by Z0rk
The tacitness of wikis:
[Via Library clips]

Stewart Mader from Grow Your Wiki is guest posting on Wikinomics and his lastest post is on the effectiveness of wikis enabling tacit sharing.

Documents that are open and dynamic allow people to evolve the documents by direct editing or leaving comments…ie. people are sharing their experience and what they know can add to the richness of the document.

Right away I thought of the How-To Guides I’m writing for our Communities of Practice (CoP) at work.

Wikis are great for communal documents, such as How-to guides or protocols. As people gain expertise, they can provide comments, hints or questions that can make the document richer.

This way they can help me evolve the document, even though it’s finished. Well, that’s the idea, it’s never finished…I may miss a feature, and I can’t experience every context, so there’s stuff that happens when people use Communities that I may not know up front. eg. a new way to use blogs, a workaround (exception to procedure) page for Document Control as each client has different needs.

They may leave a comment about a feature of our CoPs where they have a workaround, or a use case.
eg. someone might say everyone in our team has a status blog, so when we go to a meeting we already know what everyone has been up to, our meetings are more about action.
Another person visiting the guide may see this and use this idea.
A simple comment box on a wiki has enabled the sharing and receiving of know-how by two people that don’t even know each other, plus this is perpetual as another person may come along and get value or an idea from reading the same comment. In fact another person may leave a comment back and say that they found it more manageable having one group blog for status. The original person my see this and comment back saying, that is a great idea, I didn’t know that was possible. Oops, that’s because I may have not put that fact in the guide, lucky that comments allow for others to help where the guide fails.
And as Stewart mentions I can go and refine the guide and leave a comment saying thanks.

Also, all of this interplay, this dialog, is also explicit, it is all time-stamped and it can be used to analyze how useful that particular document is. By making it explicit, a lot of metrics can be applied that will finally be able to measure what formally was invisible. This will not only be useful for the organization but also for the individual, say during performance reviews. Before, no one knew how important a protocol might be, especially if it was just stuffed into a binder in the lab. Now, anyone could look and see just how often that protocol was examined, and by whom..

In the end we have this explicit type deliverable that has to be formal and succinct as it has to cater to many audiences, and can’t be too explanatory (long), and try to cover every context possible, as people won’t bother reading it. But on top of this we have a layer of collective know-how and feedback via the comments which inturn we feed back into the document (via edit) some tacit know-how.

The point is having perpetually live documents (editing and comments) harnesses the collective wisdom, where people can share their know-how, and benefit the user experience as a whole. It’s a win win situation.

And, if a different document needs to be created for a different audience, the community will be there to help.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Social media, Web 2.0

15 tips for successful knowledge sharing:
[Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Lucas McDonnell has a list of 15 tips for successful knowledge sharing. Reading through them, I couldn’t help think of the Carnegie tips from How to Win Friends and Influence People.  In both cases, the general principle is to listen more than you talk and let people have interesting ideas – no matter who really owns them.
Here is Lucas’ list (check the source for his comments):

1. Share failures as well as successes.
2. Don’t oversell your own work.
3. Ask questions about others’ work.
4. Ask before borrowing.
5. Give credit where it’s due.
6. Be genuine, avoid ‘networking’.
7. Don’t just connect with those doing identical work.
8. Be prepared to provide documentation.
9. Talk to people you already know as well.
10. Take lots of notes.
11. Take the first the step.
12. Learn more than you teach.
13. Be patient and listen.
14. Talk to people about talking to people.
15. Expect the best from people.

A very nice list, demonstrating the social aspects of knowledge flow. It does not happen in a vacuum. These are not new points as shown below:

And here are Carnegie’s 21 elements from HwWFaIP (courtesy of this page and listed in many other places as the summary of the book):

1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.
4. Become genuinely interested in other people.
5. Smile.
6. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
7. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
8. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
9. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
10. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
11. Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”
12. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
13. Begin in a friendly way.
14. Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
15. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
16. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
17. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
18. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
19. Appeal to the nobler motives.
20. Dramatize your ideas.
21. Throw down a challenge.

Online knowledge sharing will only be effective if it follows similar core elements. Web 2,0 is about human conversations, not IT tools. The tools are important based on how they further these core elements.

Online sharing still happens between people, through human social networks. The same tips that further healthy human communication face-to-face, as exemplified by Carnegie’s list, are just a helpful with Web 2.0. What Carnegie wrote in 1936 for Depression era audiences is just a relevant today for online communities. plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (from 1849)

Organizations that forget this will not have successful online experiences.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by thomas_sly

Robertson: Ten tips for succeeding at collaboration:

[Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

James Robertson of StepTwo posted his slides for a recent presentation entitled, Ten tips for succeeding at collaboration (with audio). Along with the tips, he includes some background around the ideas he presents. Nice.

Ten tips for succeeding at collaboration [+ audio]

view presentation (tags: blogs sharepoint wikis openpublish08)

Always nice to see presentations using newer technology like Slideshare. Being able to also hear a presentation rather than just see them is another huge bonus.

