Home again after a few very enjoyable days away at IWMW2008 in Aberdeen, and I feel like I need a way of saying thank you to the web managers’ community for allowing an academic in…heh heh ;-)

So I spent half an hour or so (no… really…;-) on the train back from the airport putting together a front end for an HEI feed autodiscovery pipe that I knocked up in one of the presentations yesterday (I was giving the talk that was on at the time my full partial attention, of course ;-) that picks up on some of the conversation that was in the air at the end of the innovation competition session (I didn’t win, of course…;-(

The context is/was a comment from Mike Ellis that HEIs et al. could start opening up their data by offering RSS feeds of news releases, job/recruitment ads and event listings, because there’s no reason not to…. So my, err, gift(?!) back to the IWMW community is a little something where UK HEI web managers can proudly show off how they’ve taken up the challenge and published a whole suite of autodiscoverable RSS feeds from their home pages ;-): UK HEI autodiscoverable feeds.

(Cynics may say that the page actually names and shames sites that don’t offer any autodiscoverable feeds; I couldn’t possibly comment… ;-)

Anyway, the pipework goes like this…

First of all I grab a feed of UK HEI homepages… There isn’t an official one, of course, so as a stopgap I’ve scraped a dodgy secondary source (safe in the expectation that Mike Ellis will have an authoritative, hacked feed available from studentviews.net sometime soon…)

All that’s required then is to pull out the link in each item, that hopefully corresponds to the HEI homepage, and use that as the focus for feed autodiscovery:

Any feed URLs that are autodiscovered are then added as elaborations to the corresponding HEI feed item. Although these elaborations aren’t exposed in the RSS feed output from the pipe, they are available in the pipe’s JSON output, so the half-hour (offline) hack on the train earlier this afternoon consumes the JSON feed and gives a quick and dirty show’n'tell display of which institutions have autodiscoverable feeds on their homepage: UK HEI autodiscoverable feeds.

Looking at a couple of comments to the post Nudge: Improving Decisions About RSS Usage, (in which Brian Kelly tabulated the provision of RSS feeds from Scottish HEIs), it seems that publicly highlighting the lack of support for feed autodiscovery can encourage people to look at their pages and add the feature… So I wonder: when IWMW comes around next year, will the phrase No autodiscoverable feeds… be missing from the UK HEI autodiscoverable feeds page, possibly in part because that page exists?!

(Note that if you use this page to test a homepage you’ve added feed autodiscovery to, there is cacheing going on everywhere so you may not see any change in the display for an hour or so… I’ll try and post a cache-resistant feed autodiscovery page over the next few days; in the meantime, most browsers glow somewhere if they load an HTML page containing autodiscoverable feeds…)

So I’ve changed blog engine and, err, moved the OUseful.info blog to here - http://ouseful.wordpress.com/ - for now, though the Feedburner feed is still the same: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ouseful, and http://ouseful.info/ should always point somewhere relevant…

The old blog posts (that is, everything that used to dangle off http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59) are all archived at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive, and links to the old blog should redirect posts there…

I did consider importing the old posts here, but I’m not going to… Fresh start and all that…

I do need to sort out a search engine that covers the old posts as well as the new, though, so I will probably go with something like a Google CSE (or maybe a Yahoo BOSS engine…?)

Anyway - aside from that, things will continue pretty much as before… or maybe not…

So they dropped out of school and created their own apprenticeship university, where you learn as you do. As mentioned before in this blog post, the best transfer of know-how happens when learning and work is happening at the same time.

The article is also honing on learning stuff that is relevant to the well being of your community.

From the article:

“As soon as the young people arrive at Unitierra, they start to work as apprentices. They discover that they need specific skills to do what they want to do. Most of the time, they get those skills by practicing the trade, with or without their mentors. They may choose to attend specific workshops, to shorten the time needed to get those skills.

The most dramatic lesson we derived from the exercise was to discover what we were really missing in the urban setting: conditions for apprenticeship. When we all request education and institutions where our children and young people can stay and learn, we close our eyes to the tragic social desert in which we live. They have no access to real opportunities to learn in freedom. In many cases, they can no longer learn with parents, uncles, grandparents—just talking to them, listening to their stories or observing them in their daily trade. Everybody is busy, going from one place to another. No one seems to have the patience any more to share with the new generation the wisdom accumulated in a culture. Instead of education, what we really need is conditions for decent living, a community.”

Also check out Kevin Jones’s presentation on training vs informal learning.

