Ada Lovelace Day

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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

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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

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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

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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

telephone_JaneBozarth

personal knowledge management & wisdom

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PKM consists of practical methods for making sense of the increasing digital information flows around us. There is no procedural method to go from data to wisdom. On this Stephen Downes and I agree, though he thinks I adhere to the DIKW model.

That said, while this is a much better model than this, I think it stays true to the original ‘filtering’ vision, where you go from data to wisdom through successive filtering processes. And while there are different ways to think of knowledge — processed, procedural, propositional — this model I think adheres to a more basic view.

Here are some images from a presentation on PKM I will be giving at our local university tomorrow and including in a workshop next week. Data does not create information, information does not create knowledge, and knowledge does not create wisdom. People use their knowledge to make sense of data and information. People create information that represents their knowledge, which can then be more widely shared.

DIKW

DIKW

Data + Knowledge = Information

Data Knowledge Information

Seek, Sense, Share: Find

Seek Sense Share FindPKM is an approach for dealing with information by making our thoughts more explicit through filing, classifying, commenting, writing, presenting, conversing, mashing, etc. PKM itself will not make us any wiser, just as accumulating knowledge does not equate to wisdom.

The ways of adding value to information I described in my last post (Filtering; Validation; Synthesis; Presentation; Customization) are not a series of steps, only some of the ways we can make sense of information, for ourselves and for others.

Sense-making

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The term personal knowledge management (PKM) isn’t about management in a business sense but rather how we can manage to make sense of information and experience in our electronic surround.

Personal – according to one’s abilities, interests & motivation (not directed by external forces).

Knowledge – connecting information to experience (know what, know who, know how).

Management – getting things done.

PKM is an individually created process. Tim Kastelle has discussed how important it is to Filter, in the process of Aggregate-Filter-Connect. I have recently used Seek-Sense-Share to describe PKM.

The critical part of PKM is in personalizing information and experience, or to use a business term, adding value. Ross Dawson shows five ways to add value to information (my examples/descriptions follow):

Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)

Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)

Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)

Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)

Customization (describing information in context)

Terms such as Filter or Sense don’t adequately describe the sense-making process in PKM. Looking at it from an outside perspective though, as Ross Dawson has done, gives another way to describe some of what is happening in our minds. We are adding value (and context) to information so that we can later retrieve it and perhaps use it. Whatever we make transparent is value-added information for others, especially if we do it consciously and well.

The image below shows an expanded description of sense-making in the context of PKM.

PKM sense-making

A basic tool I’ve described for PKM is social bookmarking to file information. It’s simple but doesn’t add a lot of value, just a few text comments. A tweet is also simple and cannot add much value with a 140 character limit. A blog post can be much more informative especially if one takes time to research, link and compose. A collaborative document that aggregates information and shows it from a different perspective could also be valuable. Developing a slide presentation with carefully selected graphics could be seen as higher value information. More difficult to produce and perhaps adding more value to basic information, could be a narration with the slideshow. I have noticed that the process of developing higher-value information helps to sharpen one’s own thinking.

Once again, I want to point out that people with better PKM skills, an ability to create higher value information, and a willingness to share it, will become more valued members (nodes) in their professional networks.

Social media workshops

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I will be presenting two 1/2 day workshops on Thursday, 25 March in Miramichi, NB. The event is sponsored by Silicon East and attendance is (almost) free. There is a $10 fee to cover refreshments.

Please pass this on to people in the area who might need an introduction to social media, without any hype or sales pitch. I will be heading up on Wednesday late afternoon and can pick up a few people in the Moncton area who want to go up early. I will be staying at The Rodd, where the workshops will be held, and returning on Thursday late afternoon.

Workshop #1: Social media for training & education (9:00 AM to noon)

Focus: understanding web social media and how they can be used for training, education and personal learning
Topics:
What is Web 2.0?
Personal knowledge management – a sense-making process
Tools, techniques and resources for social learning on the web: e.g. social bookmarks, blogs, twitter

Workshop #2 Social media for small business (1:30 PM to 4:30 PM)

Focus: understanding web social media to connect with customers
Topics:
What is Web 2.0?
Examples of social media use for business: e.g. blogs, twitter, slidecasts, videos
Web tools, techniques and resources for small businesses

Pre-registration is not necessary but please let me know in the comments if you plan on attending and if you could provide transportation or need it.

