Blogs at the core of KM & Collaboration

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I’m helping to create a collaborative work and learning space for a group of executives and this is part of the introduction to the site:

Blogs: The main communication tool is your blog, which each participant has registered in his or her name. Think of your blog as a professional journal, where you can record your thoughts and ask questions of your peers or the staff. Each blog post has a unique identifier, called a permalink, which can be referenced by others. Blog posts do not need to be perfect essays. Blog posts can help make sense of your learning process. Comments can be made on another person’s blog, or you can discuss it on your blog and then connect with a hyperlink to the other one. This creates a network of the conversations around an issue or topic. Here’s a video called Blogs in Plain English.

Wikis: Blogs are personal, while wikis are for groups. A wiki is a collaborative web document that records all activities so that any person can add to it, without losing what was previously written (it’s like “track changes” in MS Word). Here’s a video called Wikis in Plain English.

Jon Husband has dusted off a piece on blogging and dialogue that he wrote in 2004, which I think bears repeating:

  1. Firstly, individual or group blogs that are focused on a domain of information and expertise chronicle and catalogue the blogger(s)’ knowledge. Over time, this grows to create a recognizable “body of knowledge”.
  2. Secondly, by offering the capability of commenting and interacting, the information on offer can be better defined, refined, explored, tested, and built upon.
  3. Thirdly, the information on offer provides a latent platform for action – information that can be acted upon often turns into knowledge that can be shared and used in various ways.
  4. Fourth, by linking to the blog or blogs that offer related information, the knowledge that is built can be shared more and more widely, if desired.
  5. Fifth, the rhythym and cadence of the posting, reading, commenting and linking replicate the dynamics of dialogue in very effective ways. There aren’t the same kinds of interruption and distraction that so often occurs in conversations that only weakly replicate the dynamics of dialogue.
  6. Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this “body of knowledge” and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.

The more online communities and social networks that I’m involved with, the more I view blogging as a core process that keeps them going.

Learning Classifications

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Readers

Informal learning is a theme of this blog and has been an area of professional interest for the past couple of years. There is a link between informal learning and collaborative work; the latter is a key focus of my consulting. This link was highlighted by Teemu Leinonen in a recent post on networked learning, starting with a definition of informal learning:

Informal learning means learning that is taking place in every day life situation when we are interacting with the outside world or with our own inside world. Most of the learning is informal and purely accidental and random.

This is an adequate working definition, in my mind, but what I find most interesting is Teemu’s definition of non-formal learning, a term that I haven’t used much or really noted:

Networked learning can also be non-formal. Non-formal means that it is informal but with objectives. If a group of criminals are organizing a discussion group in a bar to share ideas about latest burglary techniques they are having a non-formal learning session. It is informal but with an objective.

Given these definitions, I would say that much learning in intentional online communities (such as a community of practice around knowledge management) is non-formal, whereas it is more informal in looser social networks like Facebook. My sense of this is that non-formal learning would involve mostly self-generated objectives though objectives could also evolve from the group. Formal learning would differ from these in that most, if not all, objectives would be externally directed.

These three working definitions may help in defining and explaining different approaches or strategies when working with communities of practice, work groups, professional networks or even classes.

Own Your Data

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The impending closure of the Eduspaces service has many people wondering what to do and several options are cropping up in the online discussions.

For those not in the know, Eduspaces is/was a free, social networking and blogging service built on the Elgg open source platform. It used to be called elgg.net but was changed to Eduspaces when it became obvious that the community came mostly from the educational sector. I’ve used Elgg for some of my clients and have had an Eduspaces account, but my main site has always been here. I pay for my hosting, own the data, and use an open source platform so that I can export my blog in the event that I want to move to a different service provider.

Anyone who asks me about blogging or setting up a community on the Web using wikis or some other application is given pretty well the same advice.  If the site is important and the data are of some significance for the long term, then:

  1. Use an open source platform from a stable and functioning community.
  2. Own your own domain, and have a Service Level Agreement for your hosting.

Using open source gives you freedom from vendors and ensures that you are not handcuffed to your technology provider. Having your own domain name and paying for a service provider (or hosting on your own server) ensure that you have control over your data.

