I’m working on a few presentations and have been updating some graphics, one of which I used in my last post. Anne Marie McEwan told me she really liked the image and instead of waiting until I give the presentations next month, I’ve put up a segment of the slides on Slideshare [no longer available] with all the related graphics on PKM from the perspective of seeking, sensing and sharing. (CC-Attribution-Non-Commercial). Please let me know if you find them useful and feel free to suggest changes. It’s life in perpetual Beta around here.
Month: March 2010
Critical thinking in the organization
Even the mainstream training field is realizing that reduced layers of bureaucracy mean decision-making gets pushed down the organization chart. This is the message of the AMA in the promotional video – Critical Thinking: Not just a C-suite skill. However, wirearchy takes this one important step further by advocating a two-way flow of power and authority. In both cases, the need for critical thinking is evident. Here is Edward Glaser’s definition:
“Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life.”
A personal knowledge mastery process can help to develop critical thinking skills, where sense-making includes observing, studying, challenging (especially one’s assumptions), and evaluating. Developing these skills takes practice, appropriate feedback and an environment that supports critical thinking.
Several web tools can be used to develop critical thinking skills; the foundation of PKM:
Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking, and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a two-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.
So yes, critical thinking is not just for the C-suite, but unleashing it requires a new framework for getting work done. Wirearchy as the organizational framework, coupled with active personal knowledge management processes, is a step in that direction.
Elgg: it’s a community effort
This weekend I noticed a tweet from Alec Couros about some issues with the Ning social networking platform. That post is over a year old but from the comments as late as last fall, there seem to be ongoing issues on how Ning treats its customers, users and their data.
This brought me to reflect, once again, how important an open source framework is as we move more of our computing to the cloud. While Ning may be free, it is not open source, and the company can make changes at will, just like Facebook, Google or Twitter may do.
I advise my clients that they should consider how important their data is to them before using software as a service (SaaS). Can the data be easily exported? With social bookmarks, it is easy to export and import OPML files from one platform to another. It is also simple to export from WordPress.com SaaS to your own open source hosted version, which is why I strongly advise clients to use WordPress for blogging. With Ning, Facebook and many others, there is no such export function.
So what is the alternative to Ning? This social networking platform is simple to set-up and use and has been embraced by millions, including LearnTrends (+3,000) and WorkLiteracy (+900), two sites I manage. For large enterprise projects I have used Drupal as a community management platform and it works well, though it requires solid technical support.
Another platform that I have used since its early days is Elgg, an open source social networking platform that attracted me because of its unique underlying model. We started using Elgg for an online medical community of practice in 2004 after going through dozens of platforms. The key differentiator of Elgg is that the individual is the centre of all the action. A course is just a node that an individual connects to. You don’t “enter” a course, you just connect to it, as you would to a colleague or friend. This is real user control. We liked Elgg so much that we paid to develop a calendar function and then gave the code to the community.
In 2005 I described Elgg as a Content/Community/Collaboration Management System that allows you to develop, invent and construct knowledge. That sure beats any LMS, in my opinion. Elgg is used for commercial applications like Emerald Publishing as well as the foundation for the Eduspaces community.
The Elgg platform has matured in the past six years and has a strong community and a solid product (v. 1.7). My colleague Jane Hart provides Elgg services for education & business. Soon, Elgg.com will launch with services for those who want a hosted community platform. One major advantage of Elgg will be the ability to take your data and have it hosted elsewhere. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a wise business decision. The Elgg community blog has more information.
Supporting communities like Elgg and Drupal means that we can have more control over our use of web technologies. As business and education move to the web and the cloud, open-source platforms will help to ensure that some corporate board doesn’t decide our future for us.
Literacies
What is literacy? We may think we know. Some people even say we need 21st century literacies. But Marshall McLuhan said that, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Is this how we view literacy, though the rear-view mirror?
Chris Hedges, in America the Illiterate wrote that the lack of print literacy is creating a society that is not able to reason or understand the complexities of our modern world.
“We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.”
I find a strong counter-argument to the notion of literacy under attack is Mark Federman’s paper entitled: Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in tumultuous times [follow the link to the PDF of entire paper at bottom of Mark’s blog post]. Mark looks at two other periods in history when our notions of literacy changed. Three thousand years ago as the Greeks grappled with written language, Plato decried the demise of wisdom. As the printing press changed Europe and the balance of power shifted from the clergy to secular powers, we witnessed a series of bloody religious wars; followed by the Enlightenment.
