Mathemagenic

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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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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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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In one of the comments to this weblog Will Thalheimer suggested a link to his post on mathemagenic processing. Nice, since the title of my weblog comes from a research brief by Will (the old link is not working, but the text is the same).

Which brings me to a few things:

1. Now research-on-learning insights comes from Will in more digestable RSS format - Work-Learning Journal is strongly recommended to anyone into learning (especially to those heavily into practice rather then theory).

2. I was forced to go back and to think what mathemagenic processing actually was once again, and this time I picked something that I’m pretty sure will come back in some thinking about ethnographic writing (bold is mine):

When learners are faced with learning materials, their attention to that learning material deteriorates with time. However, as Rothkopf (1982) illustrated, when the learning material is interspersed with questions on the material (even without answers), learners can maintain their attention at a relatively high level for long periods of time. The interspersed questions prompt learners to process the material in a manner that is more likely to give birth to learning.

3. Something from another post, on experts as e-trainers (bold is mine):

I’ve been reading Richard E. Clark and Fred Estes’ recently released book, Turning research into results: A guide to selecting the right performance solutions. They recounted research that shows that an expert’s knowledge is largely “unconscious and automatic” to them. In other words, experts have retrieved their knowledge from memory so many times that they’ve forgotten how they do this and how the information all fits together—the knowledge just comes into their thoughts when they need it. This is helpful to them as they use their expertise, but it makes it difficult for them to explain to other people what they know. They forget to tell others about important information and fail to describe the links that help it all make sense.

This is something directly relevant from KM perspective as well - thinking of best-practices/story-telling approaches vs. apprenticeship.

I know it’s cryptic, but better I blog at least something, instead of hiding useful links in my del.icio.us, don’t you think? :)))

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/20.html#a1741; comments are here.

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Must read: BusinessWeek’s The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard… (via Ingo Forstenlechner).

It’s on many things: long working ours, information overload, overheads of unnecessary communication, social network profiling, knowledge mapping, an even blogs and wikis… A bit too much to mix, but definitely along the lines of the work we do, my PhD research and my personal struggles.

And a quote about things that I believe are behind many of those issues - knowledge work governance and knowledge worker flexibility:

…in terms of reducing work overload, perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time. “The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough death,” says Babson’s Davenport. “Even today people end up being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many hours they are in the office.”

Of course, there’s one shiny new example of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog entry — all that’s seen is the final result. Similarly, the success of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the programmers involved, not on how many hours they log.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/29.html#a1679; comments are here.

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I used to blog papers I read, but over last few months it wasn’t that much. Here is one from yesterday:

Neustaedter, C., Brush, A., and Smith, M., (2005) “Beyond “From” and “Received”: Exploring the Dynamics of Email Triage.” CHI 2005 Short Papers.

Abstract. Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Email triage can quickly become a serious problem for users as the amount of unhandled email grows. We investigate the problem of email triage by presenting interview and survey results that articulate user needs for email triage. The results suggest the need for email user interfaces to provide additional socially salient information in order to bring important emails to the forefront.

Of course I didn’t know the word triage and I was surpised that to find out that it is “a process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment” (more details at Wikipedia).

The paper is 4 pages, so you can get an impression of the main findings byt yourself, but there are a couple of things that I find pretty much corresponding with the insights from interviews on information overload we did at work.

What we found most interesting was that the interview participants using the multi-pass strategy would routinely use a first pass to handle emails they consider to be not important or junk. This pass would involve finding emails they could quickly delete or get rid of.

We didn’t look at email handling directly, but it comes heavily while talking about information overload. When talking about their email handling strategies several people noted the same. I wonder why. I guess next to the fact that getting rid of not important stuff is easy, but probably also because endorphin release upon completing the task :)

But what I’ve also heard from our participants that sometimes cleaning and organising emails takes so much time that, although properly sorted, important emails do not get much time to be read or acted upon…

The second thing from the paper is one of the recurrent themes, not only in this interview round, but also in other studies on whatever technology for communication and knowledge sharing.

Regardless of the user type, we found that most people felt their strategy was pretty good, but realized there were likely other, more efficient strategies.

What I find out often that technology training people get are often stops at a level of functionality (”if you want to send email click this button”), while usually there is not much discussion about productivity, your own and others (”think before emailing - may be a colleague is next door and would actually enjoy a coffee break instead of one more message in a mailbox”). We are often taught how to use tools for what they designed, but not how to use them to make our life easier and more fun.

Anyway, what would be practical implications of it? Apart of reshaping existing technology trainings I’m thinking of ways to share personal effectiveness tricks and establishing shared communication practices that make life of everyone easier. Those probably could help, but then there are questions about starting the process:

• moving out of your own comfort zone (”if it doesn’t break don’t touch it”)
• finding ways to talk to others about practices which are usually hidden in our personal interactions with tools
• getting convinced that there is a value in comparing personal effectiveness tricks (this is a big issue - it’s easy to say “do it like me”, but most likely answer is “it doesn’t fit because I organise my work differently”) and figuring out how to pick up something that could be useful in spite of differences

Of course, you can design better tools, but I’m not convinced it would help - many times it’s not about having a good instrument, but about knowing how to use it in a good way :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/23.html#a1593; comments are here.

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Just a concept map from information overload workshop. It’s a bit drafty… May be Carla will make a nicer copy (I sent this one to her for our project). Or may be I’ll find time to blog it properly…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/22.html#a1530; comments are here.

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From today’s workshop on information overload:

• my presenation (on two things: (1) connecting PKM and information overload, (2) some relevant input from personal information management research)
• Information strategies: exposure, channels, tools
• Information “properties”

• knowledge (value/relevance/etc.) - information (artefacts) - “meta-data” - “meta-meta-data” (Ton’s forest)
• categorised/not
• useful/not
• hot - warm - cold

[I wanted to add more things, it's not working that way, so just posting from drafts]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/03.html#a1513; comments are here.

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After first steps in our research on information overload things get a bit more clear for me: it seems that it’s not about information overload, but our practices of dealing with information. Questions I find particularly interesting:

• How do you manage multitasking? Strategies, tips and tricks to handle multiple processes…
• How do you manage working with multiple sources needed for a task? Especially when there are a lot of them and they are in different formats (emails, files, paper documents, IM talks, coffee-table discussions).
• How do you manage awareness? How do you monitor multiple sources of information that could be useful in the future? (I use weblogs :)

Would be nice to find time to describe my own practices regarding those :)

Funny enough, those questions correspond with process, artefact and awareness categories from my thinking on PKM purposes and practices.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/23.html#a1505; comments are here.

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