Organizational Development (OD) and Intranets. Quote:"What is this knowledge management focus really about? At the heart of the knowledge question lies a very different logic about how value is created in the new economy. In the industrial economy if people thought about knowledge at all they operated from the old equation: knowledge = power, so hoard it. Today companies are embracing a new equation for success: knowledge = power, so share and it multiplies. This new logic represents a radical rethinking of basic business and economic models."
Of all the virtual playthings on the Internet, Soda Constructor has got to be one of the deepest and most playworthy. There's a Soda Zoo full of amazing critters to play with and a community of critter-makers to join. The little critters look innocent enough when in their conceptual cages. [DeepFUN Weblog]
I wholeheartedly agree with Bernie. SC is incredible. A few clicks and you're literally drawn in. A big part of this is because the physics seems so natural.
Is it just me or is weblogspace looking more and more like a group mind? A new organism. If so, this is the first example of this ever. Why not write about the mechanics of this? How can a 1/2 million smart people (1/3 on UserLand, 1/3 on Blogger, and 1/3 on other systems) and 5-10 m readers cooperate to create a new paradigm for conscious life? How can we incorporate more people without becomming too chaotic for any advancement? Is this worthwhile? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
This is the global brain idea, which is being worked on by a few researchers, notably the folks over at Principia Cybernetica. One truly fascinating account of a real, large group mind is Paul Cox's piece on how the Cloudmakers community aggregated around the enigmas posed on the internet by the marketing team of the Spielberg movie AI.
Ask Hardware Manufacturers to Support Ogg Vorbis. The Xiph.org Foundation has released a fixed point decoder for the Ogg Vorbis format under a BSD style license. What that means is that manufacturers of portable music players can now easily add support for the Ogg Vorbis format. This is important because the MP3 format is encumbered by software patents, and those who implement encoders or decoders are required to pay royalties. [...] Ogg Vorbis produces higher quality files at a lower size, and no licensing fees are required for its use. [...] [infoAnarchy] What do you think? [] links to this post 2:35:31 PM
Rambles a little, but there are interesting parts. Here's a quote:
It was obvious that everyone I talked to got great psychological rewards from their work on the Web. That's just as well, because it's equally clear that while librarians may advance their careers by creating digital resources, faculty generally are not rewarded for their Web work with pay increases, promotion, sabbaticals, or tenure.
The problem seems to be that traditional peer-review mechanisms for research have not yet expanded to consider resources created for or published on the Web, though there are signs that some scholarly associations are beginning to consider their responsibilities in this area. A new resource called MERLOT [Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching] has been set up specifically to provide peer review of discipline-specific Web resources, applying the same measures of scholarship as those applied to standard scholarly publication [http://www.merlot.org/Home.po].
As Eric Shulenberger told me, academic inertia is a powerful force, and until these measures of scholarly achievement gain wide credibility, untenured scholars who devote enormous amounts of time to the creation of Web resources, at the expense of formal publishing, may place their careers in jeopardy [Jeffrey S. Young, "Ever So Slowly, Colleges Start to Count Work with Technology in Tenure Decisions," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 22, 2002, http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i24/24a02501.htm].
Playfulness and evolution. The following is from the 1998-1999 Bradley Lectures - this one by Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason magazine and author of The Future and Its Enemies:We human beings, however, play all our lives. For a human being not to be creative and curious is a sign of senility, not maturity. [DeepFUN Weblog]
An excellent read. Follow the link and scroll down a bit. Postrel writes:
The real limit to progress is not the amount of stuff we have, or even the current supply of ideas. It is all the different ways in which those things or those ideas can be combined. Every new idea adds to the ever-branching number of future possibilities. Mastery is a matter not only of how many things we know but of how quickly and adeptly we can use them in new situations.