[via Nancy White]

Losing followers on Twitter? 

I stopped keeping track of the number of people following me on Twitter, I know it was pretty high, but I also know it wasn’t a true measure of how many people were paying attention to what I said there.

Some of them, I assume, are people who tried Twitter and for some reason didn’t become a regular user. I can tell beause when I post a pointer to a picture on Twitter, somewhere between 100 and 500 people click through. How many people are reading the stuff? I don’t know, but it’s less than the reported number would suggest.

A new kind of outage started on Twitter last night, it started losing track of the connections between users. I haven’t seen this quantified yet, just various posts that indicate there’s some kind of problem. I’m sure as the days goes on we’ll learn more about it. I started this blog post in part to try to gather information.

TechJunk picking up steam 

Tech.NewsJunk.Com was born on the 4th of July, just like the United States of America. I chose a holiday so the expectations wouldn’t be too high, cause I knew at first it would be hard to find the kinds of stories I was looking for, news about products. Not interested in mergers or trends or personnel changes at tech companies. Just product news and reviews, that’s all.

http://tech.newsjunk.com/

Well, it’s starting to pick up. We’re learning where to look.

And the flow is up. It’s not even remotely in the ballpark of TechMeme, but a link from Tech might get you 250 page reads. That’s not bad. I’d take it.

And now we have the JavaScript include, so if you want to include the latest links from TJ in your blog you can. Just add this bit of script into your page.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://tech.newsjunk.com/js/recent5.js”>

And if you know a good source of tech product news, please post a comment or send me an email. Thanks!

PS: A frequently asked question is does the news have to come from a famous blog or blogger — and the answer is an emphatic no way! I want to hear from real users, and when possible from the designer of the product. I care about what people think. Now, that said, it’s okay if you write for a big publication too. There’s just no bias against individual bloggers.

Congrats on the new blog Mary Beth, just one request. Can you PLEASE make your RSS Feeds full feeds instead of partial? I read everything in a feed reader, and I tend not to read sites if I'm forced to go to their site.

Thanks!
Grey

MacBook Touch coming soon!?!? 

There’s much speculation about a refresh on Apple’s laptop line, a permanent thread in tech bloggerland, we’ve been waiting for it for a long time. Here’s my bet. The MacBook Air was the leading edge of a new form factor at Apple, the low-end of a new lineup of super-thin laptops.

In the next round you’ll see one with two or three USB ports and a removable battery as well as a tablet version. Both will run the iPhone software at least as an option. The tablet might run it as its only option.

Mike & Nik will have what they want but it won’t cost $200.

BTW, my guess is they extrapolated the same thing, and their challenge is a clever way of getting an I Told You So when Apple announces the tablet MacBook Touch™ in Sept.

We won in Iraq, a long time ago 

I know this goes without saying, but it keeps coming up.

Remember when our troops marched into Baghdad, took the place over, drove Saddam into a hole and arrested or killed the government. Then we disbanded their army.

When you go to war that’s what victory looks like.

Then came the occupation. There is no such thing as winning an occupation. You either continue to occupy or withdraw. It’s semantic nonsense to apply the verb “win” to the noun “occupation.”

Winning in war or sport is not vague or ill-defined. When the clock runs out in football the team that’s ahead wins. When two runners are in a race the first to cross the finish line wins. When you fight a war, when you take the other guys’ capital and disband their government and army, that’s winning.

As I said it goes without saying, but it keeps coming up in the news, this weird idea that there is such a thing as winning an occuption, when there isn’t.

I agree with the concept Patrick puts forth of , “I’m not sure we would have found our way into the social computing groove if we hadn’t made the mistakes of indiscriminate structure and control, and big planned systems that didn’t fit local working needs.”

But I’m not so sure this applies in this case, I’m not sure Knowledge Management even had to exist for social computing to occur…maybe I’m wrong, I wasn’t on the beat in the earlier days.

Would of Facebook still happened if KM didn’t happen?

Would of YouTube still happened if KM didn’t happen?

Would of del.icio.us still happened if KM didn’t happen?

Would of Blogger still happened if KM didn’t happen?

You get the picture…

I’m not dissing KM, I’m just inquring, and investigating.

As far as I know, KM used information management principles to tease out (conscript) and organise people’s know-how, ie. stuff you hear in conversation…casual fragments.

So the idea was to get people to “share” what they know…and of course all in the aim of supporting and formulating decisions and actions.

