ASIST K-Blog Panel

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

New article from Vogel and Goans: DELIVERING THE NEWS WITH BLOGS: THE GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY EXPERIENCE

Is available in pre-print from the page linked above. It is to appear in Internet Reference Services Quarterly v10 n1 (March 2005). What's unique about Georgia State's implementation is that it's homebuilt and its been around a bit longer than other library blogs. This is also a scholarly journal for those of you looking for someone to cite! Pointed to by Shifted. Althought T.V. told me she was writing it and I've been looking for it...

Sabrina Pacifici on Corporate Blogging

A presentation on how organizational blogs may "facilitate research services, knowledge management, marketing, training, and communications within groups, departments, and enterprise wide." (Source: beSpacific)

Friday, November 26, 2004

Nice Pointer from Bill Ives

Bill Ives highlights our presentations on his blog, Portals and KM.

Monday, November 22, 2004

WRT Question: Math in blogs?

I recently did a little research on Math on the web to see if anything had changed in the almost ten years since I was doing a lot of math. The answer is that very little has changed! There's still a dichotomy between software that does the work and software that does the presentation (mark-up). The majority of product right now include the equations as images/graphics/.gifs. MathML might eventually fix this problem, but we appear to be years away from widespread use. Generally, if you use MathLab, Mathematica, etc., you save as HTML or XML and it creates pictures that show the equations -- correct me if I'm wrong. Since there's really no new technology in blogs - it's all just XML and HTML - you do the same thing you do with any other web page. It depends on where you host your photos and blog if the images come through in the feed. Here's my post on math on the web. Here are my posts on searching math on the web.

Sunday, November 21, 2004

Denham Grey on Asynchronous Repositories and Explicit Sharing

Grey discusses many reasons blogging can be productive in a corporate environment without explicitly talking about blogs. I suppose some/much could apply also to wikis or KM systems or even storytelling/oral history?
  1. Reflection (also mentions not being fast enough thinking on your feet in f2f stuff, there's something to that)
  2. The Record
  3. Getting in Deep
  4. Helping Novices (see Efimova who calls this distributed apprenticeship)
  5. Communication

Friday, November 19, 2004

Discussion from the KMEurope PKM Session: Knowledgenetworker Wiki

As I might have mentioned, the European blogger and KM communities are much more active in researching blogs (and other tools) for PKM. They recently had a well-attended workshop at KMEurope. Many of the attendees blogged it, but this wiki is probably a better place for an overview. Remember, if you would like to see the blogs that discuss it, look in Technorati or Feedster.

Mathemagenic: Why she blogs

Efimova pointed this post out recently when discussing the "power of articulation." She also points to another post where she says why there are a lot of librarian, journalist, and lawyer bloggers) This is a nice explanation of the benefits and uses of blogs for PKM. All quotes, formatted in a list for clarity:
  • conversation for growing my ideas
  • to make some free space in my memory
  • feeling of “coffee-table dialog” with my far-away colleagues
  • blogging builds my own (customised! :) network of like-minded people without almost any effort from me

Garrett's "About a blog' presentation slides

Christina's slides, in outline form

This might actually be more useful for some. I'll still try to get them up somewhere in PDF or PPT. This post will mutate until I'm happy with the final format.
Blogs for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)
Christina K. Pikas
Agenda

  • What is PKM?
  • Why Blogs?
  • Nuts and Bolts of Blogs for PKM

What is PKM?
  • Taking personal responsibility for lifelong learning and organization of ideas
  • Requires individual ownership and motivation (see note 1, below)
How is PKM different from personal information management (PIM)?
PIM
PKM
  • Facts
  • Documents
  • Addresses (URL and geographic)
  • Connections
  • Analysis
  • Conversations
  • Ideas
  • Selection
  • Sense Making

