To KM from expert systems via the web
My interest started in 1985 when I first heard of expert system, embarked on a journey of discovery that I clearly recognize is still very much underway.
Early years
A fascination with the power and
promise of capturing expert decision principles and heuristics. Helping
others take a major leap forward in their competencies. Thinking all
you needed was to apply the 'best' rational thinking and you were for
ever made.
Built fragile, brittle, well-bounded decision support systems. Thought I had the kernels of 'true' knowledge captured in the rules, a proven process for (measurement) & continual refinement, a representation that delivered inference and promoted learning. Boy was I ever wrong!
Middle years
A gradual awareness that
knowledge was not in the rules (or the frames, cases, predicate logic
or mined document repositories), something far more intractable was at
work. Engaging in the web, first e-mail then bulletinboards, newsgroups
and listservs, then MOOs and MUDs and morphing to web based
conferencing. Discovering networking, learning about creative abrasion
and the wonder of asynchronous dialog, moving from sharing the good
stuff to collaboration and co-creating it.
Current journey
Slowly
understanding knowledge is emergent, ephemeral, constructed and largely
tacit. Looking for deep dialog that signals new connections, searching
for knowledge spaces, community and collaborative writing genre.
Falling into and out of exciting conversations across the internet,
trying to sample the spaces where advanced knowledge practices are
explored, verified, lived and improved upon. More and more aware that
learning is a social activity.
http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?PersonalKnowledge
Thinking of knowledge as a complex, fractal ecology of ideas, memes, thoughts and assumptions.
Right now
* interested in design of living glossaries and making language distinctions
* crafting patterns that capture quality solutions and specify the application context
* excited by the diversity of blogging and distributed, syndicated, persistent conversations
* searching for social affordances that foster knowledge creation
*
aware and wary of individual epistemologies that gloss over the role of
relationships, downgrade the importance of social capital and downplay
empathy and ethnography
* reflecting on just how slippery knowledge is and
*
wondering why so few are drawn to this basic quest, see or appreciate
the value of working with knowledge vs. information and why KM has lost
it's allure.
So may I too ask, what exactly brings you to KM?
From a post to KB 10/31/2003
I'm glad you agree, Denham.
I was lucky to remember I had posted this here, and after carefully looking found your response in italics below it.
It seems to me that we've set a good example by including e-mail notification in the TeleCommunity blog-engine.
We also now offer a WYSIWYG-editor in our wiki-like WebWorkspaces, btw.
Posted by: Garsett Larosse | May 16, 2005 at 09:43 AM
Are you finding deep dialog in the blogosphere, Denham?
It seems to me that you underestimate the vanity-degree of blogs.
People learn by connecting, some by reading, some by writing, yes.
That's a part of personal knowledge management, perhaps.
But structuring of collaboratively built knowledge, functional knowledge representation, and developing ways to tie this into our daily practice, shouldn't that be our goals?
Conversations in the blogosphere are distributed and qualitatively different to being in a place/space or using a conversation engine. Agree we need to anneal our knowledge pieces and to cross-edit 'source documents'.
Posted by: Garsett Larosse | May 14, 2005 at 06:08 AM