Technology

information & communication technology

Knowledge Artisans

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I noticed this piece on The App Gap which mentioned “knowledge artisans”, and it reminded me of a business plan I did about three years ago:

Next-gen knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Equipped with and augmented by technology, they rely on their human capital and skill to solve complex problems and develop new ideas, products and services. Highly productive, knowledge artisans are capable individually and in small groups of producing goods and services that used to take substantially larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models.

Here’s what I had written as part of the business model:

Open Source Artisans*
We are a small company with several years of development experience who have embraced open source as a way to reduce customer costs, ensure long-term stability of our software and focus on what we do best — custom development. As part of a larger global development community, we can stay small and nimble and quickly react to market and technology changes. We openly partner with other like-minded companies and share in the risks of software development, implementation, maintenance and service. We are true to our partners and our customers because we offer Old World service for the long term, by staying on-time and on-budget for the short-term.

* An artisan (craftsperson) is a skilled manual worker in a particular craft, using specialized tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial Revolution. ABC Co. are the Artisans of the post-Industrial era, retrieving old world care and attention to detail, but using the latest tools and processes. To ensure that we stay current, we are members of various Open Source Guilds, such as the Drupal development community.

The business plan was written in 2005 and I’ve stripped out all of the location-specific details and attached it as a PDF if anyone is interested. For reasons not linked to this plan, the company decided not to continue this effort, so it wasn’t implemented. If you find that it’s of some use, please post a comment.

ABC Business Plan

Low-cost content management

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I was recently interviewed by Canadian Technology News and the resulting article, Six Strategies for Content Management, covers several points worth considering. Proprietary software and open source options for enterprise content management (ECM) are both discussed. I’m glad that I’m quoted on what I consider the two most important points:

  • Open source may do the job
  • Tap into free (or near-free) Web 2.0 ECM tools

One hundred years later

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One hundred years ago was an age of print, when most of our information and knowledge came via books and newspapers. I was reminded of the changes that we’ve seen in information distribution with the release of Before Green Gables on the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables.

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Budge Wilson was commissioned by Penguin Books and the L.M. Montgomery family to write the prequel to this popular series of books whose stories take place not far from where we live [full disclosure: Budge Wilson is my mother-in-law]. The official book launch and other events are happening in Toronto this week.

I have been interested in the entire process as I’ve watched from the sidelines. The way in which a work is commissioned by a publishing company, the fact that the heirs to Lucy Maud still have control over her works 100 years later and the slow process of going from manuscript to published book. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum from blogging, but then Budge’s prose is of significantly greater quality than my ramblings.

So what will publishing look like 100 years from now? The process of publishing this book is not that different than it was in Montgomery’s time. Will it be the same for Budge Wilson’s grandchildren should they decide to become authors? Will copyright, as we know it, still exist and will it be practical to enforce it?

Review: Moodle Teaching Techniques

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I had written a review of William Rice’s previous book and noted that it was rather technical. Moodle Teaching Techniques is more pedagogical and gets down to the details of how to develop online courses in Moodle.

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Moodle adoption is growing and it is probably the most widely-used open source learning content management system in the world. That makes this book rather timely [not like my review which I had hoped to write in 2007].

This is a good guidebook for anyone developing online courses with Moodle. The introduction covers some basic instructional techniques and then the book gets right into the “how-to’s” of course building. One comment I found interesting was how Rice recommends that wikis, forums and blogs should be used:

In Moodle, each student can have a blog. This is turned on by default. However, a student’s blog is not attached to any course. That is, you do not access a Moodle blog by going into a course and selecting the blog. Instead, you view the user’s profile, and access that user’s blog from there. In a Moodle student’s blog, there is no way to associate a post with a course that the student is taking. This results in “blogging outside of the course”. Also, as of version 1.9, you cannot leave comments on Moodle blogs.

These comments show the inherent weakness of the “course” model when used online. Everything has to fit neatly inside the box that contains the course. Having blogs outside of the course is a good concept, because student’s posts can travel with them from course to course. The use of “tags” could alleviate the problem of finding blog comments, but would require another tool for aggregation of these tags. Once again, several tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, etc.) loosely joined may give more flexibility than a single system, such as Moodle. Furthermore, I cannot understand why the comment function was removed from Moodle blogs. Why have a blog at all if you cannot comment? You may as well just have an HTML editor and a place to publish web pages.

