happier to see them travel and being used: knowing that a bit of my thinking was useful for someone else is rewarding by itself. In this respect I don’t really need credits, but I definitely appreciate having “trackbacks” - some way of knowing where my ideas travel and what happened to them.

For me as a professional things are much more difficult: I still get hired and get paid as an individual, not as part of the cloud. The current rules that govern my work are pretty much based on the number and quality of the ideas that could be traced to me as a contributor. In this sense, credits are essential.

While I love doing research, one of the reasons I’m not planning to stay in the academic world is the system that ties formal professional growth (which is about the scale of challenges to deal with and available resources next to the salary scale) to channelling ideas into forms and spaces (e.g. A-list journals) that might work better for credits, but do not necessarily for helping ideas to travel wider and faster.

Interestingly enough, this is also the issue that makes me thinking of getting back to my HR(D) roots after I’m done with the PhD research. I believe that many new ways of working are not getting where they could be in organisations because they do not fit with the ways the work is evaluated and rewarded.

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Thanks to a colleague I went rereading the paper I now automatically cite in my PhD work - Alison Kidd’s The marks are on the knowledge worker. Between other things she talks about the importance of the spatial layout and materials for knowledge workers, discussing a number of roles that the mess of papers plays.

What I find striking is the parallel between those roles of the paper spatial arrangement and my uses of the weblog.

As a holding pattern

It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such a as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use [12]. Filing is uncomfortable for the because they cannot reliably say when they will want to use a particular piece of information or to which of their future outputs it will relate (p.187)

Weblog provides as much structure as I want to. Posts that are easy to categorise get “filed” into specific tags and categories, but the rest is just “piled” in the chronological archives with fuzzy or no tags and may be some linking. What is nice compared to the paper that a post can sit in multiple piles (and files) for the same time (see Whittaker & Hirschberg, 2001, for more on piling and filing).

As a primitive language

It also seems that knowledge workers may use pieces of paper or the marks on them as a material correlate of a model of the world which they are in the process of constructing in their heads. (pp.187-188)

All those “thinking in progress” posts, fuzzy tags and linking often represent bigger emergent structures that are not ready to be articulated as a whole.

As contextual cues

The layout of physical materials on their desk gives them powerful and immediate contextual cues to recover a complex set of threads [...] (p.188)

With weblog is different: these cues (context in the text, links and tags) are not those to recover a  state of mind before before an interruption, but rather at the moment of writing the post. However, it plays similar function, allowing to get back to a task at hand at a particular moment.

As demonstrable output

Piles of papers on desks are also important as tangible objects to which workers can point to show others how much progress they have made. (p.188)

Well, this should work if you can get those who evaluate your work to read your weblog :) But in any case, for everyone else it does show the thinking in progress (see also Kaye et al, 2006 on the roles that archives play).

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A bit of a follow-up on the microactions aggregate point from my post on ‘Beyond blogging’ lessons learnt, where I wrote:

Blogging is about microcontent - publishing small pieces of thought and commentary, anchored with permalinks and carried away by feeds. However, the real value is not at the post level - ecosystems between blog posts are more interesting and more important. Think of the fuzzy feeling of knowing someone from reading a weblog over time, implicit understanding of a new issue that emerges while following a conversation between bloggers or sense of belonging to a network of others - in all cases posts and links are only a tip of the iceberg.

Developing “fuzzy feeling”, “implicit understanding” and “sense of belonging” takes time and effort. For those writing and reading weblogs in a real time that’s an integral part of the process, but what about others - newcomers, who need to navigate implicitly constructed knowledge and relations, or those of a periphery of the particular topical community, who don’t have lots of time to invest, but still want to know, or those searching for an answer to a specific question?

In this respect I would distinguish between the first degree and second degree of blogging effects:

• First degree effects - those that “happen” as part of the natural processes in a blogging ecosystem - conversations, networking, reputation building.
• Second degree effects - those possible since weblogs provide rich traces to learn from for non-participants.

For a non-participant the microcontent nature of blogging creates two problems (actually, those are also problems for the participants, but to a much lesser degree):

• There are a lot of weblog posts, that are difficult to navigate if you are not part of the ecosystem
• Posts are fragmented, so often to gain real insight on the issue or to judge the expertise of a blogger one have to follow multiple posts

Now think of a company where many employees blog about their work internally or externally. Next to creating conditions for blogging (and the first degree effects of it), ideally it would be also also interested in maximising the second degree effects - making most from what is already there.

So, what are the ways to make most from the weblog traces that are already there?

