by Shereen M

The CommonCraft Show:
[Via Common Craft]
I posted Common Craft’s video about Twitter earlier. Here are many more describing Web 2.0, and other, technologies. Their medium, Paperworks, is very unique and it is fun watching and hearing how the production values improve as they get a better understanding of this medium. Some of my favorites are:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Blogs in Plain English and, the most useful one,
• Zombies in Plain English

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by jurvetson
Working Transparently:
[Via Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
By David Gurteen

I am including almost all of the post bt David Gurteen for a reason. It brings together in one post the ideas espoused by several other people. So, I quote David, who quotes John who quotes Michael. Every step in the transfer of information is stated and linked, providing the very openness and transparency discussed in the post. David then brings in his personal experience and ands another wrapper with the article on Science 2.0.

All of this to weave his view on openness into the other views. I hope my small addition provides some more insight into the need for openness and transparency for Science 2.0 aproaches to be useful.

I wrote a Gurteen Perspectives article for Inside Knowledge Magazine recently titled Open and transparent? where I talked about the concept and need for openness and transparency in the way we work today. So I have been delighted to see others say similar things:

In this post KM 2.0 is about showing your workings out by John Tropea, John quotes from Michael Idinopulos:

“The real paradigm shift in Web 2.0, I believe, is the blurring the line between publication and collaboration. In the old days, people collaborated in private. They talked to their friends and colleagues, wrote letters. Later they sent emails. All the real thinking happened in those private conversations. Eventually, once the key insights had been extracted, refined, and clarified, they published: books, articles, speeches, blast memos, etc.”

“…the really exciting thing that’s happening in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is that more and more of those private “pre-publication” interactions are happening in public (or at least semi-public). I think of this as the dawn of the “Work in Progress” culture. We no longer think that something has to be finished before we let strangers into the conversation.”

And then Gerry McKiernan in this post on Science 2.0.

A small but growing number of researchers–and not just the younger ones–have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement–yet–their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0″ is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive.

Take a look. How might you work more transparently?

Transparency and openness are the lubrications that allow human social networks to create knowledge rapidly. If any one person prevents the flow by holding onto critical information, the power of the network can be degraded.

This can be a problem in hierarchies, where information flows through a few chokepoints. A well connected, diverse social network can deal with this problem.

In fact, small groups of humans have always been able to identify who these people are and often use social norms to either make them comply or to shun them, particularly if other sources of the information can be found. If these chokepoints no longer are getting any information, the power they hold is greatly reduced.

Now, this may not always happen because of someone’s unique position in a small group. But the huge scaling properties of the Internet, the Long Tail and its enormous potential, means that it becomes much less likely that a single point of failure will damage the network.

The Internet was designed to route around ‘damage’ and so can diverse, connected human social networks. The Web makes it much less likely that one person will hold unique information. Thus it weakens their advantages.

Power comes from weaving information into unique knowledge – knowledge to make decisions.

The positive effects of openness and transparency can very rapidly overcome any small advantage of an individual holding information close. They lose any advantage they might have because very little information is that unique.

If these information hoarders gain little advantage by being closed, and if the social network uses peer pressure to identify free riders and to deal with them, then it would appear that behavior would rapidly converge towards openness and transparency.

In fact, the groups that can more rapidly create knowledge using human social networks will be the first to solve many of the complex problems we face today. Groups with choke points will be much slower and, in the type of natural selection we see all around, will become extinct. At least where the need is to understand complex processes.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Science

by dcJohn
Using Wikipedia to Reenvision the Term Paper
[Via EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative]

At the just held online EDUCAUSE Online Spring focus conference, Andreas Brockhaus and Martha Groom, both at UW-Bothell, just around the corner so to speak, discussed unusual aspects to classes taught by Groom. She required the students to either create a new page on Wikipedia or to substantially add to a previous page. No term paper. It was going up on Wikipedia.

Befitting a discussion about using new technologies in the classroom, you can see the Powerpoint presentation and hear the talk online. Almost like being there.

While there were some barriers to break through, the effect on the students and their writing was almost electric. Normally, only the teacher and a few other students might see what was written.

In this example, the entire Web could see what they wrote. To ameliorate this somewhat, she had the students work in groups.

Martha Groom has been using this approach for the last few years. There are still a few things to work on. Writing for an encyclopedia is different than working on an essay.

She has added a recursive approach to the project, with proposals and peer review before it hits the Web. The community nature of Wikipedia required the students to really give up proprietary feelings about the essays. Sometimes the give and take of online discussions could be a little harsh.

But Martha has continued to tweak the approach. Generally, the students were very happy with the results. The quality of writing was very high also. With such transparency, the possibility of plagiarism is infinitesimal. It really highlights the need for proper sourcing of the work. All very good things.

And, if a really good job is done, the student can point out the page to others as evidence of their scholarship. All in all, much better than a one-off term paper.

Technorati Tags: Education, Science, Web 2.0

by tanakawho

KM 2.0 is about “showing your workings out”:
[Via Library clips]

Two of my posts have linked and quoted blog posts that are bringing to light the difference that the renewed push in KM brings, in a shift to a “work in progress” mentality.

I have mentioned several times that km 2.0 is a social way of doing work, it’s not a separate task, instead it’s blended in our work routine.

