Month: June 2011

a little understanding

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES:

Indian PM “Knowledge combined with creativity and productivity has the potential to impact the social economic nature of a nation” – via @stevedineen

“Getting out of the way is a much underrated organizational skill.” – Craig Newmark – via @Mickipedia

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Claiming Ephemeral Media – why it’s important to own your data – by @downes

If people want to converse in an environment that basically owns all their data, I can’t stop them, but I’ve been through this before – remember HotWired Threads, anyone? – and don’t feel like going through the grief again.

I think that’s the most difficult part of reclaiming ephemeral media. The silos [Facebook; Twitter; etc.] have made people feel as though they have to be there, and the people there are complicit in making those who don’t play in the sandbox feel like outcasts. Are you ready to have people act as though you’ve dropped off the grid?

 

Excellent PKM & networked learning reference list by @hreingold – An Introduction to Mind Amplifiers

a five week course using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter

@aronsolomon – Transparency + Clarity = Understanding – via @rdeis

The problem is that we tend to make things way too complicated. We say too much when few words will suffice. We over-elaborate upon things which are reasonably easy to understand.

“We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need” Atul Gawande @ Harvard Medical Graduation – via @hastingscenter

In his book “The Youngest Science,” the great physician-writer Lewis Thomas described his internship at Boston City Hospital in pre-penicillin 1937. Hospital work, he observed, was mainly custodial. “If being in a hospital bed made a difference,” he said, “it was mostly the difference produced by warmth, shelter, and food, and attentive, friendly care, and the matchless skill of the nurses in providing these things. Whether you survived or not depended on the natural history of the disease itself. Medicine made little or no difference.”

Connecting with Communities of Practice

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This month, The Learning Circuits blog asks how do we break down organizational walls when it comes to learning?

One way to look at this problem is to see what kind of work needs to get done in the organization. For example, if you are trying to balance the need to support complex work with innovation, as many knowledge-intensive companies are, then there are different needs to be simultaneously addressed. Complex work requires strong ties and high levels of trust to enable work teams to function. This often has to be done behind the firewall to protect competitive secrets. On the other hand, innovation needs loose ties and a wide network to get diverse points of view. This means working outside the firewall on the wide open Web.

Communities of Practice, supported by skilled community managers and appropriate knowledge-sharing tools can bridge these two areas. They can provide a lightly structured forum to bring outside ideas inside the organization, to multiple teams, while not detracting from the work being done in individual projects.