Here are the enumerated tips (in American English :-). And a few of my thoughts sprinkled through.
Get ahead of the curve. “Thousands of uncoordinated wikis and blogs in your company is anti-knowledge-sharing.”
Recognize when collaboration will work. In James’ talk, he gives two key criteria: A sense of purpose and a Clear sense of community. And he talks through several examples of using these criteria.
Understand where collaboration fits in. Internet need not be in conflict with the Intranet, as the purposes are different between the outside world and the internal world.
Establish a portfolio of tools. One tool will NOT unite them all.
Identify an owner of collaboration. Not sure who should be the “collaboration czar” or where it should fit.
Define boundaries and relationships.
Establish policies and support.
Start by ‘gardening.’ x
Focus on business needs. “Pilot in an area that people care about.” Don’t bother piloting in IT or in the KM team. They aren’t normal people!
Don’t forget it’s all about the people! Of course! But I hope we can say this with a bit of a smile, as it seems a cliche. Just like “It’s not about the tools.”

A very nice list and a fun presentation. The important thing is to focus on a specific area, a specific need, and some specific people. Once they find the usefulness of collaboration, it will spread to others who will use it.

But recognize that not every needs to collaborate, at least initially.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by nattu
FIVE QUESTIONS…for Jane John:
[Via eLearn Magazine]

No matter what one does for a living, everyone today needs good online research skills. According to Jane John, past president of the Association of Independent Information Professionals, the key is to first clearly define what it is you need to know. In this interview John also explains what specific skills teachers and students need to navigate our ever-growing sea of information, and how leaving time for reflection can help illuminate the real meaning and value of that information.

Some discussion of the approaches students will take, including the importance of synthesis. Current education spends a lot of time on analysis, breaking things down into simple easily remembered bits.

Web 2.0 promotes synthesis. Being able to bring facts together in order to create knowledge will be important aspects of future learning.

Technorati Tags: Education, Web 2.0

by Conspirator

Do Schools Kill Creativity? A Comical Inquest at TED:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

If you think of yourself as someone who understands creativity, this is an essential talk by Ken Robinson, from the TED Conference. He calls into question the antiquated teaching models we have in the Western world, and asks many great questions about creative thinking and the business world.

Key quotes from Mr. Robinson:

“My contention is that creativity is as important as literacy and should be treated with the same status.”

“They’re [children] not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say being wrong is the same as being creative. What we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you won’t come up with anything original. And by the time most children get to be adults most children have lost that capacity.”

It’s a funny, enlightening and well reasoned 20 minutes. Highly recommended.

Video: Do schools kill creativity, Ken Robinson, TED

Ahh. Education. Always good for some nice discussion. This is a very entertaining talk, though.

Most schools do drive out creativity in many students but I think they also force some students to become more creative, in order to get around the roadblocks presented by schools.

Just as patents/copyrights put barriers in the way of innovators, requiring them to find a new way forward , so too can public education.

However, these students would probably be creative no matter what, while the vast majority will have creativity pushed out of them. It is a real waste. This is one reason I expect public education to see vast changes.

The following represents a model of the approaches that may be taken using Web 2.0 tools. It is really simplification of what is possible. The question is how fast this model in some form is adopted.

Working together to solve problems in a collaborative fashion results in faster innovation cycles. This will be true in school also. Ones that use Web 2.0 approaches to teach will find that their students are more creative and better able to solve difficult problems. This will be superior for solving the complex problems seen today than the 19th century approaches we use today.

This is not about teaching a curriculum that will solve all our problems. This has been attempted for the last 150 years. This is about changing the basic manner in which we teach children.

It will be less authoritarian, with less of a stern headmaster using a top-down approach and more of a collaborative approach. Rote memorization of things like what year an event happened will not be as important, since this will be too easy to find online. But understanding the results of an event, how it changed the world, will be among the important skills that will be taught.

In a Web 2.0 world, finding information is easy. Using it to create knowledge is more rapidly facilitated by working in groups.

And because Web 2.0 tools make explicit many things that are usually hidden in today’s approaches, it will be possible to tease out data such as each person’s contribution. Those that try to freeload on the backs of their group can be more easily identified and dealt with.

I do not expect it to be Nirvana but schools that adopt more of the approaches, particularly with older students, will find they are more successful at meeting many of the metrics being used today, at least the ones examining creativity and innovation.

Technorati Tags: Education, Web 2.0

When Play Becomes Work:
[Via elearningpost]

Shankar Vedantam explores the widely accepted belief that extrinsic rewards can get people to do things. Research studies, Vedantam shows, points the other way around — external rewards kills the inner drive.

“External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful — tasks that telegraph something about a person’s intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values. People will voluntarily perform intellectually arduous work, for example, because it gives them pleasure to solve a puzzle or win a game of wits.”

For this to work, there needs to be a way for the telegraphing to get disbursed throughout the community and allow others to know about the intellectual abilities, etc.

If this is not done, most people will feel like schmucks, taking on arduous work with no real group compensation. The reward does not have to be much. Intellipedia just used a small spade.

The group passed the award around whenever someone did something outstanding. The rewards have to help strengthen the connections, not break them.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0