What do you do with knowledge? Find it? Share it?
I've just read a really excellent - though lengthy - blog post from Mark Gould (@markgould13) entitled What do we do with Knowledge?
This was bought to my attention by a tweet from @VMaryAbraham
Two bits stood out
much of what we call KM is, in fact, merely manipulation of information. What social tools bring us ... are really interesting ways of exposing people’s working processes... there is little better for learning and development of knowledge than close observation of people at work.
This aligns quite strongly with some of the bits I've been mulling over relating to a Systems Thinking approach. Seddon, in Freedom from Command and Control says "The principles for the development of knowledge are: integrating measures with work, focusing on purpose, designing work in flow rather than function, and assuming knowledge is associated with work"
Put people in an environment when they are making their own life/job/process better - and the process rather than the people are measured... I wonder if they'll feel an incentive to share then?
what we think is information overload is actually filter failure. Where we rely solely on controlled vocabularies and classification systems, our capability to filter and search effectively runs out much sooner than it does when we can add personalised tags, comments, trackbacks, knowledge about the author from other sources, and so on. Whereas repositories usually strip context from the information they contain, blogs and other social tools bring their context with them. And, crucially, that context keeps growing.
and the context is not something the system brings... they are part of the conversation.
I commend the post and thank Mark for writing it and Mary for sharing