Firstly people are working this way on the open web, and they are also using social computing tools in the enterprise, these people are sometimes referred to as IT rogues. The second difference is the fact that the new interest in KM (by early adopters), is being initiated by the workers…social productivity. Whereas the first wave of KM was more a mandate by management, KM 2.0 is coming about by workers saying to management, “I’m really productive in a social way, it’s how I get things done, can we use these social computing tools”…and management would say, “Is this the new KM way to share tacit knowledge”, and the workers would say, “I’m not too sure what KM is, but I get things done by collaborating and connecting with my network.”

Anyway I want to once again point to the Transparent Office blog (this is becoming one of my favourites), Michael Idinopulos posts about the real essence of the new KM. It’s about thinking out loud, more open collaboration, your workings out are visible (less private). People get to share, engage and nuture, insights and works in early stages or in the thought stages…before all the cream is sorted, and formalised into a final product.

Perhaps KM 2.0 is like showing all the workings out of your maths solution…we get to see how you got there. It’s this “how you got there” that we are trying to tease out, actually as you are sharing, others can help shape your path, and bring you to perhaps a better place…the social capital at work. Also, others can read about the stages in your path, and utilise that know-how for a totally different work at hand, eg. an approach, experiences and insights a blogger shares about her workings towards a “engineering” deliverable, could very well be usable by an HR person.

A HR person is not going to read an “engineering” deliverable, but if they happened to come across a post (a fragment) about a research method the engineer discovered and applied in the “engineering” deliverable, the HR person may be able to use that info in their research task.

[More]

KM 1.0 was usually a top down approach where the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit form was non-obvious. It often did not fit the way many people actually work. But Web 2.0 approaches allow people to use low level technologies to make this transition (tacit to explicit transformation) themselves, using the path they find useful.

And in doing this, they often make much clearer the path they took. This makes it easier for others the learn (explicit to tacit transformation) as well as help (explicit to explicit).

Web 2.0 approaches greatly accelerate the creation of knowledge by easing these transformations. The easier tacit and explicit knowledge can be moved and changed, the faster knowledge can be created, permitting a wider range of problems to be attacked and solved.

So, Web 2.0 approaches are firstly important and useful for the individual user. They have to be or no one will use them. But, an almost emergent property of these approaches is that normal human social networks can vastly leverage these individual actions to create a large storehouse of knowledge.

Of course, the organization really likes the fact that tacit information, hitherto only found in someone’s head, is now in a location that the organization can access and use. At least some organizations. The ones where the creation of knowledge is a core value.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media

by muha…
Have you discovered SlideShare?:
[Via Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
By David Gurteen

Have you discovered SlideShare yet? I post all my public powerpoint presentations to it and there is even a Knowledge Management group on the site with 130 slideshows.

You can see my slideshows here.

Better still you can embed people’s slideshows in your blog or personal website just as you can with YouTube. Here is an example:

Until we get Flash working correctly, you have to view this directly at David’s Slideshare site.

Just as the ability to post photos online, and share them with others, so Slideshare allows people to share their presentations. While not a wonderful as being there, it is a very good way to see how others are presenting information. I expect that scientific conferences will begin to use something similar. At the moment, you can go to some, such a the Pacific Symposia on Biocomputing, and see the written materials for each of the last several years. Having slides would be very nice also.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Social media

by Clearly Ambiguous

A Groundswell at SXSW: How The Audience Revolted and Asserted Control:
[Via Web Strategy by Jeremiah]

For the second year, I experienced the SXSW Interactive Festival, an event attended by thousands who have love for media, the web, and gadgets. SXSW is a bubble of the tech elite assembling, in many ways it’s a glimpse into the future, exposed on a Petri dish today.

[A Groundswell Occurred at the SXSW Interactive Festival as the Audience Revolted And Took Charge]
Last year, Twitter gained traction at SXSW 2007, this year, it fully ramped up to be one of the most prominent and power shifting tools of the festival –we witnessesd a Groundswell. What’s a Groundswell? It’s a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions. Dan Fost, writing for Fortune Magazine reports that this is Social media is putting an end to the passive role attendees traditionally play at business gatherings.

[More]

The ability of attendees to communicate with one another in realtime during a presentation will become more and more prevalent. I expect few scientists currently use Twitter during a talk but the ability to carry on back channel communications will make its appearance some day. The example at SXSW was a little more raucous than I would expect to see at the annual meeting of the AMA but it might be as rancorous.

Part of the problem here was the relative anonymity of the chatter. That is, the speakers were not seeing any of this discussion and so were unaware of it direction. I would expect that as we progress, others will monitor the channels and help keep the presenter aware of just what is happening. How about tweets posted on a monitor for the speakers?

In my personal experience, I have seen some very creative approaches used by the audience to produce some wonderfully useful items. At the second ETech meeting several of us used a program then called Hydra, now called SubEthaEdit, that allowed users to create a collaborative document in realtime using WiFi to connect. Four or five of us would take notes, often catching items others would miss. Someone would add Web links for relevant items. We could write in comments, etc. and create a very rich document that was much denser in its information content than if any of us had written it by ourselves.

I am surprised more of this is not happening at meetings or even in class. Study groups could produce very robust documents for the group. I would imagine that there even might be a market for these sorts of notes, for those who slept through the presentation.

So audiences can be more than just unruly.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Technology

by CoreForce

CommonCraft does really excellent presentations and this is a great introduction to Twitter. I’d just have to get a lot better with my TXTing skills to use my phone, although you can use Twitter from the computer. The key, as with most Web 2.0 approaches, is the conversations that can occur. Twitter furthers an intense conversation between people separated in both space and time.

Twitter in Plain English

until we get Flash embeds working properly, you can see this at CommonCraft Twitter.

Watch for it.