The users of Eduspaces are in a much better position than would be those of Blogger in a similar event. At least the Eduspaces community can migrate to another Elgg host. There is no other Blogger platform to move to.

If I had to move a large Eduspaces account, I would find another Elgg installation. I migrated from Drupal to WordPress (which I don’t regret) a couple of years ago, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to stick with the same platform.

Critical thinking means questioning one’s assumptions

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Jon Husband wonders if the real gap in our society is critical thinking, especially in the case of North Americans being duped into thinking that we are in the midst of a long emergency and that we are at war with terror (at war with a concept?). A far greater emergency is what we are doing to our environment, but global warming doesn’t get anywhere near the funding that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do.

A similar lack of critical thinking comes from our politicians, especially in Atlantic Canada, who equate economic growth with jobs. Richard Florida shows research that “productivity growth may be negatively correlated with job growth”:

Since thriving cities are productivity machines ala Robert Lucas and Jane Jacobs, we now have substantial evidence that shows what a big mistake it is to use job growth as a proxy for productivity improvement and development. It may well be that the most productive cities generate jobs at a considerably slower rate than their less productive (and less developed) counterparts. In other words, job growth may actually be picking up the opposite of what some people think.

Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators, which looks at the need for critical thinking in education, is on my reading list for next year.

Open Source Social Networking Application

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I recently joined Xing, a business social networking site. In one of the forums I came across an open source social networking system (SNS). Dolphin is Creative Commons licensed, not the more typical GPL for open source, with the following restrictions:

Dolphin is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This means that you are free to use it the way you need, adapt it, change code, distribute, share with friends or even sell it. You must, however attribute the work as specified by BoonEx. And the specification is dead simple – don’t remove links to BoonEx and the Dolphin Page in the footer of all Dolphin pages, unless you paid for it.

An example website built with Dolphin is the German/English language LearnTube! Community, though it doesn’t have many members yet.

I get a lot of hits on this website from searches looking for open source alternatives to Facebook. I have recommended Elgg, which hosts Eduspaces, or sometimes Drupal, and now I know of another one. I’d appreciate finding anyone with first-hand experience of a Dolphin installation.

Update: It looks like Eduspaces will be shutting down its free service as of 10 Jan 2008. It’s too bad, but a free service still has to pay for the cost of hosting hundreds of blogs :-(  More on Eduspaces at IncSub.

Agendas, Assets & Assumptions

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Seth Godin discusses his early approach to doing business on the Web and shows how a fixed perspective didn’t help with a market that is in constant transition. A pre-determined agenda, combined with the desire to use the assets on hand plus an assumption that nothing would change, spelled failure.

How about education?

  • Agenda: We need to follow the curriculum.
  • Assets: Let’s keep our classrooms full and teachers employed.
  • Assumption: Everything happening outside the classroom is not influencing the students, parents or legislators.

How about training?

  • Agenda: What can we deliver?
  • Assets: Fill up the LMS, since we paid lots for it.
  • Assumption: No one will ever notice that information delivery does not equate to performance improvement.

Informal Collaborative Social Learning & Work

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Some recent threads seem to be interweaving and creating patterns in what is becoming my de facto field of practice – “informal collaborative social learning & work”.

One thread is what Jay Cross has referred to with Hole-in-the-Wall Learning (HiW), which I first came across in the book Design Like You Give a Damn, and this conversation has been picked up by Peter Isackson:

It seems to me that the fundamental key to the success of HiW is the notion of “self-organized groups” who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, as Jay suggests, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus (authorities) notice that a group is neglecting what is considered “essential” in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or inculcating an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.

The idea of self-organised groups is a key theme in informal workplace learning, which Jay and I experimented with last year in the “unworkshops“. The HiW data is corroboration that we may be on the right path, though these studies involve young children only.

The other thread came via Michele Martin when she described some “new” roles that may be jobs of the future. The roles of Personal Learning Environment Assistant; Social Media Specialist; Online Coach; Social Network Catalyst and Social Network Analyst are ones that I’ve taken on at some time over the past few years. These descriptors are, for me, a clarification of the work that I’m doing.