One thing to do is improving discoverability of interesting blog posts, blogs and bloggers with smart search, aggregation and providing pointers to good content (exteded discussion and specific “to do” ideas). However, those things do not help much with improving access to expertise fragmented in a number of posts that not only take time to read, but also require some “integration” effort. Similar problem exists, for example, with forum-based Q&A discussions, where one often have to read through the whole thread to get an idea of proposed solution(s).

Weblogs are a bit better than forums in respect to summaries (since bloggers could not rely on having previous messages visible in a thread they tend to summarise some of it, see paper on weblog conversations for more), but they are still far from providing densely packed information in a way a good article would do.

Weblogs are good for drafting and discussing ideas in progress, but it also makes a lot of sense to find ways to do more with those drafts. Some ideas:

• Making a list of “best of my posts” is a good practice anyway, but as a company you can provide an additional incentive by asking bloggers who work for you to make those lists. For example, to be promoted in a newsletter on a topic of their blog or as an input for their evaluation if they want to bring their work-related blogging as an extra point.
• Checking if weblog content could be reused as an input for web-pages, white papers, help files, training courses, books, etc. and asking bloggers to work on those. I guess many would be happy with an opportunity to rework bits and pieces of ideas into something more coherent and potentially more visible (and I think that asking “more professional” writers to rework someone else’s weblog content only makes sense if bloggers themselves don’t feel like doing it).
• Automatic summaries and visualisations. Those do not replace human summarisation, but could be useful to get an idea of interesting trends and to locate specific weblog posts and conversations.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/30.html#a1960; comments are here.

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Had a nice opportunity today to update my Dutch and my knowledge of KM research in NL at KM day “Made in Holland”. Hopefully will blog a bit more tomorrow, but these are some resources in relation to my talk on blogging and KM.

Slides: .ppt

What was in the talk (so you don’t have to check it if you saw some of the things already):

• Highlights from Microsoft employee blogging study
  • Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.
• Personal vs. business dimensions/choices
  • Blog posts 1, 2, 3 + ECSCW’07 talk
• Implications for KM
  • I should blog it soon.See ‘Beyond blogging’
    lessons learnt for a starting point.

Also:

• Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/13.html#a1952; comments are here.

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Tony Karrer (via Edu RSS):

Interesting discussion going on with contribution by Luis Suarez, Jay Cross, David Wilson - around the distinction between Knowledge Management and Learning:

Knowledge Management and Informal Learning
Knowledge Management and Learning - Separated at Birth? - Where They Really?
KM & learning: separated at birth?
KM and Learning

Sometimes it’s funny and a bit frustrating to see the discussion coming back to the same issues… I guess this is because where I started myself, moving from HRD/training/(e)-learning to KM 5 years ago: from recognising similarities between those fields and from disappointments that they are hardly connected when it comes to shared language and practices. This is also where my PhD has started (I’m far away from there now :) - from fascination with informal learning and recognising the potential of integrating HRD and KM thinking to support it better…

We did some work trying to figure out the overlaps and gaps between KM and learning in theory and practice (mainly focusing on corporate settings) and looked for directions for integration. I have some bits and pieces in my weblog, but it probably makes more sense to look at the papers since they document things in a more coherent way (both are based on the data from interviews and workshops with practitioners):

Efimova, L., & Swaak, J. (2002). KM and (e)-learning: towards an integral approach? “The new scope of knowledge management in Theory and Practice”, proceedings of the 2nd EKMF Knowledge Management Summer School (KMSS02). 2-6 September 2002, Sophia Antipolis, France.

Efimova, L. & Swaak, J. (2003). Converging knowledge management, training and e-learning: scenarios to make it work. Journal of Universal Computer Science, Vol. 9/6 2003, pp. 571-578.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/12/14.html#a1871; comments are here.

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There is part of my work that I hasn’t been writing much about over last two years. Not because it’s so confidential, but because most of the complexities that I had to face and to learn from are still too complex for a blog post. I am about to disengage from the project to focus on my PhD; I hope I’ll be able to reflect on the things properly one day, but I also need a placeholder for some of the lessons learnt (or, to be more precise for some things where I’ve learnt a lot without having an answer :)