How is PKM different from KM?
Organizational KM: Unlike personal KM (see definition [below]), which centres on the individual, organizational KM depends upon an enterprise-wide strategic decision to actively manage knowledge through a range of processes, tools and people. Personal KM: A set of concepts, disciplines and tools for organizing often previously unstructured knowledge, to help individuals take responsibility for what they know and who they know.
From European Guide to good Practice in Knowledge Management Part 5: KM Terminology (ftp://cenftp1.cenorm.be/PUBLIC/CWAs/e-Europe/KM/CWA14924-05-2004-Mar.pdf)


KM
PKM
  • Organizational/Enterprise
  • Doing for
  • Top down
  • Knowledge as an object that can be identified, stored, used out of context
  • Public
    (enterprise-wide)
  • Personal/Individual
  • Enabling
  • Bottom up
  • Knowledge as part of your habitat in your organization’s information ecology Straddles public/private domains (see note 2 )

Why Blogs? What I mean by blogs
Blogs for PKM are defined here as internal, enterprise-supported individual efforts

From: Frederik Wacka, Corporate Blogging Blog, August 10, 2004, http://www.corporateblogging.info/2004/08/six-types-of-business-blogs.asp (see note 3 )

PKM blog posts may be as simple as a link, or may be part of a long collection of analytical essays
Seven Blog Posting Formats
  • Link-only
  • Link blurb
  • Brief remark
  • List
  • Short article
  • Long article
  • Series postings
From: Amy Gahran, Contentious, September 22, 2004, http://blog.contentious.com/archives/2004/09/22/blogging-style-the-basic-posting-formats-series-indexposting-formats-series-index


Why Blogs? - Voice
  • Blogs are inherently personal
  • Encourages contributions from lurkers
  • Low technological barrier concentrates effort on content, not graphic design or presentation
  • Informal style allows personality to show – author chooses tone, style

Why Blogs? – Reflective Thinking
  • Like more traditional journaling, posting can require reflective thinking, distillation of ideas (see note 4 )
  • Practice writing for later publication – reflect and polish
  • Exploration of new research areas or testing of new ideas with low or no risk
  • Encourage a higher level of "information engagement" (see note 5 )

Why Blogs? – Annotations
  • Documenting links encountered via blog posting does more than provide access
    • Selection
    • Annotation with analysis
    • Added context – in time, relationship to other items, meaning to field
  • As part of Bates’ "berry picking process" (see note 6 )
    • To place street signs along the path
    • Berries can be saved
    • Path can be retraced (reverse) chronologically
  • Nonlinear information seeking processes can be traced via category filtering (see note 8 , should be 7, appeared as 8 in presentation)

Nuts & Bolts – Organizational Culture
  • Sharing or knowledge hoarding
  • Management support
  • IT support
  • Policies (see note 7 , should be 8, appeared as 7 in presentation)
    • Gentle but firm guidelines
    • Time allowed
    • IP considerations (may need access control)
    • Levels of access/privacy, use of information

Nuts & Bolts – The software
  • Post via
    • E-mail
    • Web form – from anywhere by VPN?
    • Bookmarklet
  • Ability to customize look and feel
  • Ability to add new blogs quickly
  • Nice-to-have items
    • Levels of access
    • Ability to post files (drawings, recordings, etc.)
    • Ability to cache page views
    • Company specific meta-data assignment

Nuts & Bolts - Access and Preservation
  • Search
    • An enterprise search may take care of this
    • Changing the post template to add meta-data may help
  • Categorization
    • NOT assigned from above or default, assigned on the fly
    • Crosswalks to existing taxonomies may be helpful
  • Archives

Nuts & Bolts ROI, Elevator Talk, Why Us?
With such a personal focus, what does the organization have to gain? (brainstormed ideas)
  • Very functional tools are free or are inexpensive. More integrated and advanced tools are available to plug into other CMS or KM suites… low bar to show return.
  • Efficiency of knowledge workers
    • Less time spent finding what they already know
    • Writing activities can be done in pieces
  • Better networking – search across to find someone with a good idea
  • Organizational learning / distributed apprenticeship
Conclusion
  • PKM blogging is an inexpensive partial solution to a complex problem
  • Blogs can be an important part of an organization’s tool kit – help knowledge workers get more out of their reading, meetings, and thought


Notes
These and other relevant links can be found on our collaborative blog: http://asistkblogpanel.blogspot.com/ (you are here!)