Geek Volunteer Overseas - Prologue. In less than a week I will be flying to Kenya. For the next nine months I will be volunteering as a Computer Instructor in a small college in rural Kenya. This article is the prelude to what, I hope, will be a series of articles that will provide first-hand glimpses into the ups and downs of working as a tech volunteer overseas. Over the coming months I hope to share with the K5 community my experiences living in a small town in rural Kenya and teaching computers to high school graduates. I will be exploring the state of development in the third world, their computer needs, their hopes and dreams, their culture, politics, educational system and much more. [full story & discussion at kuro5hin.org] What do you think? [] links to this post 2:21:52 PM
A few interesting comments from scientists there. For example here (emphasis mine): [...] The whole point behind science, its entire reason to exist, is to provide us with a predictive explanation of the world around us. It needs the "many eyes" approach more than just about any other human endeavor, because the entire point is to model the real world and you can't do that without a lot of observation.
Of course, science has also proven to be useful, and that's been something of an anathema to it. The reason is that things which are useful are things which people (corporations in particular) want to capitalize on in an exclusive way. It seems to me that there was a time when everyone recognized the truth that public disclosure and widespread collaboration is necessary for science to advance.
That no longer seems to be the case from where I sit. Today, corporations fund a great deal of research at the university level, and there is a great deal of pressure from both corporations and from the universities themselves to keep ongoing research under wraps as much as possible, in order to maximize the chances not just of publishing but also of getting patents on the results (which are probably then transferred to the corporations that funded the research).
Weblog as my backup brain. [...] The notion of personal knowledge management hasn't been explored enough. Maybe I'm sensitized to it because of my aging brain cells and general absent-mindedness. But I can't see how organizations are going to progress with knowledge management unless the individuals in those organizations learn how to unpack what they know. Think back to the heyday of expert systems in the mid 1980s. The show-stopper was not the limitations of the AI technology (although that was an issue). It was the huge challenge in getting experts to figure out what they were expert at and make it accessible.[McGee's Musings]
In other words, the roadblock was to get experts to uncover the implicit knowledge that had formed in their brains through practice.
Fear of failure. Fear of criticism. Fear of reprisal. Fear of looking stupid. Fear of removing all doubt. Fear of permanence. Fear of strangers. Fear of invaded privacy. Fear of falling behind. Fear of the blank page. [...]
Learning with Confidence. [...] An unwillingness to make public mistakes often arises from a learner's ideas about intelligence. If intelligence is believed to be a fixed asset, risk-taking holds little value ("I either get it or I don't. If I don't, I probably never will, so why risk looking like a fool?"). Conversely, if the learner believes that intelligence is a dynamic attribute that can be affected by effort, the risk of public stumbles are not as likely to hold them back from trying. This all speaks to the need to incorporate mechanisms into learning environments that will assist the learner and the teacher in discovering these preconceptions and in working to modify/correct them if necessary. (I'm reading How People Learn, and I find it fascinating.) [Stand Up Eight]
I find there's a world of difference between people who don't see themselves as changeable an those who know they are.
What about weblog citation? How might we define, as a community, suggested formats for the "tunneling" of weblog posts? For example, I quote Sebastian, who is quoting David...how does someone who looks at my post make sense of the whole concept? I am only now getting used to the disjointed conversations that take place in this medium.
Some of the most experienced bloggers, like Dave Winer, very seldom include much of another person's post at all...they simply refer to their comments and let the reader follow the hyperlink to digest the reference.
I've found that viewing threads of a conversation are much easier in my RSS aggregator, but only if the responses occur in a timely manner. A reply taken out of context by a long pause can be quite confusing if it isn't referenced properly. So that brings me back to my original question: can we come up with a proposed citation standard? Should we?
One last thought: is there any value in attempting to catalog various "types" of weblog posts (e.g. Announcement, Commentary/Critique, Conversation (Meme), etc.) and developing styles for citations that match the purpose of a post? Just thinking out loud... [Stand Up Eight]
Let me highlight relevant pointers for whoever wants to tackle this long-standing, recurring problem.
The BlogMD initiative is developing a metadata standard for weblogs and weblogs posts. Join them.
As mentioned in the above site, Dave Menendez has developed an RDF vocabulary for describing threaded discussions, including (but not restricted to) blogthreads.
On the academic side, Simon Buckingham Shum has been interested in mapping discussions for a few years already. I don't know how easy to read his papers are, though.
Fear.
