Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/29/2006

The world is changed.- Galadriel (J.R.R. Tolkien)

April 29, 2006

The Value of Social Tagging in a Corporate Setting - Taxocop
These tags are a fantastic resource - user warrant - for keeping the controlled vocabularies up-to-date. They provide us feedback we could get no other way. Given the ease with which people can tag things – and yes, we could argue about whether there should be some cognitive burden for quality's sake - we gain a unique insight via this process."

Personal Knowledge Management Tools Ready For Enterprise Use - Robin Good
Personal knowledge management tools such as weblogs, wikis and online messaging systems are creating easily accessed knowledge on the fly with simple features and rapidly implemented structure to get communities of peers surfacing answers and collective insights for critical issues.

BBC Program Catalog - BBC
This experimental catalogue database holds over 900,000 entries. It is a sub-set of the data from the internal BBC database created and maintained by the BBC’s Information and Archives department.

The Simplicity Cycle - Change This
Most cliches find their origin in truth, and "less is more" is one that rings true whether we are discussing a new marketing piece swimming with text and graphics or an ice cream sundae swimming in, well, just never add a dollop of strawberry sauce over the chocolate, caramel and those multi-colored jimmies.

GIs Shoot Footage for New War Doc - Wired
The film is another example of participatory journalism, Smith said, made possible by cheap cameras and the growing number of people who know how to use them.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/25/2006

Podcasting isn't made for most people - USA Today
he rise of MP3s changed the music industry. Blogs changed how we look at and read the news. Viral-video sites such as YouTube mean never missing another funny moment. Sites like Flickr have taken over from the coffee-table album as the way we share our photos. After all that, we thought podcasting was going to change radio.

Talking up KM - Denham Grey
Knowledge is more than implicit and tacit stuff below the waterline. For me, knowledge is also sense-making, practical solutions, awareness, emergent and ephemeral. The key is not the difference between information / data and knowledge but what you do with this distinction.

Social Networks Save the Day - Data Mining
I recently came across the work of Jeffrey Heer and Danah Boyd who have been working on social network visualization.

Millennials make their mark - Seattle PI
As a group, Millennials -- the generation born between 1981 and 1999 -- are characterized as confident, hardworking and technologically fluent but lacking the resourcefulness, independence and, in some cases, basic literacy skills that marked earlier generations, workplace experts said.

The Experience Designer Network (EDN) and some great thoughts on learning - e-clippings
Learning cannot be adequately explored through the lens of a single expertise.

E-learning languishes in the classroom - The Australian
"[Digital technology] has had more impact on administrative services such as admissions, registration, fee payment and purchasing than on the fundamentals of classroom teaching and learning," the OECD says in a policy brief.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/22/2006

Does Web 2.0 guarantee Enterprise 2.0? - Andrew McAfee
Managers, professionals and other employees don't have much spare time, and the ones who have the most valuable business knowledge have the least spare time of all. (They're the ones already inundated with emails, instant messages, phone calls, and meeting requests.) Will they turn into avid bloggers and taggers and wiki-writers? It's not impossible, but it's a long way from a sure bet."

Why face-to-face still matters! - Kathy Sierra
We all are aware of the notion that most of the information we get in a face-to-face communication is NOT from the words themselves, but rather from body language, facial expression, and tone of voice.

The future - Paul Gillin's blog - Social Media and the Open Enterprise
Social media (mainly blogs and wikis) today is uncannily similar to the Internet of a decade ago: there’s intense user activity, with growth rates of more than 100% per year.

Wiki of Fortune 500 Companies that are Blogging
27 (5.4%) of the Fortune 500 are blogging as of 4/4/06"

Unnecessary Innovation? - Fast Company
The judges on American Inventor shot this fellow down -- watch how quickly their expressions shifted from amusement to near-disdain -- but I wonder: Perhaps the Therapy Buddy is a good idea?

Was Sculley Right to Shoehorn Jobs Out of Apple? - Lockergnome
While a well known fact that Jobs is a very difficult person to work with, did Sculley make the right move? Stripping the very man that made the Apple I, Apple II, and Macintosh reality from the dreams of Wozniak and other talented engineers may have been going a bit over board. Or was it?

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/17/2006

Podcast numbers cut through hype - BBC
There will be just 700,000 diehard downloaders in the US this year; a tiny audience compared to the 25 million people who tune into stations run by traditional broadcaster National Public Radio (NPR) every week.

Ning
Create and share your own socials software.

Reinventing the intranet - InfoWorld
Modern social software could be the key to building effective enterprise knowledge systems

He Said She Said -- Perspective and Perception in Podcasting (Podcast) - Zxplanazine
In order for podcasting to realize its real potential in education, both perspective and perception will need to be altered.

ACU uses iPod for distance learning - ipodnn
Abilene Christian University is planning to use video iPods to teach students from afar.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/15/2006

What's Noteworthy on Learners, Learning & Schooling - McRel
Schools operating within the industrial age model of education do not provide working and learning environments that support the autonomous and independent contributions befitting life in an information age society. The industrial model of schooling defines tasks and responsibilities as selecting, sorting and delegating according to a relatively inflexible hierarchy. In contrast, a person who can and will function efficiently in the Information Age must develop the knowledge and skills to understand patterns, changing relationships and the "negotiated" meaning of those patterns and relationships. Since there are multitudinous sources, quantities and qualities of information inundating every aspect of private and organizational life, no one person or small group of people can control, sort and select the information needed by all of the people working in an organization.

