Knowledge-at-work

On the concept of a concept

 

What is a concept?

An abstraction?, cognitive building block, a container for idea(s)?, a symbol & representation?, a tool for indexing, learning, memory and navigation?, a fundamental language construct?, a reified cognitive artifact?, a category?  Concepts can be any unit of thought or a mental image formed by generalization.

Any concept is more than its name, the links to related concepts define its meaning, every concept has a life-cycle. A concept is an abstract, universal psychical entity that serves to designate a category or class of entities, events or relations. WikiPedia

So what does a concept look like?

Fuzzy or crisp boundaries with gradational or binary membership?, does the essential meaning morph with community membership? is there a universal classification of concept types?, is a concept both a personal or group possession?

Concepts are defined along multiple dimensions:  abstract-concrete, conjunctive-disjunctive, artificial-natural, well-defined/ill-defined, object-event.....

Why are concepts important?

Our beliefs, world views, creativity and communication ability, depend on the concepts we hold, how strongly we hold them and ways we can change them. Concepts are the building blocks for analytical and mental models. Making concepts explicit and visual helps promote learning, knowledge construction and assists with memory retention.

Concepts are key entities for knowledge work. They solidify ideas, reify emergent distinctions, help with articulation & explication, aid discovery and meme description.

We now have the means to access and navigate texts at the level of the contained concepts. This has important implications for personal learning, JIT knowledge provision, spawns new revenue models and helps with profile building.  Tagging gives concept level ways to classify and retrieve works.

How are new concepts acquired?

Mostly from instances through; abstraction of invariant features, hypothesis testing, selection of prototypes. Acquisition may be through language using definitions, synonyms, analogy, and metaphor. A fundamental difference in conceptual approach is found between 'lumpers & splitters'

Concept mapping

This article by Joe Novak explores the theory, provides practical tools and tips for mapping concepts

Related questions

1. How are concepts related to      categories and classification?,
2. What are the 'hidden      politics' in concept formation and agreement,
3. How do concepts relate to      knowledge construction and 'bringing forth our worlds'?

My previous thoughts on concepts – coming in a kind of circle.

Finding the real KM

One of the difficulties with knowledge management has always been deciding exactly what it is, what it covers, why it is important and where the discourse boundaries lie.

Here we have gathered some definitions, views, pointers.

I suggest KM is:
A practice concerned with increasing awareness, fostering learning, speeding collaboration & innovation and exchanging insights. There is a delicate balance to be maintained between explicit and tacit, between personal and community, between collecting assets and enabling flows, between looking inward and externally, between mining and capturing insights and building on shared experiences.

The KM Forum has an earlier collection from 1996

Murray and Barclay have their say

Steve Barth, 2002 takes a turn

Yogesh Malhotra talks 2005

A KM ontology may help

2nd generation KM from KMCI

Contrasting KM vs.IM is another approach

The KnowledgeBoard has a dialog around this subject

Summary

Often it is easier to start from what KM is not. There is general agreement that KM is about more than technology alone, that it covers a wider field than intellectual capital, that personal knowledge is not the whole picture, that KM involves more than a suite of practices.

Using social bookmarks

Suggesting social bookmarks can be a very useful knowledge related practice. Here are some ways I have found this to be an interesting approach.

I've been slowly drawn into social bookmarking since January this year when I believe Lilia first introduced me to Del.icio.us. Here is my path so far.

Started by collecting my 'favorits' for access from public computers e.g. libraries and when using other's computers but not wanting to 'pollute' their bookmark collection.

Experienced some of the power of shared links, i.e. found others were using tags I'm interested in such as pkm, knowledge_management, knowledge

Pulled tag feeds into my aggregator (Bloglines) as a way to keep up with links others have found interesting and to 'find' stuff. This helps me keep up with the numerous KM links floating around.

Discovered a few users that had very similar interests, projects, studies and far more time than me to search, cross-link and share - added these 'filters' to my list.  An example is Jack Vinson's 'cloc' tag

Found some unique tags that clustered interesting links in my subject areas - Groups were using these to notify each-other (black-boarding), or 'posting' for feedback, critique and comments. Example the use of 'cooperation' tag by the smart mobs mobloggers 

Now I find social bookmarks to be an integral part of my  'awareness', scanning, and KM intelligence gathering. They are more useful than a search engine, provide more focus than a blog feed and give me a different slant on news and information.

Key tags -  KM, knowledge, knowledge_management, pkm, innovation are accessed via my bloglines feeds and are sorted into folders. Tag links I visit less often, are available via a Del.icio.us folder in my bookmarks / favorits on my browser.

