“The major explanation for the lack of productive cooperation between the universities is to be found in their sense of competition with one another”. A fascinating article by Collins (1974) offers insights about how knowledge diffuses across practitioners of common scientific craft but also how they don’t truly trust one another. I could contrast that with last week’s observations about trust and hiding information, which Collins highlights in his writing:… Read More »Bandwidth
This post continues the saga of organization’s learning practices; tacit, or unwritten knowledge; and how things ultimately get better. Based on the commentary by JennNippert, I elected to read the article by Brown and Duguid. I decided to add some other articles that sounded cool and since I worked on the Space Shuttle program, a chance to revisit the Challenger program via the Kumar & Chakrabarti article shot to the… Read More »Adages, Idioms, Proverbs, are Lessons Learned
What’s the difference between a sea story and a fairy tale? Fairy tales start, “Once upon a time…” and sea stories start, “No shit, there I was…” I may have mentioned this before: I am a movie buff and I love using movie scenes as allegories and metaphors to illustrate a point. Sadly, this does not always work well for me because often my listeners don’t always know what I’m… Read More »Sea Stories and Fairy Tales
As I mentioned in a previous post, this class on Knowledge Management is designed to generate different perspectives on the concepts around knowledge, knowledge sharing, and knowledge management. The idea is to pick three academic articles from a list and then talk about them. Truthfully, this week I learned a lesson: don’t be too casual about which articles you pick. Some of the articles were wholly uninteresting to me… Read More »Strategy or S-tragedy?
Today’s post could rightly be called a reflection. I’ve been spouting off about big data, documenting it all, tacit knowledge (that stuff that everyone knows but no one writes down), web technologies, etc., etc., etc. So naturally in the Knowledge Management class we have to read and review a few articles from the syllabus (pick two from column* A, one from column B). Today’s aggregated postings have articles about wikis,… Read More »Spieglein, spieglein an der wand… wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?
Xie and Matusiak introduce several different definitions of digital libraries in their book, Discover Digital Libraries: Theory and Practice. One of the most workable definitions of a digital library I found was the one by (Bishop, et al., 2003) that digital libraries are “sociotechnical systems – networks of technology, information, documents, people, and practices”. Like others in my LIS 658 class, I relate strongly to the Bishop definition. I work at… Read More »The bishop’s mitre