The bottom line for this book is that 1) if you are using Moodle and 2) you are designing courses, it’s full of helpful tips and techniques. An excellent review of this book is available from Susan Smith Nash.

Usability – KISS

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I’ve been enjoying CBC Radio’s Spark program that looks at technology and culture. The host, Nora Young, is knowledgeable and runs a great show. I pick it up on air from time to time and have downloaded a podcast or two.

As I was listening today, I heard that there was a wiki for sharing information and ideas so I thought I’d give it a try. The site is built on SocialText, which is an enterprise class system, probably good to be able to scale up as needed. I registered and added my two cents worth on one of the wiki pages. I found the interface confusing and got frustrated a couple of times when menus would pop up that made no sense to me. Now, I’m a fair bit of a web geek and am usually comfortable poking around these systems. I wonder what the more mainstream Web surfers do when they try to add comments here?

If you want people to really get involved in the conversation, you have to make it dirt-simple to do so. That’s one reason I don’t have captchas or membership requirements on this blog. I really like getting comments and feedback, so I keep it simple.

Update: Here’s the wiki I was commenting on. Craig Hubley’s comments after mine are worth reading.

Aggregating Bookmarks

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I’ve used various social bookmarking tools, such as Furl and Magnolia, but have settled on delicious for a while. If you use many bookmarking applications, as well as rating tools like Digg, you might be interested in SocialMarker, which lets you save a page for filing on several systems at once.

SocialMarker lists 31 tools, several which I’ve never heard of, and a new bookmarking service, Mister-Wong, which is targeted at the education field.

Fair Copyright for Canada

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Have you joined yet?

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From the Facebook group description:

In December 2007, it became apparent that the Canadian government was about to introduce new copyright legislation that would have been a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The new Canadian legislation was to have mirrored the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act with strong anti-circumvention legislation that goes far beyond what is needed to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties … Instead, the government was about to choose locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a “Canadian-made” solution.

 Update: Now is the time to put pressure on your Member of Parliament. Check out Michael Geist’s list of Copyright MP’s.

Site Stats

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Tony has asked several fellow bloggers to share their site stats. Obviously I use a different stats package than Tony does [actually, I use several, which all give different data]. Anyway, for what it’s worth and in the interest of finding some patterns in this mess, here are some screen shots of my raw stats. The first image shows this site since it started in April 2003 (the blog went live in late Feb 2004):

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Much of my traffic comes from referrals (61%); less from search engines (19%). Some popular search terms (2007) that bring people here are – learning; open source lms; moodle scorm 2004; benefits of blogs; training vs education.

Here are where most of my visitors come from:

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The e-lance economy?

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In 1937, economist Ronald Coase published an article, The Nature of the Firm, in the journal Economica. Within the article, Coase argues that firms exist because there are costs inherent to free markets – such as costs of communication, of sharing information, of trying to find goods and services. Given these costs, Coase suggests that firms are formed because it is more efficient and less expensive to complete many of these tasks internally within a formal organization rather than outsourcing them to the market and thus incurring these added costs.

Alex Slawsby on the Innosight Blog looks at the nature of the corporation and how advances in information and communications technologies may be enabling a more modular approach to work, especially networked free-lancers, or e-lancers.

… the ‘e-lance economy’ may represent a modular stage of organizational evolution – indeed, an architecture of easily swappable or plug-and-play components (e.g. individuals or resources). In an age where closed, proprietary systems are recognized as inhibiting the ability of organizations to respond to or even identify innovation-borne change, modularity seems a promising answer; virtually every element of the value chain could come together on an ad-hoc, objective, modular basis without being hamstrung by the subjectivity and myopias brought on by business process and the long-term commitments to physical infrastructure, a capital investment in which innovation may quickly make irrelevant.

An example of this economy would be open source software development, with its lack of organisational structure and the ability for anyone with the right skills to plug in or out of the project, yet maintain the integrity of the code. A key question though is whether e-lancing will become the dominant economic model, as the corporation is, or only suitable for certain industries, such as the film industry’s project-based work model. If e-lancing is more effective in most industries and becomes our dominant work model, then organisations will have to rethink everything from HR to supply chain management.