Here's a little something I wrote in reply to High Context.editor David Gammel's introduction to the group-forming community.

I'd like to mention one of David's initiatives that he hasn't mentioned in his intro but is in my opinion highly relevant as a practical illustration of blog-based group-forming. David has set up the KMPings service.

What KMPings does is enable webloggers with an interest in knowledge management to combine teasers for selected blog posts from their personal blog. The result is another, collective blog that points to various posts by participants. (If this sounds abstract, just click the link and you'll understand right away.) KMPings has enabled the formation of a loosely coupled community of KM bloggers. I'm subscribed to this blog and it has helped me discover a few new webloggers who share my interest in knowledge management.

One way to describe what KMPings does is to say that it provides a shared channel for a particular area of interest. It was a direct inspiration for my proposal of ridiculously easy (blog-enabled) group forming. My idea is to automate what David has done and extend it to any topic anyone can dream up.

Given such a system, if I felt like it, I could almost instantly set up a "MontrealPings" blog channel, or a "OrigamicArchitecturePings" blog channel, or what have you, and start putting relevant posts at those channels. Other interested webloggers could subscribe (via RSS) to such channels and could ping them whenever they write something that relates to the topic at hand that they wish to share with the community of subscribers.

Perhaps a better name for that idea would be just that, BlogChannels - what do you think?

[Sebastien Paquet]

Sebastien reports on a very cool project. BlogChannels could be a powerful tool... and it might save me a lot of manual work that I need to do for Seblogging. If people simply "pinged" a common channel I would not need to sift through all the stuff that is getting published on the individual Weblogs. This is especially the case with less focused Weblogs where only now and then a posts refers to educational applications of personal Webpublishing and Weblogging...

7:43:28 PM    

Across the Internet and around the world, people are working on similar never-ending photographic projects. They are making photologs, a kind of Web site that is a combination of photo gallery and visual diary. Photologs, also known as photoblogs, are similar in format to Weblogs, but they are built around regular photo updates instead of commentary and links. Unlike standard Weblogs, they have been largely ignored, perhaps because they make no claims to revolutionary status. But photologs are a powerful idea in their own right—they combine some of the best aspects of Weblogs, such as instantaneous self-publishing, with a big dose of visual stimuli. As the concept catches on and the tools for making photologs become easier to use, they might just become the standard format for presenting personal photos on the Web.

How is a photolog different from a plain old Web page? Many people who have digital cameras find themselves churning out a constant stream of images because it is fun, easy, and cheap to do. Photologs are built to handle that stream, with the newest photos right up front and older ones receding into the background. Traditional online photo galleries lack this chronological structure and can be harder to update. And like Weblogs, many photologs are updated every day, making individual photos less important than the regular flow of images...[David F. Gallagher][via Thomas Burg]

1:42:07 PM    

Some good observations from a parent's perspective...

The Ontario Knowledge Network for Learning wants to know the pulse of parents with regard to IT in parent/school communications. Here's my answer ...

Thank you for including the parents on this survey, and also thanks for allowing us to respond via a modern technology ;)

1. Do we use technology to communicate with our school?

   Yes, the telephone. That's the same level of communications integration we used back when I was in Kindergarten. If the school does have an email, we've never been told of it. I know the board has email, but generally ignores it for weeks.

   Wait! It gets better! How does the school communicate with us? By notes, printed leaflets they tuck into our kids' schoolbags ... just like they did when grandma was in gradeschool! Good to know at least one side of the equation is learning!

2. Do I agree that technology would help increase communications?

   On it's own, no.

   To be effective, the technology must be integrated into the lifestyle of the participants. You can't simply dump a complex and completed solution in place and expect compliance.

   Remember FirstClass? I do. To be effective, you must grow this organically, and when you have a school system where almost none of the teachers can use email effectively, is it any wonder the kids are unimpressed and the parents are frustrated?

   
   
3. What technology would I choose?

   Again, technology is not the issue, not by itself. First we need a cultural shift where the teachers are prepared for email and the schoolboard allots them time for it. If teachers have to answer my email on their own time, you're not going to get much compliance, and unless they see the value of it in their workplace, it's doom for you and I to foist it on them.

   Now, if it was accepted by the teachers, what would I want to use to communicate with them? Same as I use with my own clients:

   • email and mailing lists
   • instant messaging
   • regular group meetings on IRC
   • regular status reports via a web journal

   My goal, as Emperor of Education, would be to ask teachers and parents to talk to each other, to have teachers talk to other teacher's pupil's parents, parents talk to parents, everybody, all together. We just need to foster the pretext for lines of communications: We get more business done at the craft-show than at probably any other event. Digitize that.

4. Are there obstacles?

   Yes, and I believe I've already listed them but they bear repeating: Teachers must be allotted time to communicate and teachers must accept the technology as useful in their workplace.

5. Are there successful methods in place?

   In-person advisory board meetings.

   What would I change?

