In a recent entry, Knowledge-Making, Personal or Universal I differentiated knowledge-making with constructed artifacts good anywhere, anytime (i.e., universal knowledge artifacts) from knowledge-making which results in an artifact that is only used to achieve a more satisfactory equilibrium between an individual and her/his environment (i.e., personal knowledge-making = pkm). I pointed out that the rigors of universal knowledge-making were greater and also promised a later entry in which I would detail an example universal knowledge-making (ukm) effort in order to make these rigors more accessible for discussion.

My idea is that once these rigors are specified, the reader and I will be better able to see the actual behaviors that differentiate these two classes of knowledge-making endeavor. A next goal is show the degree to which weblogging enables faster, deeper, more efficient universal knowledge-making (ukm).

Re weblogging and ukm, in Academic Blog Compilations Jenny Levine (the Shifted Librarian) shares her find: two clusters of ukm-focused [e.g, academic and Ph.D related] weblogs.

"I uncovered an annotated list of weblogs (k-logs) that Jill Walker is collecting that are used by researchers and academics as a part of their research practice. There is another called Ph.D weblogs.net which is attempting to bring together PhD students' weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, and have a blog about your research interests, you can register there." [ James R. Regan's Weblog ] It's pretty obvious we need a classification scheme for blogs, although I'm not sure yet how anyone would truly index and classify them. This should provide some interesting fodder for EBN, Weblogs at Harvard, and others. [The Shifted Librarian]

I raise the Ph.D student's work because of a central presumption: that at the core one receives a doctorate for having documented their creation of new universal knowledge [whether absolutely new --i.e., unpredictable by "any" means, thus a 'paradigm shift' --or an extension of/implication from the present universal knowledge-base, but new nonetheless] . Also, we may get some interesting thoughts about universal knowledge-making from those who share the challenge of making new universal knowledge artifacts.

Given that making new universal knowledge is what unites the work of doctoral students, then our examination of the [set of related] research procedures(s) generally followed in conducting and documenting such efforts may provide us insight as to the parameters of knowledge-making at the universal level.

With our ukm insights in mind we'll be in a position to the 'surface' possible efficiencies or profundities that become more accessible through use of weblogs/k-logs on the world wide web while we work to make new ukm.