Comments on: Back to First Principles for Knowledge Management

By: John

John — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:25:12 +0000

Ariel,
I think there is great promise in networked virtual environments (NVE) to gain more experiential cues for co-learning. I don’t think we fully understand how memories are formed, at least not enough to presume we could co-experience something “as much as” someone else by immersion in an NVE. Also, I don’t see the business model for NVEs going down this path. The larger NVEs are geared towards connection for community building, dating, friend networks – not pursuing a richer focus on experiential learning.
The virtual worlds that ARE focused on experiential learning hold more promise, but again I think they are an area where we can get better at this, provided we don’t over-promise the results. We can’t visit and interact with Grandpa’s memory disc on the holodeck just yet. @moehlert is my expert here, and he will likely argue more in favor of NVEs than I do.

By: Arieliondotcom

Arieliondotcom — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:52:00 +0000

I’m wondering what you think of virtual worlds as a means of knowledge transfer since we all could then participate with virtual Grandpa in a virtual fishing trip and “experience” it as he did much more intuitively and emotionally and relationally than by paper, etc. and even by retelling by others. So in your definitions I’m hearing a compelling statement for the use of virtual worlds as a means to transfer knowledge.

By: CCCCC complimenting blog.tarn.org for the CCCCCCC of knowledge « Fredzimny’s CCCCC Blog

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 13:52:55 +0000

[...] past actions, or in converting so-called tacit knowledge to explicit. John Bordeaux torpedoes both of these. Lessons learned programs don’t work because they don’t align with how we think, how we decide, [...]

By: Navigating the seven Cs of knowledge « Enlightened tradition

Navigating the seven Cs of knowledge « Enlightened tradition — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:31:47 +0000

By: Knowledge Management 101? | Above and Beyond KM

Knowledge Management 101? | Above and Beyond KM — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:50:17 +0000

[...] short, these guides make fundamental errors that folks wiser than me (in this case, John Bordeaux) have already identified: Believing that knowledge is only transferred once it has been made explicit leads to mechanistic, [...]

By: Eli Robillard

Eli Robillard — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:23:00 +0000

Great synthesis, thanks for that. If I could add anything to your conclusion it would be to clarify that the difference between writing vs. doing is to express information vs. to provide an experience. These are fundamentally different things, and despite the constraint of language, only one is scalable. It suggests room for more powerful shared languages to evolve based on shared experiences, until you see that this already happens.

In this case, if everyone had a chance to fish with Grandpa, then everyone would understand each other better when the topic turns to fishing. But the dependency on Grandpa makes this a hard example to apply elsewhere. Instead let’s take people working in the same field (oh, say particle physics). Each encounters similar problems, sometimes the same solutions, and when they get together they’re able to improvise more language to share their knowledge and concepts than one would expect. The logical conclusion (okay it’s a bit of a leap) is that language is at some level always based on experience, and the greater the commonality of the experience, the stronger the language. When there is no common experience (as when words are simply encoded to paper, bits), the information is merely “memorized.”

Even “knowledge” can be a fuzzy word that to many implies experience. The tacit or private knowledge that fails to survive as it is mapped into expression is really about the personal experience associated with memory.

To go right back to the roots it’s interesting to read the early 20c debates on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (“does language determine thought or the other way around?”) and the writing on public vs. private languages by Wittgenstein and (I think it was) Kripke.

Even reading this message creates a shared experience, and it’s why discussions help to both solidify and evolve any field, including KM. I didn’t need to write anything more in the example about particle physicists because we share a common idea of the abstract concepts that particle physicists might talk about. I do not need to explain my use of “memorize” back in the first paragraph; we all went to school at some point and learned how to break a word down, so I could safely assume you’d understand the intent to apply it to machine memory as well as people. Language rocks.

If I were to add a second thing to the conclusion, it would be how all this relates to story-telling. Through all these ideas runs a thread that demonstrates why story-telling (whether written or oral) is more powerful than simply encoding information. Through exposition, stories recreate context.

Cheers,
-Eli Robillard.

By: prahaladmungara

prahaladmungara — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:05:25 +0000

very well expressed content

By: Martin Lindner

Martin Lindner — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:35:29 +0000

while i agree in general with your thorough argumentation (thanx for posting this), i’d like to point to a complementary phenomenon: that in many cases knowledge is only there when i write it down, not sooner and not later, and after this i have to turn to my own text to reclaim it.

the mantra that the richer side of knowledge is *always* embodied, oral, etc. is not true, IMHO.

By: E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez » Information Management and Knowledge Management by John Bordeaux

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:55:20 +0000

[...] many of your views on what is traditionally known as Knowledge Management, then let me point you to a recent article he put together in his blog and which has got so much food for thought on it on this very same topic, that I will defer to an [...]

By: drfuzzy

drfuzzy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:02:53 +0000

Lisa: Hey, the application of these ideas is essential – thanks for the reference!