But at the time you couldn’t do that unless you were having those conversations in an environment that could capture what you said as you said it.
We can’t have a video on all the time, there would be too much garbage, but now with social computing you can have conversations online, which become digital artefacts as a result.

But as a result, and I do agree with Patrick, in the other extreme of a fragmentation frenzy, where everything is informal and nothing is distilled or preserved. It’s all messy and is intact by hyperlinks.

I like the idea of a deliverable that has some metadata listing the URL’s to all the blog and forum fragments that beget the deliverable…all the workings out.
Usually this is email, but that doesn’t have a URL (and who wants to upload stuff in the repository), and you don’t usual muse in email…whereas a blog is your thinking out loud place.

A real important aspect is a local embedded champion in each team who is a gardener, weeder, distiller, facilitator, guide, plumber, curator…

This person is to take those fragments that stick or resonate and house them in a location.

But to me, doesn’t this flow anyway, if someone says something profound in a blog or forum, it makes the rounds. Still there’s no reason why these nuggests can’t sit in a wiki via the flow and stock approach…everyone loves making lists.

This person could also run techniques like World Cafe’s, Most Significant Change, After Action review, anecdote circles, CoP, SNA, etc…

What do we call this person? It has an aspect of a librarian (curator).
Is it a coach? No a coach sounds like a leader.

The word co-ordinator and practioner is better.

This is about performance and learning, this person makes sure they patch up mis-communcations (or that they don’t happen often), that everyone is in the loop…they tie everything together, and massage the team.

Anyway I think a person who curates and facilitates is needed in every team…a collaboration coordinator is too narrow a term.

They are certainly there to optimise all the know-how and talent of the team and how they cooperate and are aware of other teams.

So this is about knowledge and performance, but more about coordinating it, so it flows itself, and what we drink from the flow helps us to adapt to our changing environment.

Perhaps a Knowledge co-ordinator.

Perhaps a Performance co-ordinator.
But then does this mean about performing to a decided outcome. If so, then it lacks the learning and adapting part.

This person observes how the team operates, and gets it to be more fluid, rich and responsive…almost sculpturing.

How do you mesh all these words into a coordinating role
- communication, information, knowledge, learning, collaboration, performance, adapting

The utopia is once the team has been guided and optimised in its behaviour or way of being, then perhaps they will become adaptive and self organising…and it sure helps to have intuitive technology.

I’m not sure about this, groupings of people have different dynamics, so you always need a facilitator to guide people, show them the boundaries, the group norms, the style of working…

Patrick’s tells us why we need a person like this:

“The reason why KM happened was that the problem of how organisations can operate coherently and swiftly on large scale became critical to survival. The more connected, competitive, uncertain and fast moving our environment is, the more this problem rears its head. This includes being able to sustain our slow, deep knowledge structures and memory, not just our fast moving current awareness.”

Tom Davenport talks about managing the balance of messiness and structure:

“Let’s talk about the more limited issue of defending knowledge management. As I said, I don’t really care what you call it, but if your organization really cares about creating, distributing (I’m sorry—“sharing”), and applying knowledge, you need to manage it. The last time I checked, “management” of knowledge could include some relatively structured, “here’s the knowledge we really need to do our jobs right” approaches, as well as some more emergent, Enterprise 2.0-oriented ones. If you only do the former, your knowledge workers will probably feel a bit stifled; if you only do the latter, things will probably feel a bit chaotic. If I’m a NASA astronaut, for example, and I’m sitting on the launch pad when something goes wrong, I’d rather have people looking for a solution in structured knowledge bases than mucking around in blogs and wikis.”

Andrew Gent has this to say about codification:

“The next layer up represents “knowledge capture”. Here the knowledge is instantiated in documents of some kind: sample documents, lesson learned, case studies, white papers. These all represent mechanisms used to selectively capture and sort knowledge in such a way that it can be reused by people who may never come in contact with the original author. The obvious limitation is that only a small portion of what any individual knows about their profession is captured in any of these documents. This is offset by trying to capture the most important or influential pieces of wisdom.”

“…the process of codifying or standardizing knowledge into actionable procedures and practices actually changes the knowledge. It cleanses, sanitizes, and simplifies the knowledge — removing the stray tidbits, the ugly but necessary workarounds, the secret tricks of the trade… all of the untidy clutter that make up true expertise in a field — all of this is stripped off to achieve a linear, documentable, process.”

David Gurteen left a quick comment on my previous post about his take on the evolution of KM, check out his brief story, podcast, and slidedeck below.

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