Jacob Reider. Jacob Reider: "I was teaching a class of medical students today and somehow we got onto the topic of physicians as decisionmakers. The best medical care, I argued. is provided by those who make the best decisions. This is why I'm so interested in medical informatics."  [Scripting News]

Fascinating discussion on the relation between information, knowledge, and effective decision making.

11:04:45 PM •  • comment  

How About a Personal Library App. Maybe it's just me, but I never saw any way Amazon was going to be profitable until they took over the e-Commerce and web operations for Borders. [Blunt Force Trauma]

Terry is looking for a program that will let him build and maintain a database of his personal library using the data available from Amazon and elsewhere on the web. It already exists and it's called Readerware. I now have over 3,000 books catalogued using it. It also supports CD and video libraries. Recommended. Less than $100.

10:36:49 PM •  • comment  

www.KMWorld.com - Storytelling part II. Quote: "There are many directions that storytelling in a knowledge management environment could take. However, underlying any new direction should be a rich and powerful knowledge architecture. Without that architecture, storytelling will likely continue to languish either in abstract academic research white papers or hidden in the undiscovered byways of personal interactions within corporate communities, and knowledge management will miss the opportunity to extend its scope and depth by incorporating one of the most heavily used knowledge transmission mechanisms in corporations today."

Comment: via elearningpost [Serious Instructional Technology]

Part 2 of a two-part series. I referenced part 1 earlier.

10:07:48 PM •  • comment  

Matt Mower - Why Radio?. (SOURCE:Curiouser and curiouser)-Matt about sums it up for me! The K-Log and general "Two-way web" software platform that is Radio makes it the tool for me. If you want just a blog, then, yes perhaps other systems might be better.However I do believe that Radio could be the klogger tool of choice. Why? Because Radio has such potential in both a networked (social) and standalone (personal) context. Because Radio is a general computing platform that has been specialized to handle blogging but could also be specialized for a thousand other applications. I, along with others, are looking to take it to the next stage with k-log ready tools. Userland are doing their part with things like Instant Outlining and RCS. So, that's why Radio. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Ditto. Radio isn't perfect, but as a platform it has more potential and opportunity to evolve that way than anything I've yet seen. One important dimension of that platform aspect that I haven't seen mentioned yet is the degree to which it is accessible to those of us with only moderate technical capacities. Lotus Notes, as a counterexample, is also a platform, but it generally takes a great deal of expertise to exploit it effectively (as David Gurteen does, for example)

9:06:04 PM •  • comment  

Newton's Laws

Isaac Newton also used direct observation to formulate his laws. Newton was in government service for many years. His first law states:

* A body at rest tends to remain at rest, while a body in motion at a constant velocity in a straight line tends to continue in that motion.

Clearly, this law is based on first-hand observation of a bureaucracy in action.

One night, Newton became engaged in a heated argument at a local bar over a question of epicycles, leading him to punch his opponent in the nose. After being thoroughly worked over, Newton contemplated the results and announced his next law:

* Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

In a well-known story, Newton discovered gravity when he was hit on the head while sitting under an apple tree. This tale is, of course, fictitious. It was actually a fig tree, and the result was his best-known theory:

* I bet you could make a swell cookie out of these figs.

8:43:34 PM •  • comment  

Rheingold on Smart Mobs. Amazing article by Howard Rheingold on "smart mobs."

The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests?

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Rheingold has a pretty good track record of noticing important technology/people intersections early. Definitely on my short list of people to pay attention to.

8:37:04 PM •  • comment  

Greg Hanek on Educational uses of Weblogs. Quote: "For sometime now, I've been pondering what role the use of blogs might have in the classroom. I have even made some half-attempts at writing down my thoughts about same, and sent a few emails about same. Now it's time to start going more public with some of my half-baked notions, and seeing what discourse might come about from it"

Comment: Seems like a plan.  The list is good.  Faculty do want engaged students and that frequently means reflective students.  To reflect you need a personal space to do it in, ergo weblogs. [Serious Instructional Technology]

I'm convinced that reflecting skills will become an essential aspect of becoming and being effective as a knowledge worker, whether as a student or as a manager. One problem is that our education system does little to promote reflection and our economic organizations (rooted in industrial logic) select against it.

If you're someone who wants to work on reflecting capacities in spite of the systemic biases against reflection, let me suggest two useful starting points. The first is the late Don Schon's The Reflective Practitioner . The second is Ellen Langer's Mindfulness.  

Of course, keeping a weblog is also an excellent way to begin practicing reflection.

8:29:20 PM •  • comment  

Quote: "One of the best things about user research is that it reminds me of all the things I have forgotten, particularly about being a new Internet user. It is hard to remember what it was like to be new when you have been on the 'net for 8 years. Two things I had forgotten:

1. People don't like using the Internet [...]

2. People don't know when one site ends and another begins...."

Comment: via ColumnTwo, which I've recently added to my daily visits.

[Serious Instructional Technology]

A nice reminder that not everyone lives and breathes the internet or technology. Often, too easy to forget.

8:13:52 PM •  • comment  

Developing knowledge management for Pursuing Perfection in healthcare. Marc Pierson mailed me recently ro ask how to subscribe to the RSS Feed for my Knowledge-Log and pointed out that we had similar interests. Take a look at his [weblog] - what he is involved in is exciting - using weblog technology and KM to improve health care!

Also see the [WWPP] site - World Wide Pursuing Perfection in Health Care. See the bit about [David Bohm] and [Dialogue]. Another interesting [link] gives more details of the plan for using weblog technology. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

We're starting to see lots of interesting examples surface on KM solutions that take a decidedly more human approach to the use of technology.

11:27:30 AM •  • comment  

Time for people. Paolo Valdemarin: Time for people. "Time for anonymous companies is over, we have all had enough, it really looks like it's time for people, time for weblogs." [Jake's Radio 'Blog]

Also this comment by Paolo:

I have had a company web site for about the last 7 years, but I have never received much feedback from it. Since I have opened my blog I'm receiving lots of messages from people all over the world. This is happening because they perceive the weblog as the interface to a person, while the company site belongs to a faceless entity, even if for some of those 7 years, behind that company web site there was only one person: me. [emphasis added]

If you start connecting the dots between the weblogs and k-logs space with the recent books such as Free Agent Nation , Bobos in Paradise, and The Rise of the Creative Class you can see the acceleration of a fundamental shift in the relation between employer and employed.

Pay attention; it will affect you.

11:19:56 AM •  • comment