The competition for k-logs, then, isn't KM systems; it's email. What k-logs add to email is a slight, but important change to the communications paradigm. The shift is from targeted addressing to an assumption of community and inclusivity. A blog is an open record, available to everyone in the community. Instead of thinking about who needs to know, the corporate blogger thinks about informing many others. Instead of a one-time message, the blogger thinks about creating a long-lived, widely accessible record.
These changes in the way we think about our daily writing are more appropriate for the way we work. It's much more natural to gradually document our work for others using an open, journal-like blog than to constantly update specific individuals. The advantage of k-logs is that they eliminate the effort required to explicitly remember to update coworkers and the additional work in deciding who needs to know about each update.
This is very true. One key thing that Gary does not mention, though, is the need to have generalized trust within an organization in order for the "more natural", open, way of sharing knowledge to prevail.
[...] we were unschooling the children, following their lead to help them learn as they felt ready, felt the need.
The years have had educational ups and downs, but we have seen before our eyes that children can learn as though they had cartoon vacuum cleaners in their brains, sucking book after book in. Our main educational strategies became (1) frequent trips to the library (spread the meme!), (2) leaving books in the middle of the floor, where the children were bound to stumble over them, pick them up, and give them a browse, (3) feint that we might not permit them to learn this or that, and (4) find others to help them with topics we weren’t ourselves adequately familiar with.
There's lots of fascinating, futuristic stuff from many different authors on Ray Kurzweil's virtual bookshelf. Here are a couple titles that I find especially intriguing :
