Archive for knowledge building

The need for educators in communities

June 13, 2008 at 3:54 pm · Filed under knowledge building ·Tagged

Many groups that are formed for the purpose of sharing and developing knowledge often have a wide range of expertise, both in terms of technology practices and in terms of the theoretical or analytical concepts of the domain or business. A “learning community” (defined for now as a group with both individual learning and the creation of group knowledge as goals) that has been together a long time has a history and has progressed in developing ideas and practices of group interaction. In other words, ideas and group practices have been proposed, discussed and refined. Much of the knowledge, practices and history becomes background and implicit to further conversations. New people unfamiliar with the domain or the practices cannot adequately participate because they do not have the background knowledge to understand the context of the practices. New members are then “peripheral participants” in the larger group.

New members could be brought more rapidly up-to-speed in an established group if that group has taken time to make the history explicit and help new members to become familiar with it (either explicitly, as in mentoring or training, or by preparing representations of the knowledge and practices–essentially a learning curriculum). In effect, it seems that all knowledge-intensive and practice-intensive communities could serve new members most effectively by dedicating some resources to the ongoing creation of learning resources and activities for new and less-experienced members. In this sense, established communities are similar to established professions. In professions like science, history, software programming, project management, etc. there are well-defined bodies of knowledge and practices that often take people years to master. Educational institutions exist to bring learners up-to-speed in the practices of the profession. I am suggesting that established communities would do well to attend to the learning required to become an effective community participant by creating opportunities for new learners to grasp the knowledge and practices of the community.

Thus, there is a component of an established community that could be served by community members who are also educators. Educators bring specialized knowledge about how people learn, how to design learning contexts, and how to support that learning. Educators and educational activities would make the initial “peripheral participation” more effective and efficient.

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Knowledge capture

May 8, 2008 at 5:06 pm · Filed under knowledge building ·Tagged , , ,

I am obsessed with capturing knowledge, both for myself and for the knowledge generated by groups. This blog entry relates my belief in the importance of filtering and sorting information in order to be more effective at using and acting on that information.

For personal knowledge-building, I take a lot of notes for fear of losing some important idea. Then I like to organize those ideas into categories that make sense for what I’m trying to learn. I’ve played around with multiple technologies and processes to capture ideas and information. For example, I often find it effective to take handwritten notes when I am away from my computer and then re-read and process these notes into digital form by entering the notes into various design documents, todo lists, and calendar entries. The design documents are meant to capture ideas, evolve existing ideas, record decisions, record things that I have learned (such as design principles), and generally advance my thinking on the various projects on which I am working. I find that translating my initial notes is more akin to sifting through the information for the most valuable parts and discarding the rest. It is not unusual for me to discard many of the original notes. The important part is extracting the information into the tools most suitable to handle the type of information. For example, things I have to do go into a todo list with dates and reminder mechanisms or directly into a calendar entry. Where to store the other information (e.g., ideas and resources that might help me do something on my todo list) is more of a problem. I’m constantly in search of better ways to handle this. That problem deserves a deeper discussion, but not now.

The main point I want to make here is the importance of taking unstructured information and categorizing or organizing it in various technologies where it will be more likely to be acted upon. Leaving these notes in a Microsoft Word file, for example, is a poor technology to use since it requires an imposed process to make it work (e.g., one has to remember to keep looking into the file to remember what is to be done).

A similar problem of capturing useful knowledge occurs when groups work together. The problem is compounded by the different views of what is useful versus what is not useful but it seems important to have a process that extracts useful information from the ongoing work of the group.

Meetings are one of the events where extracting information is important but which rarely occurs. Some meeting notes simply summarize the decisions made, or conclusions drawn, and the next actions. Often, these items get buried in meeting notes that are relatively inaccessible. To be most effective, these decisions and conclusions ought to be made visible within the contexts in which they are important (e.g., as new policy posted on a web site). Action items ought to be placed in a calendar, todo list or other project or task-management system so that they can be addressed and tracked. Again, follow up processing is about translating the information into appropriate technologies that enable better collaboration.

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