   Move these online so the notes and materials can be archived.

6. What types of technology would I feel is best for communications with the school?

   See (3) for starters.

7. Should technology (and by that I know they mean specifically Microsoft technology ... with a bare sprinkle of Apple) play a key role in my child's classroom learning?

   No.

   "Technology should serve the body, not enslave the mind," and when we now know from SEC documents that 85% of the money the schoolboards pay towards Windows licenses is pure profit for the world's richest corporation, I think it's wasting our money and sending the wrong message to the children.

   When we teach our children to be passive consumers of a proprietary technology, we enslave their minds.

   That is wrong. It's immoral and it's a mistake.

   Should transparent technology (and by that I mean those technologies we are permitted to own, to take apart, change, re-form and re-apply by our own whim and in that category I can include all sorts of technologies, from the aircraft and automobile to the computer hardware and software, to the fine points of grid computing and the internet itself) should any of this be part of the curriculum?

   Absolutely, so long as we remember there are two types of knowledge, gnosis and epistimon; technology per-se is squarely in the second category of those dry things we can learn by rote to enumerate, whereas it is the fluid and human knowledge of the first category that is the ultimate goal of education.

[Gary Murphy]

12:42:21 PM    

As noted a few days ago in a rather 'colorless' posting, his first name is Ed. Last name, Blogger.

He's the finally sent forth Bay Area Writing Project's 'blog roadie,' the guy who'll show NWP Tech Liaisons around back stage on the 2002 Atlanta tour of educatonal applications for Web logs. If you're nice to him, he'll sell you a T-shirt at cost. (Bryan Bell gets 50% off the top of every sale. Well, he gets that when the kid starts to look a little less Anglo.) [Pat Delaney]

12:42:20 PM    

Ed Blogger - The Atlanta Tour 2002.

His first name is Ed. Last name, Blogger.

He's the Bay Area Writing Project's 'blog roadie,' the guy who'll show NWP Tech Liaisons around back stage on the 2002 Atlanta tour of educatonal applications for Web logs. If you're nice to him, he'll sell you a T-shirt at cost. (Bryan Bell gets 50% off the top of every sale. Well, he gets that when the kid starts to look a little less Anglo.)

[Pat Delaney]

4:42:39 AM    

Le plan du Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux : Pour faire les bons choix...

(page 25) 4. Développer les systèmes d’information de gestion en appui à la gestion par résultats et à l’obligation de rendre des comptes

4:42:32 AM    

Des données sur le système de santé au Canada et sur les coûts ou plutôt le fardeau économique de la maladie au Canada. Tiens, ça me fait penser à ce que Gérald Larose disait dans ce premier numéro de la revue du CEFRIO, PerspecTIves

« Keynes et Marx disaient la même chose : l’économique précède le social et le social est une dépense. De toute évidence, ce paradigme ne tient plus. Aujourd’hui, le social est un investissement déterminant du rendement de l’investissement économique. La clé d’accès à ce capital social est désormais faite de savoirs, de formation, de mises en réseau, de technologies de l’information, etc. »

Peut-on dire la même chose des dépenses de santé ? Probablement pas... sauf, sans doute, pour ce qui est des 'dépenses' de prévention, de développement social...

Un manque, reconnu mais de moins en moins acceptable dans la mesure des coûts de la maladie : l'impact sur la famille et les proches...

4:42:31 AM    

Just wanted to share some initial thoughts on how one could elaborate and reorganize Weblog content visually. Building visual layers of abstraction on top of all the Weblog content that gets published over time offers some interesting potential for reflective learning. Following this thought I started to play a bit with concept mapping software. Here is a small and pretty rough prototype of what I am talking about...

Of course, all kinds of additional information could be integrated in such a map. What I find interesting is the idea of combining higher order concepts, more general themes, descriptions of relations, etc. with published Weblog items. Thoughts and comments anyone?

3:42:07 AM    

Knowledge isn't power?. A recent Xerox research report has found that high-performing employees don't tend to hoard information. According to the news summary: The idea that knowledge is power has been knocked on the head by researchers who claim that high-performing employees are more likely to be ones who proactively share information with their colleagues.
High-flyers consistently recognise the value of sharing knowledge. In contrast, employees rated as 'low performers' tend to be hoarders who avoid contributing to the knowledge pool, according to research commissioned by Xerox.  [Column Two]

Cette réflexion me fait penser, a contrario, à un texte qui m'a fait rire tellement il était caricatural dans sa manière de présenter l'information comme source de pouvoir... C'était dans la partie française du groupe européen sur le KM - Knowledgeboard, un texte portant sur le KM dans le secteur public (Affaires sociales Belgique, si je me souviens). Je ne peux mettre la main sur le texte en ce moment, le lien étant bloqué...

Mais les deux points de vues se complètent : moins on a de pouvoir, plus on retient l'information. n'est-ce pas l'essence des comportements bureaucratiques ?

2:42:57 AM