Keynote Hanze University

On Tuesday 29 June I was at the conference 'innovate with information' in Groningen (NL). I was being asked to kick-off the conference with a thought-breaking presentation about social media meant for librarians, information professionals and communication staff. Of course, most of them were already using social media extensively. So how to tease them?

I think I conceptualized the whole meaning of 'social' in social media differently, and how to grasp the issue of the information overload. I argued that information overload will only increase due to social media because more and more people are increasingly storing and sharing fragmented information through these media. However, social media can also assist people to make sense of this information overload, as it offers ways to filter the information.

My slides and text are available on SlideShare:

Hanzehogeschool

View more documents from Richard Lalleman.

 

Moving from meaningless to meaningful

The previous blog post 'Knowledge Sharing through Conversations - a Homage to Twitter' already illustrated the strength of Twitter-kind-of-technologies. It highlighted how powerful conversations are via these technologies in order to share knowledge with people who you did not know before. So you did not know that you needed to share that particular knowledge to that particular person. A great story about how it is to create and share knowledge in networks and probably already convincing enough to you. However, I want to share another great story which I experienced today. This story goes far beyond the idea of being a part of a network to make yourself heard. Let me first share the story with you.

Friday 28 May 2010 (around 8h00)

From 2005 to 2007 I worked together with @kattebelletje in the Netherlands on migrating the data from a library catalogue. The project was finished in 2007, I left the business, moved to London, moved to Copenhagen and we did not have that much contact anymore. However, Twitter managed to connect us and I kept an eye on her. This morning I saw she sent out a message via Twitter with a picture. I scanned the message and what I read was 'Regent Street', 'Apple' and 'Tweetphoto'. Even though I did not read the message, my eyes were triggered, because I knew Regent Street from my stay in London and I like watching pictures so that a message gets more context. Additionally, the message was sent by @kattebelletje.

Was she in London? If so, what was she doing in London? In a split second I scanned the 3 words from the message, I asked myself these questions and I clicked on the link to the picture. The picture on the left shows you what I saw. Not knowing what was going on there, I clicked it away and continued with my work. I was really thinking this was one of my moments where I lost valuable time by looking at these 'meaningless' things via Twitter - time I could have better used to work without having such an interruption.

Friday 28 May 2010 (around 8h30)

It was 30 minutes after I saw the meaningless picture and did I learn from wasting my time? No, because I saw an other message from somebody not related to @kattebelletje at all. It was a message from @dereckbreuning. A couple of months ago I was his lecturer in knowledge management. Since that time I also follow him and once a time his messages are attracting my attention. And this was a message that attracted my attention. Why do you think? Yes! Can you see it? @dereckbreuning used similar keywords in his message as the ones that triggered me before. By scanning the message I saw 'Apple' and 'Oxford Circus'. And because I have experiential knowledge the London streets (for 1 1/2 year I biked through London) I immediately knew that Oxford Circus is more or less the same as Regent Street. I knew that this message would be related to the previous message from @kattebelletje.

However, it seemed that @dereckbreuning was in London and planning to travel to the Apple store at Regent Street, while @kattebelletje was in The Hague and 'retweeted'/forwarded the picture because she probably enjoyed seeing all the people standing in the line for just an iPad. Additionally, as this all was occuring in my network, I was still able to give @dereckbreuning knowledge about what was happening at Regent Street - knowledge that I shared while working from my office in Copenhagen. As a result, I had sent @dereckbreuning the message on the left.

A meaningless message at 8h00 in the morning resulted in a meaningful message at 8h30. Even though @dereckbreuning still went to Regent Street, he could have prepared himself better by bringing a warm jacket, coffee or umbrella with him, because he got to know through me (located in Copenhagen) that there was a big queue at Regent Street (in London). I hope he saw my message before he left and that he took these precautions, because a couple of hours later @dereckbreuning replied with the message on the left.