• how your relations with specific people in a project implicitly define the commitments you make and how painful it could be if those unspoken ‘personal constellations’ are changed
• how important is time for developing a shared language, how much you should fight for an opportunity to have it and that the best way to do so is still doing things together and not talking about doing them
• how hard is facilitation of technology adoption, especially if you are already in a technology-mediated settings
• how to make sure things are on track without having the responsibility or means to ‘manage’ (and without doing them yourself ;)
• how to communicate online - hmm, more precisely: how to get ‘optional’ feedback online, how to make decisions asynchronously, how to orchestrate selection of media to fit everyone even if there is nothing there that fits everyone, how not to spam everyone, but still have everyone updated
• how not to be involved, even if it’s good for the project
• how to tame passion
• how to introduce things (slowly :)
• how to balance between decision-making and training
• how to make decisions about technology design with subject-matter experts who don’t know much about technology
• how to write difficult things in email without ruining the relation behind
• how shared working practices could grow in a heavily distributed project
• how to go back and forth between languages; how it is much more than the languages themselves and the need to switch, but the whole cultures and mindsets behind
• how to plan and manage things you can’t plan and manage (community life and support :)
• how to balance paid long-term members and recently joined volunteers in the same team

One day (when I finish my PhD and get back to doing things instead of doing research ;) I will be much better facilitator because of all the experiences above :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/11.html#a1843; comments are here.

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From Taking Responsibility by David Gurteen in Inside Knowledge (via Luis Suarez at ITtoolbox):

The point here is the line, “the ability to act on knowledge is power”. So many of us, even when we have the knowledge, fail to act for a whole range of different reasons: it’s not our job; we lack the confidence; we don’t have the resource; we are tied to old habits or we don’t want to stick our necks out and so forth.

This leads me on to my own definition of a knowledge worker: “Knowledge workers are those people who have taken responsibility for their work lives. They continually strive to understand the world about them and modify their work practices and behaviours to better meet their personal and organisational objectives. No one tells them what to do. They do not take ‘no’ for an answer. They are self motivated.”

The key here is about taking responsibility. To my mind knowledge workers cannot be coerced, bribed, manipulated or rewarded and no amount of money or fancy technology will ‘incentivise’ them to do a better job. Knowledge workers see the benefits of working differently for themselves. They are not ‘wage slaves’ – they take responsibility for their work and drive improvement.

David formulates in a very nice way the essence of why I’m studying knowledge workers in my PhD. If knowledge workers “cannot be coerced, bribed, manipulated or rewarded” than how do you manage them? Command-and-control methods wouldn’t work, “doing a better job” is not easily specified in a job description - so what then?

For me it has been a long way from my initial questions of supporting informal learning to current focus on blogging practices of knowledge workers, but the underlying quest stays the same - how do you “manage” (support, facilitate, steer a bit ;) knowledge worker activities that couldn’t be controlled?

Given all that I’m not sure I’d agree with David’s definition of knowledge workers as those who take the responsibility. As David himself says earlier there is a number of reasons why the responsibility can not be taken. Also work (at least for those of us not self-employed ;) is a space for negotiations between a person and an organisation. I may like to think that I’m responsible for my work, but how far I actually can “act on knowledge”? Taking full responsibility for your own work means that the other side gives it to you as well, which is not always the case and which is definitely a matter of power exercises.

As a knowledge worker I fight to my freedom to make decisions and shape my own work, but as far as I’m employed by a company (which, I expect will be the case for many others) there are always degrees of freedom (I have a choice within boundaries; of course, I’m also free to push those boundaries, but they do exist and limit my choices ;) and a “responsibility continuum” where responsibilities for shaping the work are shared between knowledge worker and those who pay him.

So, from my perspective David’s definition needs refinement: I’d talk about “being prepared/expected to take the responsibility” or “striving for taking the responsibility” rather than just “taking it”.

I also wonder if while focusing on the important aspect of the responsibility David lost “knowledge” part of “knowledge workers”. How far does he talk about characteristics that make new generations of “workers” different from whose who were there before, rather then “knowledge workers”? What “knowledge” part of the work has to do with taking the responsibility? The connections are implicitly in there (as far as I know from where David comes), but for a good definition they should be clarified a bit more.

Don’t think I’m ready to come with a good definition myself, but just a try. Some times ago I defined knowledge worker as someone who creates value by being subjective. May be I should redefine it as:

knowledge worker is someone who creates value by acting on knowledge

And then, to make the connections clear I’d talk about:

• the nature of knowledge: invisibility and a personal nature of it (subjectivity, always a degree of implicitness, escaping measurement and all other things are here)
• need for taking personal responsibility for acting on knowledge - since it couldn’t be fully specified from outside
• and how organisations depend on knowledge workers taking the responsibility for acting on knowledge to get the value of knowledge turned into action

Makes a good outline for a section on knowledge workers for my dissertation :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/29.html#a1823; comments are here.

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Recently I discovered a couple of tools that made my “organising myself” work much easier. Thought it could be worth sharing.