Social media & workplace performance matrix

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c4lpt_corporateJane Hart has an excellent resource on Case Studies for Social Media & Learning in the Workplace that she keeps up to date. I’ve looked at it many times and thought that it might be easier to see the big picture as a matrix, which I’ve created as a Google Document.

Feel free to use and improve this spreadsheet. If you do re-post it, please let me know so I can add the link here. Much of the information comes from third-party reports so I cannot attest to its accuracy. Let me know of any errors or omissions and I will address them.

If you would like to edit the Google Doc, or get it as a spreadsheet, please contact me.

Communities, communication & construction of knowledge

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Some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week.

@oscarberg “Most enterprise social software platforms actually separate internal communication from external communication while email & phone doesn’t.”

via @timkastelle Good #km post – Informal Information Management and Knowledge Management Are Not the Same Thing by @johnt

My thinking is that just the sharing aspect of informal stuff is “know-what”, this is what KM has been about, but we need to go further to the “know-how” ie. to learn and to be able to have the skills to come up with your own “know-what”. We can do this via conversations. We can now converse with people who shared their informal information, and not only know “what” but also “how”…the ultimate example is apprenticeship and mentoring.

via @VenessaMiemis  A fairly good source on Social Capital

In general, there is no one model for social capital formation or the creation or strengthening of local groups. Albee & Boyd (1997) argue that there is no single answer or model to promoting participation … there are only frameworks and guiding principles. Pantoja (1999) argues that instead of one particular model of local organisation, a wide variety of community organisations should be promoted. There needs to be an individual, participatory approach to each intervention.

@downes Social OS and Collective Construction of Knowledge

The development of a technological literacy, though, is uneven. In the divide between a world where we control technology and a world where we are controlled by technology lies what Henry Jenkins calls the “participation gap.” It is the divide between those who can create and have created using digital technologies and those who have not. This is not simply a digital divide, not simply a division between those who can access technology and those who cannot, but rather, a divide between those who have been empowered by technology and those who have not. And it is a gap we see not only at the base level of simple web constructs such as web pages or Twitter profiles, but even more so at the higher reaches of social engagement, in professional discourse and communities of practice. To begin to learn is to begin to participate at the periphery of a community of practice; to become learned is to reduce the participation gap between oneself and fully engaged members of that community.

Pilots or Beta?

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If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practices. Backward-looking good or best practices are inadequate for changing complex environments. Constant probes of the environment are necessary to see what works.

beta

Enterprise performance should be looked at from the perspective of perpetual Beta. The values and culture can remain stable while the tools and practices keep evolving to take advantage of the situation. Perpetual Beta means an acceptance that we’ll never get to the final release and our learning will never stabilize. This is quite different from perpetual Alpha, or never getting to something concrete, as Jay Cross commented here several years ago:

What’s beta and what’s not is a state of mind. Many people try to go into release prematurely: they put defective product on the market. (By productizing people, I mean locking in on attitudes, structure, opinions, etc.: becoming rigid.)

Life as beta is uplifting. You have the opportunity to streamline things, to respond to feedback, to become a killer app.

Lots of alphas are claiming beta status now. They debut on life’s big stage long before they’re prepared to play the part.

Does perpetual Beta equate to doing lots of pilot projects? Ross Dawson is a strong proponent of pilot projects for implementing Enterprise 2.0 and lists five characteristics of great pilots: Enthusiasm; Roles & Functions; Skills; Personality & Network:

5. Network
The primary way in which pilots projects will become visible to other people the organization and adapted to new issues is through the personal networks of the pilot team members. Strong personal networks within organizations emerge through both personality, organizational role, and work history (e.g. having worked in multiple divisions or locations). In most organizations networks are fairly strongly correlated to longevity in the organization, meaning that recent recruits are unlikely to have strong personal networks.

On the other hand, Gartner’s Anthony Bradley says that piloting does not make sense for social media projects:

This practice is not prudent for social media where the software complexity should be minimal and the primary goal is to get people interacting. Community participants are fickle and unforgiving (especially external communities). You may only get one shot at catalyzing community formulation. Don’t pilot, test, prototype, or experiment on the community. Don’t artificially restrict participation. The law of numbers is a critical factor in building a thriving and productive community.

A key factor I see in these two articles is that it is important how you define a “pilot” project. If it is viewed as something done on the side and not part of the real business, then it may be doomed to failure. If being involved in pilot projects is a normal part of work, then it fosters a culture of life in perpetual Beta. You can still cancel projects or go in a different direction, but there is a cultural commitment to learning by doing. It’s the difference between our pilot and your pilot.