Wikis are the buzz. Like Amy Gahran (Learning with (and from) Wiki), I have been quietly 'intrigued" by wikis, while trying to get past the mind-bending thought of creating a web site that anyone, anywhere can change on you. And I agree completely with Amy's issue:

In my opinion , the biggest stumbling block with wikis is that most of them have absolutely terrible user interfaces. They expose the user to far too much of the software's inner workings. (For example, see this wiki's category list.) They're not very intuitive or usable. And they're almost exclusively text-based, not very visual. Yes, you can get used to them without too much difficulty, but most non-geeks would have to push past considerable initial revulsion and awkwardness to get to that point. That's a tall order.

Yup, wikis work great, but they are generally U-G-L-Y and outside of us geeks, hard to navigate (raise your hand if you know what "diff" means). It is no great mystery- the software is generally written to be as small as possible, usually in obfuscated perl, and by folks like actually enjoying curling up to read a good Unix manual.

read on...

5:13:54 PM    

One more addition to your KM bloggers list: Jeremy Aarons with Dubbings and Diversions. 

Jeremy is a philosopher in KM land, traveller, juggler and he is likely to take you for an adventure (I met him at OKLC in Innsbruck and we shared not only fun of talking about knowledge work research, but also the thrill of paragliding from 2000m :)

You can start from Jeremy's thinking on KM research (for example, a series on task-based KM: one, two and three).

12:05:44 PM    

To start with - a piece from my comments to Blogs and CoPs: Can blogging replace communities of practice? (scroll to find)

For me (please forgive simplification) the essence of a community is in a sense of belonging and practices that its members share. I can understand that it's hard to believe looking at loosely-coupled weblogs "out there" that their authors belong to a community, but I can not discard my own feeling of "belonging" as well as indications of many other bloggers saying that weblogs help to build relations and shared understanding and to engage into reflective conversations.

I've been thinking on it for a while and trying to articulate my ideas about community clue in case of weblogs to a few people in Nürnberg and Lisbon... One more attempt.

Elmine Wijnia talks about weblogs as communication hub (also here) to find others and connect with them. I think weblogs do a bit more - they provide shared thinking space. I know that it's hard to believe that many individual weblogs, even linked, can provide a shared space, but it feels like that (and I tend to trust my feelings :)))

For me the closest metaphor is a city, a shared living space. Usually we don't know many others in our neighbourhood, but we walk on the same streets every day, see the same familiar strangers, get wet under the same rain, miss the same bus... We have a lot of context to share and meeting each other abroad we will connect easily. Living in a same city creates a sense of belonging and a sense of community...

Weblogs do as well. Of course, not for everyone (as in a city, you may not feel it). I was thinking what creates such shared context in case of weblogs. I guess it's weblog reading.

I'm thinking about my own weblog ecosystem. We don't read same weblogs, but they are interconnected, so at the end we get exposed to similar names, events, ideas, books. For example, once you get into KM blogging, you will quickly learn about wikis, join Orkut or find out who Dave Pollard is. Our experiences of blogging are never the same, like experiences of living on different streets, but in some cases they overlap enough to create a feeling of sharing the same space.

I think that those "some cases" of overlapping weblog experiences have to do with several things: density of a network, speed of ideas travelling around and time that one devotes to reading weblogs of others. The last one is important: getting to know your community takes time and you will never connect with a city when you jump in and out of a tourist bus.

I'm getting more and more convinced that when introducing someone to blogging the most important thing is to help newcomer to start feeling rhythms of blogging cities: getting a map for an orientation, learning basic terms to find a way around, finding good guides (blogs to start reading), taking time to explore and soak...

I'm playing with a "city" metaphor to explain blogging... I'm thinking of RSS as public transport lines - they take you faster where you have to be, but you miss little secrets on a way. And about risks of generalising in weblog research when one studies only specific communities (think of aliens making their opinions about humans based on their study of New York ;)

I guess it's time to dive a bit deeper into research on cities (thinking of Emergence on self-organisation of cities, William H. Whyte’s theory of triangulation, and may be even connecting with A city is not a tree).

So, may be at the end we can find out if and when weblogs can turn into a knowledge spaces...

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

12:04:28 PM    

For all the effort given to the transportation of physical things...we really don't have much of a clue on how knowledge flows in an apparent knowledge economy. Knowledge flow analysis (or some derivative of the concept) is quickly becoming a strategic consideration for corporations. Knowledge flows much like water - not where you want it to...but rather where the conditions are right for natural flow and dispersion (how can you tell I'm trying to grow a $!?# lawn?). As this article states, organization charts do not accurately reveal how information flows. "Whether as a manager presiding over a department or as a member embedded within one, we are all dramatically affected by information flow and webs of relationships within social networks. These networks often are not depicted on any formal chart..."

11:57:09 AM    

Kevin Kruse has put together an elearning dashboard. He lists elearning news, stock prices, upcoming events and blogs. Stop by and have a look...

11:56:10 AM    

Stephen Downes is repositioning himself from edu-tech guru to RSS missionary :)...RSS: Grassroots Support Leads to Mass Appeal: "To be sure, RSS will evolve rapidly over the next few years. It’s poised to be exposed to a great deal of rhetoric, and is on the verge of being widely commercialized, with the inevitable cycle of hype and disappointment that will follow. That said, RSS is a technology with a strong future, strong because of its simplicity, flexibility, and utility."

11:54:53 AM    

How to use weblogs to create engaging learning experiences: "Apart from being very easy to use, I feel that there are three key attributes that have contributed to its success: 1) personal point of view, 2) chronological nature and 3) byte-sized posts. Together, these three attributes help create experiences that are both engaging and memorable."

11:53:40 AM