Eight Things Leaders Never Do
Great leaders are few and far between. This has nothing to do with genetics. Rather, most people just don't know how to be leaders. The good news is that it's relatively easy to learn to be a leader.

Myers-Briggs: Celebrate or Reevaluate? - CLO
Do corporations see the dichotomy in having diversity programs that extol the richness of individuality and psychometrics that defines people by 16 behavioral classifications? Is organizational effectiveness and diversity enrichment enhanced by MBTI? Corporations should determine whether their commitment to multiculturalism is enhanced or hindered by these methods of profiling.

Are we fundamentally changing human nature in our lifetime? - IT Conversations (podcast)
Joel Garreau thinks that yes we will be...over the next twenty years. What's driving this? He goes into great depth on Moore's Law and later on, Metcalfe's Law, which he received brownie points from Bob at the end of his session. He talks about technologies, how they are now aimed inward and gives a number of s curve examples.

The Name Game - folksonomies - CIO
You can see what your colleagues are interested in. From a collaboration and knowledge-sharing perspective, that's what's neat about folksonomies.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/11/2006

A thirst for knowledge - Guardian Unlimited
No one would tell you a student using Google today is producing work as good as they were 20 years ago using printed sources. Despite these amazing technical breakthroughs, these technologies haven't added to human wellbeing.

The Next Revolution in Interactions - John Hagel
There has been a pronounced shift in the composition of the US labor force towards tacit work, in part driven by a shift towards a service economy accompanied by aggressive efforts to automate transactional work.

Five Questions...for Christopher Dede - eLearn Magazine
Christopher Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His areas of interest and research include virtual environments, handheld devices, and neo-millennial learning. Professor Dede graciously agreed to inaugurate our "Five Questions" interview.

Instruction Design Verse Learning Design - Random Walk in E-Learning
The term "learning design" is used to describe the body of work that would come out from the shift in focus when pedagogy focus on the learner in stead of the skill of the teacher.

Forrester: 25% Interested in Podcasts; 1% Regularly Download Them - Podcasting News
Only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts," according to Forrester analyst Charlene Li. "One-quarter of online consumers express interest in podcasts, with most interested in time-shifting existing radio and Internet radio channels."

CIOs Turn to Training to Retain Employees - Chief Learning Officer
When it comes to retention strategies, most people think of salary increases, beefed-up benefits and more flexible schedules. However, according to a new survey, executives are increasingly using another method to retain employees: training.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/09/2006

Connectivity does not confer knowledge - Knowledge Jolf with Jack
Throwing a bunch of knowledge workers together via the internet does not automatically create a smart organization. Organizations still need a goal and leadership. People need to know how they should be smart and what is expected of those zillions of interactions that are possible.

Do laptops boost learning? - Argus Leader
Students also said in the survey that they preferred doing school work with the laptops and were more excited about learning. They also improved their technology skills because of the laptop use.

How's Your Workforce IQ? - Harvard Business Review
One of the largest companies in the oil and gas industry, BP LLP (formerly British Petroleum) is a federation of financially successful business units with over 100,000 employees. As BP's corporate leadership knows, size matters only if BP can leverage its knowledge of technology, customer relationships, and business methods across the company-without interfering with business unit autonomy. To promote such knowledge sharing behaviors, BP implemented three explicit "peer processes."

Are 21st Century Skills Right Brain Skills? - Education World
Successful players in this new economy will increasingly be required to develop and use the right-brain abilities of high concept (seeing the larger picture, synthesizing information) and high touch (being empathetic, creating meaning).

Study Links Punishment to an Ability to Profit - New York Times
Sociologists have long known that communes and other cooperative groups usually collapse into bickering and disband if they do not have clear methods of punishing members who become selfish or exploitative.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/08/2006

Why Workers Are Reluctant to Share Their Knowledge - News Wise
Knowledge sharing is often one of the most troubling issues facing employers and they keep trying to develop effective ways to encourage employees to share what they have learned on their jobs. It remains a difficult goal. Companies consider knowledge acquired on the job as belonging to the organization and it is critical that it be shared. But often employees do not see it that way.

Wikis, Blogs and Other Points of Failure - Intelligent Enterprise
We live in an information age that has gotten long on information and short on attribution and verification. I blame not the Internet so much as the gullibility of a society that has transferred a sycophantic trust in the printed word to a similar trust in the pixelated word. For too many people, if it's on the Internet, it must be true — common sense and access to the Internet's own powerful tools for verification notwithstanding.

The call and challenge of leadership - The Jamaica Observer
There is no activity so mysterious or majestic as that of a leader overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, making tough decisions in the face of mortal danger, enduring corrosive criticism, ruthlessly jettisoning friends and foe alike but in the end emerging vindicated by history, the final arbiter of human affairs.

Moral Leadership: A Pipedream? - Leader Values
Sexual harassment is lower, diversity is greater, and possibly product quality is better. But on a day-to-day basis I still see poor behavior on the part of leaders at all levels, behavior that I characterize as immoral.