1. For a reading list on PKM see: http://wiki.knowledgenetworker.net/wakka.php?wakka=ReadingList back
2. See Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker, "Blogging thoughts personal publication as an online research tool," chapter in SKIKT-Researchers' Conference 2002: Researching ICTs in Context, Oslo, Norway: InterMedia, 2002, pp.256-9. back
3. See also Frederik Wacka, Beginner’s Guide to Corporate Blogging, http://www.corporateblogging.info/basics/corporatebloggingprimer.pdf back
4. For more on blogging and reflective practice see Sebastian Fiedler. "Personal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning." In T. Burg, ed. BlogTalks. Vienna: Zentrum für wissenschaftliche Forschung und Dienstleistung , 2004. 190-216. (draft available http://seblogging.cognitivearchitects.com/stories/storyReader$963 , accessed 11/4/2004) or P. Hernandez-Ramos, "Web Logs and Online Discussions As Tools to Promote Reflective Practice." Journal of Interactive Online Learning 3, no. 1 (June 2004). Available: http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/archives/2004/summer/04/index.htm (accessed 11/3/2004).back
5. Thomas H. Davenport, "Information Behavior and Culture." In Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Page 93 has a graphic demonstrating "a hierarchy of information engagement" from read/view through simulate/live.back
6. Marcia J. Bates. "The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface." Online Review v13 n5 (1989): 407-24. back
7. There are several good discussions of corporate blogging policies that are generally intended for external blogs. A very recent one is from Charlene Li of Forrester Research, http://forrester.typepad.com/charleneli/2004/11/blogging_policy.html (accessed 11/9/2004) back
8. In fact, the information-seeking behavior described in Allen Foster, "A nonlinear model of information-seeking behavior" JASIST v55 n3 (Febrary 1, 2004): 228-237, speaks directly to professionals doing interdisciplinary research. back

Contact:
Blog http://christinaslibraryrant.blogspot.com/

WRT Question: Time spent reading feeds, blogging

A question was asked in our session (and also in other blogging sessions I attended) about how much time should be expected/budgeted to keep up with feeds and to blog. This is actually a somewhat complicated question, because there are quite a few people who sort of crawl into the internet and don't reappear for hours (days?)! Knowing that our audience is mostly composed of busy professionals narrows the answer.

First, there's ample evidence that librarians at all levels (school, public, academic, corporate) must read the newspapers to adequately serve their customers. See, for example: Juris Dilevko and Elizabeth Dolan, "Reference Work and the Value of Reading Newspapers: An Unobtrusive Study of Telephone Reference Service", Reference & User Services Quarterly v39 n1 (Fall 1999): 71-81 (available full text in Wilson OmniFile Full Text Mega and other places). So, assuming we all know this, I also assume that most librarians are spending time every day to read the local and national papers in addition to the time spent reading professional and trade literature.

If instead of flipping through a paper, if you subscribe to targeted feeds (available from Washington Post, New York Times, and other places), you should actually be quicker and more efficient. It really is much quicker to open your aggregator and scan the headlines than it is to flip through print. Also, if you have a few colleagues who have interests similar to yours, you can scan through the feeds generated from their blogs to see what they've seen that's important and why. In general, you'll have a few "must reads", some things you're reading for a specific project but then may abandon, some "if I have time" reads, etc. Based on the time available, you can read the feeds in that order.

When you're doing targeted environmental scanning for your organization, how do you disseminate the results? When you're reading the papers, trade pubs, journals and you see something of interest, what do you do? My suggestion is to go ahead and blog these items with a little comment why you think that item is important, interesting, wrong, relevant, etc.