I'm finding social bookmarks help me link to emergent stuff, point the way to high quality content, assist with locating people with interests and projects in KM and allied areas, serve as a reminder as new people link to sites, papers, blog posts and KM portals I have long forgotten.

As my tag list expands, it may come to represent key & emergent KM concepts forming a bottom up taxonomy / folksonomy

Would be very interested to explore ethnographic accounts of social bookmarking and social search - Know of any??

Conversation power

Often wonder at the relative merits of conversation vs. connection - If I'm connecting, I'm not conversing most times. Clearly there is a rhythm and trade-off between establishing and maintaining weak links, reading, personal learning and engaging in dialog. Knowledge creation and exchange requires a deeper dialog than the social banter needed to build social capital, it needs the energy of creative abrasion and the engagement of reciprocity to change deep level assumptions and unarticulated mental models.

Paul Hertzog explores the way exchanges allows strong memes to rise to the top and suggests a conversation allows mingling, sorting and reforming of ideas, insights and explicit thoughts.

Deep dialog is indeed a very fundamental knowledge practice.

Been exploring podcasting as a way to distribute ideas, increase awareness and package insights. So far I have not seen a format that effectively delivers the JIT knowledge byte. What appears to be missing is the medium for a real conversation - sure we can attach audio files to blogs and enable comments, but that is not the same as having a conversation, capturing annotation or enabling an exchange 'on the go'.

Wonder if we will see emergent affordances to allow verbal annotation, commentary or easy feedback in the podcast medium?- it would surely make more powerful 'conversation'.

Making knowledge

Just how do we create knowledge?

There are basic conditions and special practices that help with knowledge formation and utility vetting.

• Generative community

At the top my list is a community - a group that shares interests, develops a common language, builds trust, shares experiences and engages in dialog. With new tools for connecting such as blogs, IM, VoIP, web-based conferencing, e-mail and listservs it is no longer necessary to be co-located. Sharing deep insights, subtle differences and articulating experiences is easier and faster during face-to-face exchanges, helped by the presence of artifacts or exemplars and promoted when the group is open to reflection around failures.

A community is where proto-theories are examined, where ideas are tossed into the mix, where creative abrasion helps to surface hidden assumptions and assists with exploring thoughts we did not know we knew. Social mediation is key, and this is where cohorts help you make meaning and gain understanding. We own a social brain and apprenticeship is the natural way to learn. We need cohorts and community to build a shared repertoire of key concepts, evolve tools, craft language, gather stories and highlight sensitivities.

• Deep dialog

Dorothy Leonard struck a chord talking of creative abrasion in her book "Wellsprings of knowledge". To change mindsets you need to raise energy levels, increase the attention and focus. This is difficult to achieve in a placid conversation. Exposure to alternative assumptions and frames, some advocacy, deep dialog, strong engagement and a pure clash of ideas help to unsettle, and resettle meaning. Prior beliefs are difficult to change using classroom instruction and teaching as telling. Taken too far, increasing stress levels will reduce the learning opportunity, there is a fine balance to be maintained.

Conversations to assist participants opening up possibilities, sharing relationships, engaging in reflection and inquiry, allowing them to give 'voice' to their unspoken values, insights and beliefs.

• Crafting distinctions

A basic premise for knowledge sharing is that we share context. When a group has agreed on meaning, established the boundaries of their discourse and know the interests and expertise of their members, they leverage their ability to do productive work, and explore advanced topics by orders of magnitude.

The key is arriving at a shared understanding. Naming experiences, exploring & testing uniqueness and utility is perhaps the core practice for making new connections, increasing awareness and sharing insights.

• Shared      awareness

With information overload all around us, easy access to information and multiple versions, it is essential to belong to a group or network that will act as a filter, pointing you to new, interesting, unusual or intriguing tools, conversations, papers, groups and theories. Keeping up with information torrents and maintaining a sharp focus while being open to new thoughts and discontinuities is difficult to do alone.

• Information      ecology

Information is embedded in a web of relationships, connections and context. An understanding of the essential differences between information and knowledge helps focus on qualities and practices that foster knowledge emergence. 

Knowledge ecology  is a subtle concept, concerned with knowledge flows and dynamics, relationships, learning, dialog, social networking, building social and human capital. The focus is on personalization, interactions, culture, practices and social context. KE is about sharing, learning, innovation and the environment (Ba) for knowledge creation. Core practices are dialog, reflection, brainstorming, conceptual mapping, knowledge construction & summarization. Core representations are stories, pattern language, distinctions, conceptual graphs and sociograms.

Your thoughts please!

About Me

Link: About Me.

A Knowledge Management consultant from Indianapolis with a passion for virtual teams, knowledge ecology, communities of practice, distance learning and building corporate memory.