Knowledge recycling

This week is becoming a somewhat melancholic trip down competency lane, as I'm reminded, triggered by several client requests, to work I undertook 8 to 12 years ago. I rediscovered (trawling server archives and even floppy disks) my own work in teaching interaction design, knowledge modelling (working with sound engineers and speech therapists as case material, quite eclectic) and group facilitation. One of my favourite subjects in the course I taught on interaction design were the Gestalt principles, well explained by this text (the picture in this post is a teaser).

Seeing all my slides and other teaching material, there's lots that can easily be reused, and I'm sure it will be! More later.

Categories: education, KM

Scenario thinking for schools

ISP Wijzer, a Dutch advisory service for schools seeking support for their internet provision recently organised a scenario thinking session, to which yours truly contributed. Report found here, including a podcast (all in Dutch).

Categories: Scenariothinking, Education

Learning in and from projects

In a session yesterday evening with a group of senior project managers , I presented a project learning framework that addresses learning as an indivual, as a team and as an organisation as a whole and we discussed a number of processes (e.g. the corporate learning cycle driving the construction of a corporate memory) and methods (such as AARs) to facilitate and connect learning at these 3 levels. However, despite all structures, processes, methods (that certainly help!): true learning begins with being open and inquisitive as an individual and involves a certain kind of risk taking. Stepping out of your own comfort zone into those areas were you can't entirely rely on routine is a prerequisite for learning as individuals and teams. But there's more: being explicit about what you hope to learn before you start to explore unknown territory (and that requires you know what you don't know!) and accept feedback from yourself and your team are just as important.

Learning from projects as an organisation requires an environment that allows for variation (well, euphism for tolerating mistakes...), that captures key learning points from single teams, that propagates new knowledge faster than simply moving people around and above all: a strategic learning agenda.

Being able to answer the questions: which projects will deliver us new knowledge that is crucial to us? how must we share that knowledge? with whom? will help an organisation to use its projects not only as deliverable generators but as key nowledge sources as well.

At the programme management level is it even more important to be serious about learning, since programmes are by definition areas outside the comfort zone of an organisation.....

Categories: LL, KM, learning

100 Lessons Learned for Project Managers

NASA - 100 Lessons Learned for Project Managers. Nice list. Wonder how this crosschecks against e.g. PMI's OPM3 best practices or for that matter, OGC's best practice briefing on causes for project failure.

Categories: LL, KM

Tiltshifting

If you want reality to look like a miniature mock up, you can use tiltshifting photography (by using a special lens, or by postprocessing in Photoshop). The results are looking like it was when you were lying on the floor watching your train set as a small boy....some nice tiltshifting examples are here


Categories: tiltshift, photos

Automagical tagging

I'm trying to get some sort of categorisation to work with the blogger platform. Following the instructions as we speak....the result is here:

Categories: categorisation, blog, tagging

Pool tricks

Other Jackass type of videos galore at Break.com.

Categories: videos

ShotCodes to access latest knowledge?

ShotCodes, a kind of barcode that you can stick on anything (e.g. machines, billboards, doors, books, etc, etc). If you take a picture of a shotcode with your mobile phone, you're connected to the URL that is represented by the code (so you don't have to remember/type the URL..), provided of course that your mobile has internet access. This might be an adequate access mechanism to the latest knowledge related to e.g. troubleshooting a particular piece of equipment somewhere in a plant, to look at the latest discussions related to the book you're reading on the train, to access content that relates to the museum room you're in, etc, etc.

Something to follow, this Dutch innovation (although I found the registration procedure at their site a bit like the 'free for period x, but you'll never know after that and its your responsibility to keep track of changes in the contract' that you see with subscriptions to magazines, credit cards and all the other stuff you forget about once you have it...

Location-Based Content in Schools...

I'm currently reviewing a couple of papers for a mobile learning conference: the general promise of mobile learning is to enable ubiquitous and flexible access to content, fellow students and teachers, allowing a myriad of learning scenarios to materialise. Of course, we can use laptops, PDAs or smartphones to make it work
(and that happens a lot), add Wi-Fi and hey presto!

Location-based services can add yet some more spice to the mobile learning experience (the famous museum scenario, that has numerous incarnations, is one example), but who would have thought about the use of a location enabled Wi-Fi infrastructure?

Yes, Newbury Networks helps teachers to cope with unwanted chatting during class and to ensure pupils to turn up. Their nifty location enabled wifi networks help in:

-Providing students and faculty campus-wide secure Wi-Fi / Wireless LANs to enhance learning and mobility.