If you're doing your environmental scanning for a project team in your organization, then start up a blog for them on the intranet where you can post these observations with links to the full text. As Xiaoli Huang and Dagobert Soergel discuss in their paper presented at ASIST '04 (see pp.156-167 in the proceedings), there are many different types of topical relevance. If you select an article for your customer, and it doesn't show the exact words they use in their papers in the title, how do you explain to them that the paper's worth their time? Try blogging and placing the paper in context (as directly relevant, indirectly relevant, contextually relevant, relevant by comparison, a pointer) with indications of the paper's implications to their project.

Build some trust, get some more work, help your customers be more efficient, improve the bottom line...

Yes, this takes time - but less time than it would take using other methods, and less time than it would take all of your customers to scan all these publications themselves.

Updated seconds later to add paragraph breaks, and then seconds after that to add more paragraph breaks... ckp (ok, so now for the third time, sorry if this appears in your aggregator all over the place)

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Feeds and KM Presentation (.pdf)

I posted my presentation about feeds and knowledge management as a .pdf. It covers the basics of feeds and how they contribute to knowledge management.

I completely forgot to share the fantastic analogy my Dad gave me about feeds. My Dad's been in the computer industry for years. In my mind, he knows everything about computers. I could never surpass him in knowledge about computers and systems and stuff. When I was telling him about my presentation the other week, he acknowledged that like many people, he didn't know too much about feeds. I started explaining them to him and he said, "It sounds like you think you might be thirsty some day, so you go turn on a fire hose. That way when you're thirsty, you've got water to drink." Getting feeds can indeed be like that. But using and receiving feeds doesn't have to be as overwhelming as (pardon the cliche) drinking water from a fire hose. When we learn how to use them to our benefit, they can be quite powerful tools.

That analogy is why my slides have drops of water all over them.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Notes from the Panel

The panel went very well today. About 123 crowded into the room and many seemed very engaged. Thanks to everyone who attended and those who have given us support and assistance. And thanks to Kris for coordinating and selecting us. I posted my notes about the panel on j's scratchpad.

Michael Feldman recorded a test run of our presentation at the Berkman blog group on November 4. The large sound files are available as MP3s. The presentations we gave today didn't change much.

Christina (11.2 M)
Jessica (7.8 M)
Garrett (9.3 M)

Weblog Collaboration Blog Examines this Blog's Collaborative Nature

"Certainly one of the great advantages of a weblog approach over e-mail when collaborating with several geographically dispersed individuals is that all the communication resides in one central repository," writes Scott, which addresses one of the questions someone asked in the presentation today: how blogs differ from e-mail and e-mail discussion lists.

Portals and KM Highlights this Blog

Bill Ives of Portals and KM writes a much better summary about this blog than I did: "It is full of interesting stuff and a good example of a blog for knowledge management and event planning."

His blog features many terrific resources about knowledge management.

Monday, November 15, 2004

Some serendipitous examples of blogs for PKM

I was just wondering who all else at ASIS&T is blogging their conference experience so I searched Feedster (alternatively I could have looked at who's got a blog posting that links to the ASIST conference page). I came up with a post from another presenter who briefly mentions how his blog is supporting his PhD work:

pseudo-serendipitous discovery - value in research oriented blogs

Similarly to Kylie Veale (in the comments of Dissertation blogs), I also find it interesting and rewarding to write in my blog. Once in a while I go back and read what I have written in the past. It is amazing to find thoughts and ideas that come handy in the present research projects and interests, especially since I'm about to finish my Ph.D. glasswork [sic] and embark on my dissertation. The pseudo-serendipitous discovery in things one has written in the past is not so much of a discovery since you have written it. It is amazing however to try to understand the framework and the mental state present at the time one wrote an earlier blog entry (i.e. the source of the pseudo-serendipitousdiscovery). From Mentor Cana: http://www.kmentor.com/socio-tech-info/archives/000632.html

From Kylie Veale (http://blogger.iftf.org/Future/000368.html)

I write a PhD weblog and find that it helps to formulate my thoughts and ideas when I know I'm writing notes and someone else might read them.Posted by: Kylie Veale at April 2, 2004 03:53 AM

How Feeds Help with KM

Unveiling this blog is giving me another reason why feeds help people with knowledge management. For some reason, I feel very challenged explaining why feeds can help with knowledge management, which is my portion of Tuesday's talk. This blog has content gathered over the last seven months. It contains many fabulous resources about blogs and knowledge management. But how many people are actually going to dig through the accumulated content? Handing someone this blog as a giant chunk of information is quite different from giving someone a few posts every few days. Going back through seven months seems a bit daunting. Looking at a post every day or so seems much more reasonable.