So why are we saying that literacy is under attack when orality has been under attack for the past three thousand years? Because nobody remembers anybody who remembers the old ways. According to Mark Federman, societies take about 300 years for memory to fade and for major changes to be adopted. We are now just over half way through the change to electric media. Today, we have traveled over 160 years into the electric communication age, launched by the invention of the telegraph, which separated words from paper.
Mark Federman concludes in his paper:
“Have no fear – Johnny and Janey will, in all probability, learn to read, just as they learned to speak. But orality has not structured society since ancient Greece, and literacy no longer structures society today. The challenge for all the Mr. and Ms. Smiths throughout the academy, and eventually in the secondary and primary classrooms throughout the world, is to recognize that the exclusive focus and predominance given to the pedagogical artefacts of a literate world is inconsistent with the skills necessary to participate in the discovery and production of knowledge in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate [UCaPP] world. In a UCaPP world, what is valued as knowledge comprises a vastly greater domain than that in a world structured by literacy.”
Finally, Professor Mike Wesch, in the video of his presentation to The Library of Congress, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, gives examples of how videos, and video-making, are creating a different literacy, enabling a new type of worldwide communication. What kinds of literacies do producers of YouTube videos have?
“And we’re looking at this cultural inversion I mentioned earlier where we tend to express individualism, independence and commercialization while desiring community, relationships and authenticity. This is really a tension that, as these lonely individuals, we crave this connection – at the same time, as individuals, we see that connection as constraint. And what we’re seeking then through technologies often is a form of connection without constraint. Some way of connecting very deeply without feeling the deep responsibilities of that deep connection. YouTube offers this possibility and what we see on YouTube are people connecting very, very deeply. [For example] – bnessell1973 – [on losing his son to SIDS] April 17, 2007 : Creating characters gave me an escape. It allowed me to be silly. It allowed me to act how I wanted to feel. It became a form of therapy, a coping mechanism. And after a while it brought fun back to YouTube for me.”
Is video becoming the/a new literacy? Are we returning to our oral past after three thousand years?
Before we say that literacy is under attack, we should ask ourselves what is literacy today and what might it become tomorrow.
Organizing for an uncertain future
Some interesting things I found on Twitter this past week, on the themes of organizing and uncertainty:
via @SebPaquet – Neat infographic: Major Shifts in History: The Emergence of Techno-Economic Paradigms by the fantastic @robpatrob
Organisational Effectiveness via @sig [is this what your HR department is focused on?]
It’s all about organisational effectiveness. How fast, efficient and correct all information is disseminated, how effective hand-overs in the workflow happens, how visible and easy to understand the process is, how effective the capture and subsequent dissemination of knowledge is and how little time you spend on making the flow happen.
via @SemiraSK – Excellent! Organizing For Uncertainty – a Rich Agile Model for the Organization of Work by @zenext via @timkastelle
In change-resistant approaches, people can spend more time planning and reporting than actually doing the work. Rigid plan models define intelligent resilience as an indicator of failure. Teams need to be expensively managed because they are never continuously clear what they’re actually doing with their costly time and talent. Someone is punished with the costs of change once plans are approved. To protect the organization from change, clients are adversarial negotiation opponents rather than collaborative partners in continuous shared learning. Because innovation is explicitly the creation of surprise, no inflexible planning models can help create it, and actually only prevent it.
Collaboration: the secret sauce via @sourcePOV
I’ve been grappling with collaboration for a couple decades now, usually in the context of IT projects in corporate silos that seems designed to shut down cross-functional collaboration. The hardest part was watching talented people lose motivation in the midst of their best efforts to overcome resistance.
Social Media Workshop Notes
As promised, here are the follow-up notes & links from yesterday’s social media workshops in Miramichi.
Personal Knowledge Management
- All of my posts tagged PKM
- PKM social bookmarks
- Slide/Audio overview of PKM
Presentation slides (this is one large file of slides from both presentations)
Related posts:
Role of an online community manager
Books for small business:
The Social Media Business Plan
Books for educators:
How Computer Games Help Children Learn
Videos shown:
Dan Brown: An open letter to educators
Videos not shown:
Has education changed since the industrial revolution?
Social media reading list for school leaders
Ada Lovelace Day
Today is Ada Lovelace Day:
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented.
This day celebrates the achievements of women in technology and science, so I thought I’d go through my blog roll and see which women bloggers I regularly read [shown in the order they are listed in my feed reader, which makes no sense to anyone but me]:
Cindy Rivard Oyez: entrepreneure et communicatrice passionnée.
Florence Meichel est consultante – conférencière et coach dans le domaine de l’éducation 2.0 et la formation 2.0.
Jessica Hagy Indexed: “This is a little project that allows me to make fun of some things and sense of others without resorting to doing actual math.”
