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

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/14.html#a1208; comments are here.

• BlogTalk: open
• BlogTalk paper: would be bloggers

When I’m quiet this usually means paper deadlines :) Today is a deadline for submitting extended abstracts for I-KNOW04. I’m done with one of them and hope to finish another soon (somehow it’s always the last day even if deadline is extended :))) The titles are:

• Searching and finding in-house knowledge: patterns and implications (context)
• Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks (context)

I won’t post abstracts on-line (as there are too many others involved and I didn’t see much interest to posted abstracts anyway), but you can always ask.

When I’m done I hope to post a lot on weblog research, research bloggers and blog as research instrument. Thinking is piling up… and reminds me to share link to Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD comics)…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/09.html#a1077; comments are here.

• Weblog research ethics (2)
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: my weblog
• Learning from Jill’s PhD journey

This is the last keynote by Gerhard Fischer from Center of long life learning and design

He speaks about “the end of the beginning” and changing paradigms. His papers could be found at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers.html

Gerhard distinguishes between communities of practice and communities of interest in a new (for me) way: in community of practice people share same practice and the it drifts towards a shared language (groupthink is a drawback), while communities of interest cross several communities of practice and bring them together based on the interest. The primary goal then is “integrating diversity” and making all voices heard.

I’m too tired for detailed notes, so just things that caught my attention:

• gift culture – social statues is determined by your sharing (paper with more details)
• media-competition – using the easiest media to communicate (instead of the one intended by designer)
• informed participation
• “remembering lessons from the past and archiving information is necessary, but not sufficient, because the information needs( specifically in design) of the future will not be the same as they were in the past”
• Knowledge sharing: motivation of a group is different of motivation of an individual.
• Challenges in KM systems research: testing not in experimental, but in real settings. (This is something I always say to my colleagues when we are discussing evaluation strategy for KM tools we work on :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/04.html#a661; comments are here.

• KM and learning + I-KNOW conference
• Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks
• I-KNOW: Track 2

My talk (paper, presentation). In brief: I presented the examples of partnership/joint work between KM and HR/training/e-learning teams from several studies we did, summarised them as three themes and illustrated with scenarios.

As usual presentation can be polished more, but I’m happy that I managed to finish 1 minute before the “timeover” and had some interesting questions:

• Are there any studies showing effects or ROI of integration?
• What are the most important/most common barriers between KM and HR teams?
• What can be done for providing “blended learning” type of environment if training is outsourced?

Dietmar Paier (www.zbw.at) provides a good overview of using SNA in KM based on a case-study.

Some points

• Wetzstein 03 study: both formal and informal structures are important for creating knowledge in organisation.
• Informal structures of information and communication flows shape the patterns of information exchange and knowledge processes
• Zack 00: use of information and knowledge tends to follow existing social structure
• Providing SNA back to an organisation is a great source for the reflection and change
• No theoretical framework of using SNA for knowledge networks is available (Is it true?)

Questions

• What are the indicators of healthy knowledge network?
• How does it (SNA) scale?

David Hicks talks about applying ideas from structural computing to KM. I didn’t got it totally (and in any case it’s too technical for me), but someone may be interested to look at their prototype at http://cs.aue.auc.dk/construct/

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/04.html#a660; comments are here.

• I-KNOW: Ontologies +
• I-KNOW: morning thoughts
• I-KNOW: first evening

I’m missing some presentations because I’m finishing my slides (I present a paper in a couple of hours). It’s quiet in conference “e-mail room” and I’m happy to have a bit of time to check my news aggregator and to think.

Yesterday evening our discussions were jumping to blogs from time to time (at least after yesterday’s presentation of Jay Cross people know the word :) I talked about my experiences and most common reply was “it sounds interesting, but I don’t have time”. I tried to explain that I don’t have time too and that blogging works for me when it integrates with or takes place of other activities. But still people are sceptical and don’t see the real value of blogging. I’m used to it and this just confirms my earlier observation: blogging value is difficult to explain to non-bloggers.

It’s pity that I’m not presenting about weblogs :) There are a couple of nice examples:

1. Dina points to post of Microsoft employee, John Porcaro, who says:

Frank Maslowski, another stellar Microsoft employee (who happens to report to me) started up his blog. I’m officially adding blogging to all their review objectives for the new fiscal year! I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say, you’ll want to stay tuned to this one. And I expect a good dose of humor sprinkled throughout.

2. This is a nice illustration of speed and feedback loops in the blogosphere: David Buchan comments on my conference postabout ontology building. David, thanks, I’ll come to it later.

Something else: I love this conference as it’s not only about KM (and blogging), but also about meeting great people, dancing, learning how to make sushi and a lot of fun. Will turn back to my presenytation now…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/04.html#a659; comments are here.

• I-KNOW: Ben Shneiderman
• Manila for school districts and Russian dreams
• I-KNOW: first evening

Marianne Kukko from Finland presents the results of interviews with HR practitioners from 44 Finnish companies. For me the results are biased towards HR activities (e.g. training). The interesting detail of the study is about language: lack of Finnish KM terminology makes things more difficult.