The lack of features like categories also strains new readers. There's no easy way for someone to get a cursory glance at the topics we've covered or to look at things that might interest them the most. The navigational choices of a search engine or mousing through the archives seem limited and limiting.

No Pressure. No Pressure. No Pressure.

We're all feeling a little bit of pressure to post something really amazing near the top of this blog so that the people who come here after our presentation on Tuesday, Blogs for Information Dissemination and Knowledge Management (SIG KM) decide to return to peruse some of the amazing resources in our archives or subscribe to one of the feeds to see if we post anything useful in the near future. This blog dates back to the spring, when we started using it to collect and share resources related our panel.

Christina and I have improved the sidebar by adding more links to feeds, links to our blogs, and the story and purpose of this blog. We talked about adding some blogs about knowledge management and similar issues, but we aren't completely sure we'll do that yet.

Friday, November 12, 2004

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Down to the Wire...

Our presentation is scheduled for Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 10:30. We hope to see you there!

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

About wikis, not blogs, but wow...

Jonathan Davies. "Wiki Brainstorming and Problems with Wiki Based Collaboration" Report on a project submitted for the degree of Information Processing in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York (UK). Submitted 10th September 2004. link. He doesn't say what degree, but I hope at 77 pages it's at least a Masters. updated: 2:23pm. To fix line breaking

Monday, November 08, 2004

The Dowbrigade on Thursday's Talk

Michael Feldman, aka the Dowbrigade, wrote some thoughts about our talk last Thursday, including his own taxonomy of blog posts.

Friday, November 05, 2004

Science blogs, blogging

A kind of neat resource for science blogs is Tangled Bank

In cooperation with several other of us geeky science types, I am pleased to announce our own version of the "Carnival of the Vanities". A Carnival is a weekly showcase of good weblog writing, selected by the authors themselves (that's the vanity part). Each week, one of our crew will highlight a collection of interesting weblog articles in one convenient place, making it easy for everyone to find the good stuff. Two things will distinguish us from the original "Carnival of the Vanities": 1) we are specifically restricting ourselves to articles in the field of science and medicine, very broadly defined, and 2) we've got a different name. Our weekly compendium of great science weblog articles will be called the Tangled Bank, after Charles Darwin's famous metaphor...

Also, Sean Carroll has a lot of science blogs on his blogroll. Instead of saying that there aren't scientist blogs, I think it's fair to say that they don't necessarily participate in feedster or technorati. After all, you pretty much have to nominate yourself to be in those. What I found when I was doing my now somewhat famous b/ITe article was that most of the so-called blog search engines really just search feeds that have been submitted. If the blog a) doesn't have a feed or b) until recently if the feed is only in ATOM or c) the author isn't trying to get noticed or d) if the feeds are title only ... it's not really that likely you'll find it in technorati and the like.

