Monday, June 30, 2008

MUPPLE 2008 Submission Deadline Extented

The deadline for paper submission to MUPPLE’08 has been extended until July 14, 2008.
More information about the workshop can be found here.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft

KM Quotes

A good list of KM quotes by Kaye Vivian. I like these ones:

“Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody – either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action”
-Peter Drucker

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.”
–Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

“You give me an idea, and I give you an idea, we both have two ideas. You give me a dollar, I giveyou a dollar, we still each have one dollar.”
–Siemens

“A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.”
–Kahlil Gibran

“Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.”
–Kahlil Gibran

“The only source of knowledge is experience.”
–Albert Einstein

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Information is like Water

Via Bertrand Duperrin.

An interesting comparison between information and water...

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Bill Gates' Lessons to Kids

Just came across this post by Katie Ledger listing 11 things kids will not learn in school from a speech Bill Gates recently gave at a High School.

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 :
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 :
You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 :
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 :
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 :
If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault; so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 :
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 :
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 :
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time..

Rule 10:
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11:
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Graham Attwell and PLEs

Kai Pata gives a summary of a discussion on the Personal Learning Environment concept between Graham Attwell and some participants at the PROLEARN summer school . Kai writes:

The workshop was a discussion with students and Graham, it was a bit disappointing… I think mostly very general things were brought up by students and Graham’s answers were same general. Anyway, nice experience of how to spend 1,5 hour of making bubbles with some pearls among. Graham’s point of course was that he is not presenting anything but he is here to start the conversation, in the end he said that for those who feel disappointed, there is the slidecast of 20 min is in slideshare and lots of info is under PLE tag in his blog.

According to Graham:
Learning environment is not a program or site in internet - its a series of tools which individual learners use across multiple devices which are used in different ways and different contexts.
Graham here defines a learning environemnt in terms of technology (i.e. a series of tools). I think however that technology is just an enabler. In my eyes a learning environment is an ecology for knowledge networking.


Monday, June 23, 2008

PLE Illustrations

Via Stephen Downes.

Scott Leslie provides a collection of PLE diagrams by different people.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Google's Joe Kraus on How to Make the Web More Social

Via Jochen Robes.

An interview with Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, about the social Web.
Joe among other things talked about Friend Connect "How do you make the whole web social?" and OpenSocial "How do you get distribution for developers on social networks?".

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Baby Loves Banjo

A lovely video...

Monday, June 16, 2008

SoSEA 2008 Submission Deadline Extented



The deadline for paper submission to SoSEA 2008 has been extended until June 22, 2008.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together interested academics, practitioners, and enthusiasts to discuss topics related to the area of social software engineering. Focusing on technology issues, the workshop will offer an opportunity for the participants to share experiences and discuss challenges involved in building and using social software. A special emphasis will be put the role of social software concepts and technologies in shaping up future software development. The workshop will also identify key research issues and challenges that lie ahead.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 Debate




The new issue of EMC‘s ON Magazine includes some articles on Enterprise 2.0. Worth reading is the conversation between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport revisiting their old debate about Enterprise 2.0.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 = KM 2.0?

A slide set by Carl Frappaolo from a recent presenation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference where he was asking the question "Is Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management 2.0?".



Frappaolo defines KM as "Leveraging collective wisdom and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness."

...sounds like a definition of Web 2.0!

He then defines Enterprise 2.0 as "a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise".

...a technology-driven definition of Enterprise 2.0. I think however that technology is just an enabler!

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Knowledge Sharing

Dave Snowden writes:

Knowledge is a voluntary act, if people trust each other they will share. If they work together and create interdependencies then they will share. If the context requires it even political rivals will share. Good management (including knowledge management) is about creating the right sort of environment and interactions. Creating a set of explicit targets is an abrogation of management responsibility not its assumption.
I totally agree with Dave. Knowledge sharing doesn't need what many call a "knowledge sharing culture" that rewards sharing initiatives. Knowledge sharing rather requires knowledge ecologies where networking is the norm.

Monday, June 09, 2008

NetLearn: Social Network Analysis and Visualisations for Learning


Last Friday, Theresia Devi Indriasari successfully defended her master thesis "NetLearn: Social Network Analysis and Visualisations for Learning". The main goal the thesis was to develop and evaluate a system, which uses social network analysis and visualisation methods to visualise and analyse co-authorship networks, find experts, and mine communities. The proposed solution fulfills these requirements. The implemented system provides several analysis and visualisation modules that can help in locating experts and discovering learning communities with similar research interests.

The NetLearn system can be accessed here. Please feel free to use the PROLEARN Academy publication interface to add your own publications. You can then see different visualisations of your local network and discover other researchers and communities with similar research/learning interests. Please refer to the help page if you would face any applet issues.
Feedback, comments etc. are welcome!

Monday, June 02, 2008

Social Media in Plain English

Via George Siemens.

Lee and Sachi LeFever on Social Media in Plain English.

This video focuses on basics of social media: new technology that makes everyone a producer and tools that give everyone a chance to have a say.