Jane Hart is my astute colleague and very tech-savvy member of the Internet Time Alliance.
Fernette Eide writes an excellent blog on neuro-learning, in partnership with Brock Eide.
Janet Clarey just launched “instructional design by example”, therefore setting the example.
Ozge Karaoglu is the educational coordinator of “Yes, I Speak English” DVD series to give EFL children a jump-start in English – among other things.
Christine Martell is an inspiring artist promoting visual learning.
Joan Vinall Cox specializes in Personal Learning and Working Environments.
Beth Kanter “The” leading figure in the field of social media for non-profit organizations.
Charlene Croft is a sociologist, social activist and an excellent writer.
Judy Martin has bridged broadcast media and the web, and is currently focused on work-life balance.
Traci Fenton is the founder of WorldBlu which champions the growth of democratic organizations.
Anne Bartlett-Bragg is in a similar field of practice as my own; bridging learning, technology and business.
Deb Richardson works for Mozilla [way cool], lives just down the road and is usually cooking up a storm [lots of great recipes].
Karyn Romeis has recently launched the Learning Anorak consultancy focused on organisational change, learning and development.
Lilia Efimova is the foremost expert in the use of blogs for knowledge work.
Anne Marie McEwan passionately believes that businesses are wasting too many of their employees’ talents, intelligence and creativity [have to agree with that].
Knowledge artisans choose their tools
How can you be a knowledge worker if you’re not allowed to pick your own tools?
In the unattained summit of social business, Ton Zylstra writes:
So we talked about how corporate systems might integrate social media tools into sharepoint and ERP-software, but not about the notion that it is quickly becoming ridiculous that IT departments should be prescribing what tools professionals should use at all, and not just stick to managing and securing the data flowing through those tools. We let craftsmen and artisans pick the tools they think fit the task at hand and their personal skills best, but we still don’t allow our professionals in knowledge intensive environments to do so.
I like the term Knowledge Artisan to describe this growing field of economic activity. An artisan is a skilled worker in a particular craft, using specialized tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial era. Knowledge Artisans are retrieving the older artisan model and re-integrating previously separate skills.
Knowledge Artisans not only design the work but they can do the work. It is not passed down the assembly line. Many integrate marketing, sales and customer service with their creations. To ensure that they stay current, they become members of various Guilds, known today as communities of practice or knowledge networks. One of the earliest guilds was the open source community which developed many of the communication tools and processes used by Knowledge Artisans today: distributed work (CSCW); results-oriented work (your code speaks for you); RSS, blogs, wikis, flattened hierarchies, etc.
One problem today is that it’s hard to be a Knowledge Artisan in a hierarchical organization that tells you what to do and which tools to use. No wonder the more experienced and adventurous are leaving and the younger skilled artisans are not joining the Command & Control Industrial Organization.
PKM in a nutshell
Personal Knowledge Management:
- A way to deal with ever-increasing digital information.
- Requires an open attitude to learning and finding new things (I Seek).
- Develops processes of filing, classifying and annotating for later retrieval.
- Uses open systems that enable sharing.
- Aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge (I Sense).
- Helps to share ideas with others (We Share).
- “You know you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes” (We Use).
- PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity).
PKM is related to Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks. They are different ways of addressing similar issues:
How do I keep track of all of this information?
How do I make sense of changing conditions and new knowledge?
How can I develop and improve critical thinking skills?
How can we cooperate?
How can I collaborate better?
How can I engage in problem-solving activities at the edge of my expertise?
Update: More recent posts: My Personal Learning Journey & Network Learning: Working Smarter (2010)
Control design, not people
Interesting things I learned on twitter this past week:
American Bar Association article on Personal Knowledge Management. by @KMHobbi
Lawyers are knowledge workers who must cope with an ever-increasing volume of information flowing within and outside of their workplaces. In this ever-more connected world, sifting through irrelevancies to find what you need can take a lot of time. Solution: Try PKM.
Slumdog reveals learning treasures: hole-in-wall computer founder Sugata Mitra turns his hand to British education. via @charlesjennings
“If you give children time to investigate an answer, it’s surprising what they can learn,” Mitra says. “Instead of guessing, they do their own research, and acquire an advanced, university-style of learning. The children have a common goal, and bounce ideas off each other – in the friction session, for example, they started to discuss everyday examples, such as tyres, snow chains, carpet burns, and Olympic swimmers’ shaved bodies.”
Melvin Conway on homomorphism. via @BFChirpy
The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. We have seen that this fact has important implications for the management of system design. Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.
Objections to social media: Bell invents the telephone. Twitpic by @JaneBozarth