Ok, I'm having issues today, notes from the trial run

This will be my 3rd attempt at blogging my notes, comments, etc., from last night's trial run. Each time it gets a little shorter, a little less thorough.
  • length – I didn't look at the clock when I started but I think I went over 20 minutes. The problem is that for the complexity I tried to discuss, I probably should have gone longer. I'm thinking about backing down the complexity a little bit
  • intro and conclusion – in technical writing, you say what you're going to say, say it, and then say why you said it. I didn't do that well. I need to do a better job of introducing my subject and then tieing together all the loose ends at the conclusion
  • citations – I tried to use the notes section as footnotes, but that seems ineffective. I think that putting them on the slides is not an option, so I think I'll either create a handout that's an outline with the citations or I'll have endnotes with the citations on a final slide. K- if I do a handout, how many copies should I bring?
  • ROI, or why should businesses do this? – I totally left this out, but it's very important.
    • aggregation across
    • encourage innovation
    • productivity
    • workers might do it anyway – in a public forum
  • Delete Gahran's classification (slide 8)? – I know why I put it in there. I used Wacka's taxonomy to get the audience on the same page as what kinds of blogs I am talking about. I used Gahran's classification to point out that on corporate > internal > knowledge blogs, there might be different types of posts even within the same blog or across blogs. That might open up a can of worms that will take time away from my most important points
  • My most important points are voice and reflective thinking so I will try to develop these more/nail them down a little better
  • The whole secure annotations thing – this is not convincing that it's actually PKM instead of PIM, I'll need to bring up personal knowledge publishing (Paquet, also Mortensen and Walker); ie, selection, analysis → meaning, context → PKM

Ok. Now for the important point. They say we need to add jokes. Hmm. Clean and appropriate for our audience.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Journal of Interactive Online Learning: Web Logs and Online Discussions as Tools to Develop the Teacher's Voice

Hernandez-Ramos, P. "Web Logs and Online Discussions As Tools to Promote Reflective Practice." Journal of Interactive Online Learning 3, no. 1 (June 2004). Interesting article... especially for librarians...
Part of the challenge for a teacher preparation program is how to inculcate in graduates a greater sense of the importance of their profession, how to see themselves as constructivists—producers of information and knowledge— and not “just as teachers”—objectivists—who are solely in a transmission role....Journals are a common requirement in many courses, not just in teacher preparation, as a strategy to help students engage in metacognition (thinking about their own learning) with the expectation that the process will help them learn better....A complementary goal was to encourage students to see both blogs and discussion forums as valid and effective tools for professional development and lifelong learning. Levin and Camp (2002) argued persuasively that, “without the disposition to reflect on their performance, teachers are less likely to improve their practice or to be able to see the links between theory and practice.” They further said, “we believe that this habit of mind is so important that we must try to teach all prospective teachers how to reflect on their practice” (p. 572).
I feel like I could copy and paste the whole article here. It's really part of the evidence-based practice movement. In the "technology's contribution" section, the author goes on to discuss the differences in online courseware discussion forums and blogs. I like this goal of the project:
to help students develop a sense of themselves as creators of knowledge, rather than just consumers of information, and to see themselves as meaningful contributors to professional dialogues

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

On Keeping Found Things Found

I have a meeting with JJ Allaire of Onfolio tomorrow, so I've been reading about the product. It's a research management tool people can use while surfing the Web. (It's a PC application, so I can't actually use it.) I came across a quote I thought some of you might appreciate: "The trick ... isn't about getting the information; it's about being able to keep it all straight," the article's author paraphrases Adam Berrey, who has worked with JJ Allaire and his brother, Jeremy, before.

Monday, November 01, 2004

Getting from Here to There

I figured out that it costs $6 on the commuter rail to get from South Station to Providence one-way. The station in Providence at 100 Gaspee Street is less than a mile from the convention center.

Feeds and Knowledge Management

Here are my scattered presentation thoughts. I'm still analyzing how feeds can help with knowledge management and what points I really need to cover. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the basics.

Intro to Feeds
-Two main kinds of feeds: RSS and Atom
-Feeds are gaining in popularity, trend will continue

Feeds are a quick way to learn about site updates
-work for blogs, Web sites, a number of things
-feeds come to you, you don't have to go to the source
-some people use them to learn when a source updates, as opposed to simply reading the feed iteself
-can be a great way to learn when sites update, especially sites with sporadic update schedules or long breaks between updates

How to find feeds

Share Your OPML

How to use feeds

How to receive feeds

Copyright

Different sources of feeds/ways people use feeds --news
--podcasting
--Feed from a buoy to know the height of the ocean

Neat things to do w/ feeds

How do feeds contribute to knowledge management? -A big piece of KM is making knowledge available for sharing: feeds help share knowledge.
-route information to specific places or people using feeds If you have any thoughts for how you use feeds for knowledge management, please feel free to share them.