The first one is Remember the milk, recommended by Aldo

Purpose: web-based task management

• add and check-out tasks
• organise tasks in groups (called lists)
• share tasks with other users
• set-up and retrieve by: list, priority, due date, tag and lots of other parameters
• set-up notifications (by email, IM, SMS), calendar integration, RSS

Why I like it:

I was never able to get along with a computer-based task management system. What actually worked for me was a list of paper on my desk where I’d add tasks big and small as soon as they come to my mind, put colored dots for those most important, cross as done and rewrite the list as soon as I needed space or too much was crossed. It wasn’t the optimal solution: too much work to rewrite the whole thing and no easy way to remember those personal tasks in the list that I actually had to do at home. When going away from my desk for work I’d write a little post-it with “active to-dos” and stick it to the folder with “active paper” that I usually have with me anyway.

Now I have one place with all my tasks (including: “select and put online wedding photos” ;) that I can access when I need, update easily and event print. I don’t use any of the notifications, instead I look in the list at the beginning of the day, at the moments when I’m deciding what to do next and before I go shopping.

Caveats - it fits my lifestyle: no paper agenda (because I’ll forget it anyway), online access at home and at work, not that much time offline and being happy with not having access to my task list 100% time.

There are a few tricks that make life easier (and pretty annoying without them)

• Keyboard shortcuts: the most important is ‘m’ for switching on/off editing multiple tasks, learning others helps as well (it says Learn keyboard shortcuts and it actually important since life is miserable with lots of clicking if you are not using them)
• Breaking tasks into separate lists (e.g. ‘personal’ and ‘work’ or more detailed) helps to keep a group-level overview, but then you miss higher-level picture. I was missing two lists: all active tasks and all “due today or overdue” tasks. Both could be created by smart lists:

• all active tasks - search for status:incomplete and then save the search results
• all “to do now” tasks - dueBefore:today OR due:today and then save the search results (thanks to Emily from the project team for suggesting in email)

Things that don’t make me happy

• occasional glitches (forgivable: free beta product that works most of the times)
• Dutch interface unless I login and it retrieves my priorities for English (I always find it annoying when whatever web-site assumes my language given my IP-address and doesn’t have an option to change it easily)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/01.html#a1811; comments are here.

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David Gurteen has a nice piece at Inside Knowledge - Stop apologising for knowledge management!

I wonder if they really think that there could ever be a short two or three word phrase that could adequately described this discipline we call knowledge management.

And yes it’s OK to make the point that we cannot really manage knowledge but do we really need to attack the name by referring to it as an oxymoron?

To my mind, there is no need to apologise for the term. It is just a label. A label does not need to be descriptive. If you really choke on the words ‘knowledge management’ then use the shorter label – just call it ‘kay-em’. It is then so much more obviously just a label and, if needs be, you can go on to describe it.

This is pretty much the position I take myself, but I’m glad David raised the issue in a public venue. Wonder how people would react :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/05.html#a1771; comments are here.

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Jack Vinson writes a follow-up on my yesterday’s artefacts and practices, with differentiation between work and working:

Work is the output of some activity: the end result that I can then give to someone else. Working is everything that goes on to create that output: mental and physical activity. It’s a useful distinction in the discussion of knowledge work because we so frequently focus on the work product or the result of working, rather than the skill and knowledge that make the result possible. And in thinking about making knowledge work more productive, it is the working that we need to improve, not necessarily the end products.

Also something very synchronous to what I has been writing and drawing over last few days:

In thinking about this, I wonder if a deeper structure might be in play — a deeper connection to context in which bloggers (or knowledge workers) operate. Something like this drawing, where the visible is at the top of the pyramid and stuff below the waterline is the blogging culture and even deeper is the larger culture and context of the people doing blogging. (Please draw something better - or point us to a better-looking drawing. I need to spend more time, if I were to draw something pretty.)

My pictures are not perfect as well. First, I decided to make yesterday’s squares into a triangle, so this is still on weblog artefacts and practices :) Then, I went a bit further in describing those “the larger culture and context of the people doing blogging” from three perspectives. There could be more perspectives/contexts, but in my case (studying knowledge worker blogging practices) I consider those as most important:

• Personal – e.g. personal needs, values, habits, practices, etc. of a knowledge worker that influence blogging
• Community – e.g. norms and practices in the communities of practice (informal, often multiple) where knowledge worker belongs
• Organisational – e.g. norms and practices in organisation(s) that pay knowledge worker for his/her work

Of course, if I would have time I should draw the triangle as a pyramid founded in those contexts, but I’ll leave it to another time.

Also: Nancy on invisible online practices

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/13.html#a1764; comments are here.

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