Initial Reactions to Microsoft Surface / frogblog / frog design

Initial Reactions to Microsoft Surface / frogblog / frog design

Seems like this technology has been leveraged for the Microsoft smart-desk platform recently demo'd in a manufacturing context.

MIT takes the audacious step of posting all their course content on the web for all the world to see and use ... for non-profit. It's called OpenCourseWare and wouldn't be noteworthy if it were, say, Podunk State U. doing it. It's MIT, though, and that makes it noteworthy.

This is an excellent and detailed description of how knowledge is managed and transferred on the modern battlefield using what amounts to be a wireless intranet, commercially available off the shelf GPS and microsoft chat. Chat is used for real-time consideration of issues from the field by experts with quick turnaround. There are some great (and funny) examples of application of knowledge transfer in this article. It also details some of the environmental challenges of deploying the infrastructure to support it.

Summary:

I did a bit of digging into Knowledge Management professional associations and certification so that I could determine whether being "certified" might be a good thing to do in terms of lending credibility to my employer's KM practice. My findings are as follows.

Certification organizations:

Knowledge Management Consortium International: KMCI

Knowledge Management Certification Board: KMCB

They compete. KMCB came after KMCI. There's a story about this included in the details below.

KMCI offers:

CKIM (Certified Knowledge and Innovation Manager)

Overview

Details

The associated professional society is KMPro

KMCB offers:

CKM (Certified Knowledge Manager), levels 1, 2 and 3 with concentrations in Knowledge Mangement and Knowledge Systems Engineering (CKM and CKSE)

Overview

Details

The associated professional society is CKIMPS

A listing of Knowledge Mangement Organizations can be found at DMOZ.org or Google's directory (Google piggybacks on DMOZ but ranks the links by relevance rather than alphabetically as DMOZ does) as:

http://dmoz.org/Reference/Knowledge_Management/Organizations/

http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Knowledge_Management/Organizations/

Details:

KMCB is lobbying ANSI and ISO to set standards. KMCI feels that's the wrong approach. Dunno who's going to win. David Skyrme writes about whether "standards" are really needed here.

CognaTek and KMPro support KMCB. Ed Swanstrom of Cognatek is listed as a board member of KMCB. A narrative of Ed Swanstrom's hand in the origination of the split between KMCI and KMCB is described in XML Topics Maps (XTM) discussion group [XTM is an emerging standard for ascribing semantic meaning to information in XML form; an area of natural interest to KM practitioners] in a response by Andrius Kulikauskas to a post by Ed Swanstrom solicitng XTM's participation in the ISO Technial Advisory Group (TAG) formulating standards related to knowledge management and knowledge economics.
Swanstrom's original post is here.

Note that GKEC.org, KMCB (kmcertification.org), cognatek.com, eknowledgecenter.com and ckimps.org all appear to resolve to the same website (or related websites). The choice of the domain name for the professional society, CKIMPS.org, is similar to the certification acronym (CKIM) used by the rival organization, KMCI)

This article focuses on Donald Schon (Schön) , a trained philosopher who enhanced our understanding of the theory and practice of learning.

Significantly, he was also an accomplished pianist and clarinettist – playing in both jazz and chamber groups. This interest in improvisation and structure was mirrored in his academic writing, most notably in his exploration of professional’s ability to ‘think on their feet’. On this page we review his achievements and focus on three elements of his thinking: learning systems (and learning societies and institutions); double-loop and organizational learning (arising out of his collaboration with Chris Argyris); and the relationship of reflection-in-action to professional activity.

I've read a very interesting study by him done for the British architectural professional society analyzing how knowledge and skill are transferred from practicing architects to students in the rather unique professional context of the architectural studio. It explains and elaborates the transfer as occuring in the "Watch, Participate/Practice, Do" cycle.

In this article: ongoing·Why XML Doesn't Suck (a mostly technical thesis of the good points of XML in response to an earlier complaint of his wherein he points out the difficulties of programming with XML), Tim Bray relates:

When I'm doing a standup speech, I often ask: “Everyone in the audience who thinks they're going to be using the same word processor in ten years, raise your hand.“ No hands go up. “Everyone who has data around that's going to have value in ten years?” After a minute's thought, every hand goes up. The lesson is clear: information outlives technology.

Knowledge, of course, is the more valuable form of Information (cf Nathan Shedroff's
Unified Field Theory of Design).

I can't recall if I've blogged this, but John Seely Brown writes about Organizational Learning as it *actually* happens; not as the corporate entity would design it to happen via the development of shared narratives in communities of practice (Watch, Participate, Do). He discusses how organizational learning occurs because people desire to *become* part of the community (good 'ol aspiration and affiliation at work ... where have I heard *that* before) and the motivation to do that is what causes knowledge to be transferred, diffused and shared. It's a fascinating and *long* article. Prepare to mentally chew on it a bit. Excerpt from the conclusion:

To foster working, learning, and innovating, an organization must close that gap [between espoused and actual practice]. To do so, it needs to reconceive of itself as a community-of-communities.

This touches on how we store information and the extraordinary efforts we must go through to find something in digital milieu. The case cited here is a documentation of the first use of The Smiley :-)