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The Book Exercise. Via danah boyd:
"The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency, it's as though we can only see at 78 RPM; we can't see anything at 33 1/2." From Peter M. Senge's "The Fifth Discipline". Oddly, I haven't actually opened this book for a long time, but it is the nearest at hand! How telling about the lack of organization in my office. Also, noticed a sticky indicating the place where I stopped reading... And in the age of CDs and DVDs, let alone MP3 players - this quote seems a bit quaint. On another note, I actually like the sentence above. My mind is so easily locked into one frequency, that am now two hours, seven minutes past when I wanted to eat lunch! So guess what I'm going to do after finishing this entry?... Another great quote from page 40 - where I happened to flip randomly, within the section titled "Lessons of the Beer Game" - point 2, the "structure in human systems is subtle". What would all the social networking software folks think of this? He goes on to define structure as the basic interrelationships that control behavior. So, what is the 
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254 2:13:29 PM
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elearningpost has posted a nice link here connecting case studies to knowledge management. Seems obvious, but I had not really thought of it that way before. And I am working with lots of case studies...!!! =================================== Cases as a knowledge management tool. Gilbert Probst has been pushing cases as effective KM tools since long now. He even has an entire chapter devoted to it in the widely popular KM reference -- Knowledge Management Case Book. I think he's got a point here. Cases are in line with After Action Reviews as means of not only distilling what happened but also for creating and more importantly reusing knowledge (in the appropriate form). I feel that such forms of knowledge objects, where the authenticity of the contexts is preserved have a much better chance of being used and reused. Guess what I mean is that knowledge objects should be narratives. This is also Probst's argument -- cases are narrative tools: "If we read the case report as a narrative, and consider the images, metaphors and character descriptions, we find a layer of meaning containing knowledge that would otherwise remain hidden or implicit." Probst's paper on cases is here (PDF file). You can also access other gems from where this came from -- Geneva Knowledge Form. [elearningpost]
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253 1:44:04 PM
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Situated software. Clay Shirky's got a new essay up on Situated Software, a term he's using to describe software, "designed in and for a particular social situation or context." I find his essay really interesting, and I wish I had time right now for a more thorough response, but my own application commitments prevent me. One reason the situated software approach works so well is the clear definition of the end users of the system. It enables developers to build for a very specific set of users and features, which is a wonderful foundation for success. When you don't have business people requesting new features for some hypothetical user or situation, your software tends to do what it's designed to do better. In software development, the use of personas -- each persona represents a target user of the system -- is one way to address application focus and scope. But for some time now, especially with regards to social software development, I've wondered if that's sufficient. Later in his essay, Clay writes: We constantly rely on the cognitive capabilities of individuals in software design...[w]e rarely rely on the cognitive capabilities of groups, however, though we rely on those capabilities in the real world all the time. This gets to something I've been thinking about for sometime now, the possibility of using personas to represent groups rather than individuals. In fact, I even proposed it as a talk for the last O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference but it wasn't accepted. I'm still tickled by this idea of modeling the groups, because as Clay writes, there's a power in groups that you don't find when the same individuals operate in isolation. By creating group personas (groupas? grouponas?), perhaps we could better design and hone our software to utilize the group's power. Then we could create software that's honestly social and situated, and it wouldn't necessarily be at odds with the breadth and reach of a Web School application. [megnut]
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252 1:39:03 PM
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Monday (Patriot's day for those of you who are from MA), my daughters were home and decided to go outside and rollerblade. I suggested they dig out their wrist guards, etc... No of course not, they are tough, they don't need no stinkin' wrist guards! While guess what!!? I got to spend a big hunk of yesterday hustling one of em around from Pediatrician to Hospital to Orthopedic guy, and now we have a broken radius, ulna and and big honking pink cast. No not the lovely delicate waterproof gore-tex cast, but the huge, above-the-elbow fiberglass (looks like the old plaster type I had when I broke my arm) type. And Pink - Oh my God! It's practically neon. How do you sign a cast like that... Oh well. Live and Learn. Sometime's Dad knows what he's talking about. At least the general level of embarrassment over actually having fallen and hurt herself kept her from wimpering too loudly or complaining about the consequences. It was her own damn fault. And in fact she was tough and did show great courage. Coming in the house, getting an ice pack and taking tylenol - all before informing me of the injury at all. Quite stoic! She is a cool kid. Now the gym teachers who were having her do LONG-JUMPING before I picked her up for the trip to the pediatrician will think twice when a kid says they can't participate because they hurt themselves - jees, can you imagine if she had landed on her broken arm during gym! Wow!
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251 7:12:13 AM
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