KM blog of the week

Stan Garfield, a worldwide consulting & integration knowledge management leader at Hewlett-Packard, linked to my blog post "The Future of e-Learning: a shift to knowledge networking and social software" as the KM blog of the week, in his weekly knowledge mangement blog where Stan used to publish a useful set of KM resources (questions, blogs, books, links) on a weekly basis. That's an excellent blog that I would recommend to everyone interested in KM.

Also, Ray Sims, a learning and knowledge management guru, pointed to and commented on the same post/article in his nice blog "Sims Learning Connections" where you can follow his interesting thoughts on KM, PKM, Learning, and PLE.

Many thanks to Stan and Ray!

The LaaN Perspective

The Learning as a Network (LaaN) view is built upon four premises:

- Knowledge and learning are two sides of the same coin.

- Knowledge and learning are fundamentally social in nature.

- Knowledge is in the network, or even more knowledge is the network.

- Learning is a matter of knowledge networking across knowledge ecologies.

The LaaN perspective views learning as the networking of knowledge nodes. A distinction that is often cited in the literature is made between explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge (or information) is systematic knowledge that is easily codified in formal language and objective. In contrast, tacit knowledge is hard to formalize, difficult to communicate and subjective (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Consequently, we have two types of knowledge nodes:

- Explicit knowledge nodes are different explicit knowledge assets available in a variety of forms such as texts, images, sounds, videos and captured in distributed information repositories such as blogs, wikis, pod/vodcasts etc.

- Tacit knowledge nodes are people performing in diverse, frequently overlapping social domains.

Learning is the networking of explicit/tacit knowledge nodes. What we are trying to do all the time is either to pull together explicit knowledge from more than one source, reflect, detect patterns, remix and assemble it to form a new explicit knowledge asset or to expand our personal social networks by connecting to different social domains to create and share tacit knowledge in a collaborative way, through participation, dialogue, discussion, observation, and imitation.

Within a LaaN perspective, everyone is treated as a knowledge networker, one who has the ability to:

- Create, harness, nurture, maintain, and extend her personal knowledge network.

- Identify connections, recognize patterns, and make sense between different knowledge nodes.

- Locate the knowledge node(s) that can help achieving better results.

- Cross boundaries, connect and collaborate.

- Navigate and learn across multiple knowledge networks.

Requirements of a PLE Framework

A personal learning environment framework (PLEF) needs to fulfil the following requirements:

• Personalisation: PLEF should provide the learner with ability to incorporate myriad of tools and services; and ability to determine and use the tools and services the way she deems fit to create her own PLE, adapted to her own situation and needs.
• Social features: PLEF should offer means to connect with other personal spaces, so that learnres can engage in knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge creation. Social features such as tagging, commenting, and sharing have to be supported.
• Social filtering: The problem with a knowledge-pull approach is information overload. Therefore, there is a need for “filters” (e.g. recommendation, rating, ranking, review, votes, attention metadata) to help learners find quality in the Long Tail.
• Incorporate various Web 2.0 concepts and technologies. The web as platform, mashup of services, widely use of widgets, content aggregation, opened identity, small pieces loosely joined Web and rich user experience are the concepts which should build up PLEF. Web 2.0 technologies, such as, RSS, openID and social tagging have to be adopted as the basis to develop PLEF.
• Flexibility and extensibility, such that new services/modules can easily be plugged into the basic framework. PLEF should be based on a Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) that makes it possible to extend the framework with new Web modules. It should also provide a public API that can be used by third party applications.
• Web browser platform: With web browser as the platform, the independence of operation system can be assured. This also enables PLEF to aggregate and integrate third-party services.
• Aggregation/Mashups: PLEF should allow a learner to aggregate and remix different learning artefacts (e.g. feeds, widgets and media).
• Ease of use: PLEF should provide rich experience with e.g. AJAX support. A learner should be able to copy&paste and drag&drop elements to personalize and manage her PLE with minimum effort.
  

Yes We Can - Barack Obama

OpenSocial 0.7 released

Dan Peterson, Product Manager at Google, announced the release of the OpenSocial 0.7 API specification. He writes:

This API iteration represents significant enhancements to 0.6; in particular, viral-spread functions and activity stream templating have been introduced to support the needs of app developers. In addition, the gadgets specification and the emerging gadgets.* JavaScript API have been codified, and include details about letting containers cleanly support different views (e.g. profile or canvas).