Ulrich Kagrlmann talks about SENEKA project. Between other things he talks about KM trends:

• globalisation
• regionalisation
• dynamisation of job profiles
• continuous training on the job
• integration of job and private life
• multiple job
• micro-companies

Matteo Bonifacio speaks again: this time the richness of diversity in knowledge creation and about a contradiction between social and distributed way of creating knowledge and centralised technology support for it diversity. He examines several theories that say the same: diversity is good for innovation.

Then he talks about technology adoption, that happens in three ways: technology fits people’s practice, technology is shaped and changed by these practices or practices are changed to adapt to technology. Practices are social and distributes, so centralised technologies usually fail. If centralised technology succeeds it may be worse: it will imply the reduction of diversity and, as a side effect, of innovation and adaptability. So, next logical step would be to let people have their local technologies, but provide ways to coordinate between them (this is my simplification of distributed KM approach).

One of the question from the audience was about number of technologies that one can cope. I share this concern given the number of communication/discussion tools I use. I have some follow-up thinking, but it’s not getting out of me now :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/03.html#a658; comments are here.

• Deadline silence
• KM and learning + I-KNOW conference
• I-KNOW: first evening

Yesterday I didn’t make many notes: it’s not easy with technical demos, presentations were quite short and I stayed too far from the plug, so could not be on all the time. Today it’s easier: keynotes were almost one hour long, presenters have more time too and I’m smarter to come early to find plugs :)

Please forgive not clean code and editing after posting. I’m typing in Word (because it check spelling and I make a lot of mistakes with blind typing) and posting it in the breaks (as I don’t have wifi card and have to login from a special room).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/03.html#a657; comments are here.

• I-KNOW: Peter Schutt
• I-KNOW: Gerhard Fischer
• I-KNOW: Jay Cross

Jay Cross gives funny and entertaining speech “The rise and fall and rise of eLearning” (slides should be on-line, but it seems Jay needs more time to make it happen). He talks not only about e-learning, but also about “hunting elephants”, learning as network building, blogs and enterprise software. He asked how many people in the audience were reading and writing blogs: around 10 and 2 respectively :)

I’m getting more and more interested why blogs are not used much in research. I wonder if I can make a paper on it (as KMSS paper deadline was extended till 25 July, I hope that I can push myself to write it till then).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/03.html#a656; comments are here.

• I-KNOW: Peter Schutt
• Deadline silence
• I-KNOW: Gerhard Fischer

Peter Schutt from IBM speaks about “post-Nonaka knowledge management”. He discusses scientific management based on Taylor’s approach to people, proposes that current business theories (e.g. TQM, BPR) are building upon Taylor too and then suggests that we are at the turning point now, because scientific management can not be applied to knowledge work.

He states that KM is not about managing knowledge. It’s about managing knowledge work and about productivity of knowledge workers. (This reminds me things that Jim McGee is writing all the time).

He talks about stages in KM history and gives a couple of great citations:

since knowledge is intangible, boundaries, and dynamic and cannot be stocked it has to be exploited where and when it is needed to create values (Nonaka, 2001, “The emergence of “Ba”)

You cannot manage knowledge like you cannot manage love, patriotism or your children. But you can set up and environment where knowledge evolves (Larry Prusak)

The rest of the presentation is focused on three things that are important if you would like to create an environment to support knowledge workers: organisation&culture, processes, information technology. The slides contain interesting frameworks to think about, but too complex to write in a blog. Just a couple of notes:

Organisational knowledge is 4% structured, 16% unstructured and 80% experiences and expertise of people, but 80% of IT budget spent on managing that 4% (refers to analysts from somewhere)

Use of baseball and soccer metaphors to compare old style culture and KM supportive culture.

See also The post-Nonaka Knowledge Management article by Peter Schütt

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/03.html#a655; comments are here.

• KM and learning + I-KNOW conference
• Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks
• I-KNOW: time for learning

Ben Shneiderman speaks about Leonardo’s laptop (which is his new book). I guess main ideas should be somewhere on-line, so I’ll search for them rather than writing them here.

Things I found interesting:

• visualisation examples (I have to check links, but break is too short) www.smartmoney.com/marketmap, www.hivergroup.com.amazon_dyn.html, www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap
• about the book: “The old computing is about what computers can do, The New Computing is about what people can do” (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/newcomputing and mitpress.mit.edu/leonardoslaptop)
• Universal Usability Practice
• Study of user frustration while working with computers: 46% of time working with computer is lost! (paper will appear in international journal of HCI).
• Human needs for activities:

• collect: information
• relate: communication
• create: innovation
• donate: dissemination

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/03.html#a654; comments are here.

• I-KNOW: Ontologies +
• I-KNOW: comments on posting
• KM and learning + I-KNOW conference