For Thursday

Christina asked some questions about Thursday, when we should be presenting to the Berkman Thursday blog group. Instead of commenting on her post, I'm responding in a different post so everyone can see it easily.

Thursday should be a complete run of our panel. We have about 1 1/4 hours at ASIST, including time for questions, right? That's what we should plan on Thursday night. If we don't fill the entire 1 1/4 hours, that's fine. Thursday meetings end whenever they end. Our talk is the big agenda item.

I think we should present whatever we're presenting at ASIST and not worry too much about the difference in the audience. Some of the people know a bit about knowledge management already. Judging by Shimon and Josh's presentation in September about using Frassle for interpersonal content management, it seems like people already have some idea about what it is and how to do it. Otherwise, I think Shimon and Josh would have gotten more questions along those lines.

If you want to do examples, that would be good. It's up to you, though.

As for slides and whatnot, if you can either send me your presentation or put it on the Web somewhere, we can follow along using the computer in the meeting room.

In what order should we present?

Christina's Outline: Blogs for KM, the special case of PKM

(still in progress) Updated... I'm changing the order, please let me know if you think this is a bad idea! (updated seconds later because IV actually comes after III)
I. Intro
    A. What is PKM? (How I will use the term PKM, hopefully a standard definition)
    B. How does PKM differ from PIM/PCM and KM?

II. Why Blogs?
    A. They add richness to narratives of how projects developed from the personal view of the engineers, managers
    B. They are personal, but can be aggregated for the benefit of the enterprise
    C. For researchers and other knowledge workers, it gets them writing which can lead to better conceived reports and published papers
    D. They put a personal face on the enterprise
    E. It lets the quiet guy get heard, no barrier to speaking up
    F. Users can effectively annotate webpages without the privacy/spyware concerns of furl, A9 or other web-based tools
    G. May lead to innovation - researcher can note good idea for later, after current project is done? Also can publish an idea to get feedback - kind of peer review - prior to formal submission.

III. Models for Use of Blogs for PKM (this may be weak, and get dropped)
    A. Berrypicking (a la Bates)
    B. Distributed learning (a la Efimova)
    C. Information seeking process (a la Kulthau)

IV. Nuts and Bolts -- what features, policy, meta-stuff are necessary for success?
    A. Low barrier to publishing (basically a given with any COTS software)
    B. Terms of use (gentle but firm rules for everyone's comfort and liability)
    C. Search
    D. Levels of privacy/access (at minimum, limited to intranet, better yet multiple levels enterprise-wide to personal),
    E. Categories/meta-data
    F. Management support

Updated with line breaks. Also -- maybe I should be less theoretical for the Berkman Group? How long will I have on Thursday?
Should I have examples? What would the examples show/prove that aren't better described?

Theory of 5 Knowledge Transfer Mechanisms

A lot of the stuff I'm discovering you all might be very familiar with if you work more in KM. I'm really a reference librarian by training, so I'm doing some research on the recent theory, etc., of KM. I don't think this works with my part of the panel (*p*km), but maybe we can work it in there somewhere... N.M. Dixon. Common Knowledge. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. Quoted in Karlsen and Gottschalk. "An Empirical Evaluation of Knowledge Transfer Mechanisms for IT Projects" Journal of Computer Information Systems v44 i1 (Fall 2003): 112-9. Available online fulltext (pdf) via Business Source Premier. Incidentally, Karlsen and Gottschalk's study seems pretty flawed so I'm not really recommending citing it. The five types (briefly):
  • Serial – same group, same task later, writing down what worked and then doing it again
  • Near – same task, different group, follows other group's notes
  • Far – different task, different group, new context
  • Expert – generic, explicit knowledge transfer
I'm thinking that this kind of goes with Efimova's distributed learning/apprenticeship model.