e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Pedagogy is a KM Skill

    Bravo:

    Sharing knowledge takes effort and skill, even between two people talking face-to-face. You don’t create that by writing stuff down; you create it by creating robust relationships that give people the confidence to ask questions and learn from each other, and by encouraging the disciplines of asking questions without wasting people’s time, and of answering questions with clarity and power, of telling vivid stories within a shared value system. These are the things that matter, the things businesses need to be good at.

    To the extent that this is knowledge management, knowledge management can be useful. But we have words already to describe this process: “teaching” and “learning”. Teaching and learning should be core disciplines for any well-educated person, and organisations should work hard to encourage these skills.

    While I think the author overstates the case against KM a bit, I agree wholeheartedly that the best KM skills for an organization to cultivate are teaching and learning skills.

    (Found via elearningpost.)

  • XplanaZine: Distributed Communities of Practice in E-Learning

    This is a nice overview piece on using distributed communities of practice to boost your design/production teams, although there are a few oddities. It doesn’t seem written quite right to perfectly target either corporate or higher ed applications (though it could be very easily modified for either). On the corporate side, it’s a bit too…federated. I don’t know of many companies (even really big ones) that have a loose enough and geographically distributed enough command-and-control to allow for this. And in the cases where they do, there are often major cultural barriers due to organizational siloes (although, of course, that’s not a good reason not to try this strategy). Most corporations interested in trying this would benefit from a section on overcoming those barriers (which is typical in a KMish piece on CoP’s for corporations). On the whole, the strategy as written seems better suited to large universities, or maybe federated non-profits with lots of local chapters. The reference to SCORM makes me doubt that it was originally written with universities in mind, though.

    Anyway, it’s a good place to start thinking about this stuff.

  • A Great Weblog Page Design

    I just stumbled upon this beautifully designed weblog. The collapsible sidebar headers just blow me away; very efficient and useful. I could see using a similar design for long posts where you want to give the intro and add a “more…” section in order to save space on the main page. I generally think this sort of division is good practice but have resisted doing it in my own blog because the clicking back and forth between the main page and the “more…” page is annoying. (It’s especially problematic in weblogs with lots of long posts, like mine.) If I could use a collapsible on-page toggle with DHTML layers instead of a hyperlink to a separate page for the “more…” section of a post, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

    Too bad I’m not a programmer.

    Update: You can find the instructions for how to create the menu (at least for WordPress, but it looks like it might be adaptable to any PHP-based system) here.

  • Changing Mailing List Over to Bloglet

    As it turns out, the mailing list manager in Expression Engine (the blog tool that runs this web site) doesn’t support daily email digests. So I’m switching the mailing list over to Bloglet. I’ll let you know how it goes.

  • "Abandoning Taxonomy is the First Ingredient of Success"

    From Jon Udell:

    Abandoning taxonomy is the first ingredient of success. These systems just use bags of keywords that draw from – and extend – a flat namespace. In other words, you tag an item with a list of existing and/or new keywords. Of course, that idea’s been around for decades, so what’s special about Flickr and del.icio.us? Sometimes a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. The degree to which these systems bind the assignment of tags to their use – in a tight feedback loop – is that kind of difference.

    Feedback is immediate. As soon as you assign a tag to an item, you see the cluster of items carrying the same tag. If that’s not what you expected, you’re given incentive to change the tag or add another. If your items aren’t confidential and online-only access is sufficient, this can be a great way to manage personal information. But the real power emerges when you expand the scope to include all items, from all users, that match your tag. Again, that view might not be what you expected. In that case, you can adapt to the group norm, keep your tag in a bid to influence the group norm, or both.

    Jon’s insight calls my attention to the fact that a good chunk of my meme tracker idea has already been implemented. De.licio.us is, in part, a meme tagger. If you added the Bayesian analysis to compare overlap in contents from items with the same tag and used the Google API to send search strings from the Bayesian corpus, you’d basically have it. You could add the spider that gathers the metadata necessary to track propagation later on, but the essentials for the purpose of aggregating examples of the meme are (a) tagging, (b) Bayesian analysis, and (c) search on the results of the analysis.

    Thanks to D’Arcy Norman for pointing out Udell’s article.

  • Pan-African Open Source Course Management System Project

    I have just had a few interesting email exchanges with some folks associated with AVOIR (African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources). The group has a dual purpose of developing an Open Source course management system (called KEWL.Nextgen) and cultivating African programming talent in the process. Organizations that will use their system include NetTel@Africa, an organization whose goal is to close the digital divide in Africa by providing access to modern communications equipment and networks. (NetTel@Africa appears to get most of their sponsorship from USAID.)

    At any rate, the AVOIR developers apparently share my dim view of threaded discussion board interfaces and are trying to think through better alternatives. I am delighted to report that, at their invitation, I will be providing some input on the matter (for whatever that’s worth).

    I highly recommend checking this project out, especially if you have programming skills that you can volunteer. It looks like they’re doing some very important work.

  • WordPress Related Entries plugin

    A while back I hinted to the hackers in the crowd that I would love to have a tool for aggregating the posts related to a particular meme on my site. Well, it looks like somebody did it. Unfortunately, it was for the wrong blog tool.

    D’Arcy Norman called my attention to this WordPress plug-in that does pretty much what I wanted. Very cool.

    Overall, I’m very impressed with what I see at WordPress. We’ll have to see whether the pMachine hackers catch up and create an equivalent plug-in before the WordPress hackers finish developing their import tool from pMachine blogs….