-Stopping email, instant messaging, file-sharing and uncontrolled Internet access in classrooms to eliminate distractions and cheating opportunities.

-Providing classrooms and lecture halls limited (URL-specific) internet access that's course-work relevant and available only in a classroom and at specified class-times to enhance class-room attendance.

-Pushing content to a student's laptop, including class notes and assignments, only when a student is present in class to require class presence.

-Controlling and optimizing the performance, coverage and capacity of your total network, for example tracking and stopping illicit MP3 downloads.

-Taking advantage of location-based monitoring and tracking features to enhance campus-wide e911 services and security.

I wonder, does this only work when you have a nice campus out in the woods, with no competing Wi-Fi networks around, like in inner cities?

Categories: e-learning, education

Thinkmap

Thinkmap visualization software. We're currently working on a project integrating the thinkmap software in a website to visualise relationships in a knowledge base. Really nice look-and-feel (see the demos on their site). The website we're building will be public in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned to check the results!

Should (e-)learning be fun?

Sure, you heard it before: 'that course was pretty boring, it didn't engage me at all'. Or using an expression of a client: 'it didn't speak to us'. Similar comments are heard about e-learning. 'It's just a page-turner' (isn't that normally a positive comment about a book?). 'The e-forum is empty, it just doesn't work'. Roger Schank, big guy, big ideas, on his crusade to change training design (basically: don't tell,focus on doing), gives us guidance: he argues that a lot of training (and most e-learning) doesn't engage, because it doesn't appeal to the learner's fascination, exhilaration, confusion, anticipation, curiosity, determination, emotional identification, excitement and arousal. So what to do? Schank refers us to the film making industry for tips and presents storytelling as a tool to break the mould of what he calls the LIBITI problem (Learn it because I thought it!). If you define fun to be a state that your engaged in something and are not aware anymore of your environment and are not thinking about doing anything else, then yes, learning should be fun.

But: didn't that hold for the exams you took? May be they were fun in hindsight...

visualcomplexity.com?

visualcomplexity.com is a misnomer (shouldn't viz reduce complexity?) for a collection of visual representations of a.o.t. knowledge networks. (Got to this when trying to trace back the origins of 'information architect': 'web-people' say that this is a person who ensures usability, findability and maintainability of the content on a website, whereas corporate information people would probably argue that information architects model the corporate information that should be held by an organisation, preferably in an IT architecture, that may or may not be web-based, so a somewhat broader scope). Visual representations of, yes, knowledge should in my view, essentially convey meaningful relationships to its users (so I think: an information architect that makes a difference is an information architect that can create representations that convey meaningful relationships in a usable, maintainable and findable manner...). This site presents a broad collection of attempts of some 'information architects' to do so.

Dot Oh

Globalization 3.0 (Friedman in his the World is Flat), Web 2.0, what's this stuff with dubbing phenomena with software version numbers? It can be quite useful though in conversation: "You're so 1.0...." "Which version of the company are you with?" "I'm still in 1.0, but I'm upgrading." "Our group is already 4.0, so you better be quick to stay compatible with the rest of us." Or the sales rep to the client: "Sorry, that contract is not supported anymore, we used to do that when we were 2.0." Or the civil servant to the citizen: "when we were government 1.0, you were entitled to that, but since we're 3.0, I'm afraid we don't have that feature...".

To give version numbers to a set of behavioural patterns in organisations would perhaps help change managers to keep track who needs 'upgrading' and would give employees a sense of their current alignment with reality in the rat race...

Urban Tapestries

I recently got interested in 'geo-annotation', may be something to do with my love for maps. There's GoogleMaps (maps with annotations) and stuff like mappr (photos mapped on a map), but what I really find interesting is a project that has been going on for a while called Urban Tapestries, "an experimental software platform for knowledge mapping and sharing – public authoring. It combines mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems to allow people to build relationships between places and to associate stories, information, pictures, sounds and videos with them [....] creating opportunities for an "anthropology of ourselves" – adopting and adapting new and emerging technologies for creating and sharing everyday knowledge and experience; building up organic, collective memories that trace and embellish different kinds of relationships across places, time and communities."

Quite a mouthful, but the idea is that you can geotag a place based on your actual presence at that location, telling your story about that location, perhaps upload a picture, thus building a rich 'tapestry' of personal stories related to locations. Once you have a critical mass of content, you can imagine all kinds of 'trails' through the content and online 'public' support at a particular location.

You can approach this by doing stuff like My Childhood in Googlemaps but it is not as neat as Urban Tapestries, because the direct authoring from the location is missing.