Monthly Archives: September 2002

MIT OpenCourseWare Open

Posted on by David

The MIT OpenCourseWare web site debuted this morning.

I think this is great for MIT and hope more universities follow suit. Prospective students to the univesity can get an excellent idea of just what the courses are about, colleagues can critique each other’s course structure or borrow resources and methods, and the Internet public can use them as a resource and refernce that is strongly branded as MIT.

But might they not get as many students if they give away all this information? Why become a formal university student when you can get the knowledge on their web site? Well, you can only truly get the knowledge by interacting with the professor and other studnets via the course. Also, a degree from MIT still looks better than ‘I read all the MIT course notes online’.

MIT wants butts in lecture seats and lab rooms to generate revenue. Giving away this course information will draw more students than they might have had otherwise while improving their teaching and research.

Why KM Now

Posted on by David

From thought?horizon (via McGee):

I think knowledge management’s prominence has deeper roots in an individual’s need to learn at this point in history. People are finding they need to become more reliant and old ways don’t serve them any more. We are no longer content to take what the boss gives us and seek greater choice. We are starting to see the need to learn again and that is best done in a community. Knowledge sharing/management is a community based activity.

This illustrates the great opportunity that professional societies and associations have right now: to reengage their memberships by facilitating learning and knowledge sharing among the members.

As the rest of the post above goes on to say, this is nothing new. See the quote below from Principles of Association Management, by Henry Ernstthal:

Professional societies can trace their roots back to the late Renaissance, when scientific societies were formed to collect and disseminate knowledge. The earliest of these societies, the Academia Secretorum Naturai of Naples, was organized in 1560. (page 5)

Associations are a manifestation of the desire to share knowledge among individuals within a profession or discipline.

DB Table Structure for Thesauri

Posted on by David

Here is a nice db structure shared by Dale Mead on the IA-CMS list (a new Yahoo group that just started up recently):

Another approach to Logical Data Model for a thesaurus could look something like this:

Table: Term
______________________
term_id (primary key)
term_name
term_description

Table: Relation_Dict
_______________________
relation_type
(values: broader_narrower, related)

Table: Relation
_________________

relation_id
parent_id
child_id
relation_type

More CMS vendors need to provide support for thesauri management and integration (the database structure above is based on what is used in Documentum). Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Lou:

Content management system vendors take note: your bloody products might actually provide value if 1) you enabled manual indexing by integrating thesaurus management capabilities; and 2) that manual indexing stuff is “real work” too, so start figuring out how to better integrate it within your work flow support.

Fostering Change Without Getting Fired

Posted on by David

I found this post over on Steven Vore’s Weblog:

Sean Murphy in reply to Corporate Culture-Shifting: “Changing the culture is something I am battling with right now. We are trying to implement a Knowledge Centered Support environment, where everyone collaborates and shares for the benefit of the team. On a good day, I get comments like “They shoot collaborators, don’t they?”, but most often I feel like the message is treated as white noise. Upper management has not really bought into making the culture shift because they keep whipping the operational managers to meet numbers. How is it possible to get the shift to happen? It makes logical sense to a lot of use, but change is scary and seems like more effort will be required. I would love to hear from others on how they have effectively engineered change in their culture in a timely manner. Thanks.”

It’s a common refrain coming from the front lines. Suggestions, fellow culture-changers?

You may want to check out Tempered Radicals by Debra Meyerson. She writes about the experiences of people who have decided to create change within a work place that doesn’t match their values rather than leave the company. She focuses mostly on creating change on issues such as diversity, fair-trade products, family-friendly work hours, etc. However, I think the strategies that she discusses are just as valid and useful for trying to move an organization towards a more knowledge-based organizational culture.

Her key themes are: leading by example, small early wins, turning threats into change opportunities, and taking a long view. No quick fixes, I’m afraid.

The Non-writer Blog

Posted on by David

Phil Wolff has lots of ideas on how to enable non-writers to engage in and benefit from blog-like activity. He has grouped them in three general areas: Capture experiences and thoughts differently, Prompt with Structure, and Enterprise system streaming.

Definitely worth checking out.

We are in the process of designing a new intranet for our office and one of things I want to explore is creating a blog-like view (reverse chronological order) of activities, documents, meetings, etc. so that an employee can capture a history of their work even if they are not a strong writer. This would be in addition to the normal writing of entries. Phil’s stuff provides a lot of possibilities to explore.

I’ll be posting more information here for feedback as we get a design fleshed out.