This story shows the value of networking and being a networker. A collection of fragmented knowledge (the messages of @kattebelletje and @dereckbreuning) resulted in valuable knowledge. I do think that mobile communication technology is playing such a crucial role in the way how we can be better informed in the future. Imagine when more and more people are using these technologies, more and more people are sharing fragmented knowledge, and more and more people are recombining the fragmented knowledge and make it useable to the context the people are in. That what future learning is. Whether you want to call it informal learning, mobile learning or what else, it is a new way of learning that increasingly is becoming a part of our daily lives. Finally, the story also shows how valuable wasting time is. Or should we just look differently to time when working in knowledge intensive economies?

The Painful Truth of Best Practices in 2010

Why is it that people are completely beside the mark when they are referring to ‘Best Practices’? Last week, Luis Suarez repeated his thoughts about best practices in knowledge management initiatives in his blog ‘Why Best Practices Don’t Work for  Knowledge Work’. I think he makes it fairly clear what is wrong with best practices by arguing that:

Best Practices are the worst thing you can apply to any kind of knowledge work. Any kind. Social Computing is no different! More than anything else because best practices will always suggest concepts like static, fixed, inalterable, unmodified, unbeatable, perfect. And, as you can imagine, those are the kind of characteristics that would be rather the opposite to what knowledge is all about and the capturing of some of it; knowledge is supposed to be dynamic, flexible, malleable, modifiable, flowing, a continuous learning experience, imperfect. Always leaving room to improve the already existing knowledge by acquiring plenty more!

Even though his point is clear to me, this week I was confronted with the stubbornness of people who argue they are working in the knowledge management field. I attended a seminar with the title ‘Learning Methods and Learning Technologies: Best Practices’. For years a big group of KM practitioners already argued with sound-proof arguments that best-practice is a waste of time, but still - in 2010 - there are professional networks that cannot grasp the field they are working in and still hold themselves to something that ones was being introduced as a way to learn in - perhaps - simple organizational contexts! You cannot apply this in the complexities of nowadays.

During the seminar I realized that some of the ‘specialists’ confronted with the issue how the organization can best learn, do not apprehend the core of learning - which is knowledge. Learning is all about the transfer of knowledge. So, if you were to work within organizational learning, you should understand how particular ways of thinking originate. Ralph Stacey argues that ‘ways of thinking evolve’. They have a history and understanding this history enables us to understand the nature of the assumptions we are making now as we approach important practical issues. So, every organization has its own history, its own context, and you just cannot reuse an example that might have been successful in one organization with another history and context. Take the example of reusing LEAN from a manufacturing context to a service context. Even though LEAN was successful within the factories of Toyota; it is certainly not automatically a success in other factories, or even other areas of practices.

Another point I want to make about best practices is that we don’t want to standardize the learning. Literature is already pointing out to all the learning possibilities social computing is offering us, because it generates diversity. Without having this diversity we would all look through the really small hole in the hoarding at the same time. However, social computing is exposing us to people who are looking at the same object through other holes in the hoarding. And when we can easily connect to these people, our view on reality will certainly improve. This certainly results in more sustainable improvements while making a decision. (By the way: that is also why I think that NING has started to dig its own grave by announcing that the service is not free anymore - connecting easily to each other is the power of social networking sites)

Think about Twitter ... so many people with the same interests ... But they are all looking through a different hole to the same topic. They are filtering their external sensations differently. Based on a set of keywords I try to make sense of what could be interesting for me. I use Google Reader, Delicious and StumbleUpon. However, another person, is using other tools to filter the external sensation and - because they have an other knowledge based, they use a different set of keywords that describe the same topic I am also looking at. Thus, they find stuff I never found before, and by sending this through social networks you give a fragment to the others and if the other are doing the same, you get an other fragment back. 

Let’s go back to the seminar again. The reason why some of the participants of the seminar probably do not grasp the meaning of their area of ‘expertise’ is that they are not aware of the world around them. I have often heard that Twitter is like a echo-room. During the seminar I experienced the meaning of the echo-room. None of the 30+ participants had Twitter, so I was talking to myself. Is this bad? Yes! Twitter and other social media tools and technologies are great ways to understand the working of diversity in learning. But when they are not bothered to experiment with it, how would they know.