One on my constant challenges has been in describing my work to others, and these roles can help with that. A current project with the Advanced Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service has me in the roles of Social Network Analyst & Catalyst and perhaps later as PLE Assistant. As we develop the online aspect of the wildlife emergency response network with AWI next year, I will assume similar roles and perhaps even that of Online Coach. If we use these terms in our proposals and work descriptions, they will become mainstream and should make it easier to get away from industrial-style roles such as workshop trainer, when not applicable.

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The two threads of self-organised learning and some commonly used terms in online collaboration have come together for me and should make it easier to ‘splain just what the heck I do.

Taking action for fair copyright in Canada

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Following up from Copy Leftovers, here are some resources focused especially on the Canadian perspective. We should all be concerned and get informed before the Canadian DMCA is allowed to pass.

First off, you can join the Facebook group, Fair Copyright for Canada, which already has over 10,000 members. I have also been saving articles on del.icio.us relating to Copyright. Consider that Canadians pay for their RIGHT to copy digital media every day, according to Michael Geist:

The Copyright Board of Canada last week released its proposed tariff for 2007 for the private copying levy. The numbers remain unchanged: 21 cents per CD-R. As prices have dropped, however, the levy now frequently comprises a significant percentage of the retail price. Consider the purchase of 100 blank Maxell CDs. Future Shop retails the 100 CDs for $69.99. The breakdown of this sale is $48.99 for the CDs and $21.00 for the levy (even worse is a current Future Shop deal of 200 blank CD-Rs from HP, which retails for $59.99. The levy alone on this sale is $42.00 (200 CDs x 21 cents/CD) which leaves the consumers paying $17.99 for the CDs and $42.00 for the levy).

According to Steve Jobs, the music companies sell more DRM-free music than anyone else:

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

On a lighter note, you can watch this video of a puppet saying why we should Stop the Canadian DMCA, with some interesting recommendations on what to do with our politicians.

Reduce the load and improve the learning

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Technological delivery may make training efficient. It does not necessarily make for effective learning. It is the relationships among people and sharing contextualized experiences that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education.

Mark Federman also says that “education is not merely about transferring information”, which is the part of the question that Will Richardson is wrestling with in the context of teacher professional development [lots more on Will’s post and worth reading all the comments]:

But the workshops are a different story. In the best case, they are a full day of one or two particular tools. In the worst case, they are one or two hours on a lot of tools. Either way, the experience usually serves to overwhelm, and at the end of the day (or hour) the participants head back to the craziness of their teaching lives where I’m guessing much of what they have “learned” fails to take root.

Much (most? all?) of our training and education is still based on transferring information, whether it be “death by powerpoint” or a hands-on workshop. I’m just as guilty as others in trying to get everything covered in the allotted time. So how do we change?

 

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I have a few engagements coming up in 2008 and I am going to start practicing a new approach to my workshops and presentations. One of my inspirations comes from this article in The Star, about Carl Wieman and the Science Education Initiative at UBC, reinforcing what I already know, but still don’t practice well enough:

“Studies show we can remember only seven items at a time and can process only four ideas at once, so having an expensive professor read from a textbook is not an intelligent way to transfer information. It’s like overloading a computer that doesn’t have enough memory,” Wieman says.

Old-style introductory science lectures were “rotten for most people;” he says.

“The average student never mastered more than 30 per cent of the key essential concepts.

“But if you reduce the load of information and have students work the brain vigorously  – very much like developing a muscle – research shows you can increase retention to about 65 per cent.”

Often, with paying participants or attendees at conferences, we may not feel comfortable in challenging them and getting them involved in a learning process. The easy way is to present information [hopefully in an entertaining way so that we get invited back] or give follow-me activities and then let them ask questions at the end. People can tune out, yak on the back channel or check their e-mail.

Even when you provide additional resources and avenues of conversation after the workshop, few people follow up because they’re too busy with the craziness of their lives. The learning moment, which may only be one, has to happen there on the spot. Instead of a shot-gun lecture approach, covering lots of ideas and information, focusing on only a few key ideas and reinforcing them through engagement is the cognitively superior approach. However, forcing participation may turn off people used to the lecture approach and may even result in fewer smilies on the feedback sheets. It could be an interesting year.