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Information Science

Communities of Practice, Virality, and Josh Billings

In this last post for the semester, I am going to try and relate the three articles as well as discuss what I (and maybe my classmates) learned.  We may not have internalized it, but at least we saw it.  I picked up several articles this weekend and put them aside; they just didn’t call to me.   The one about “United Breaks Guitars” (aka “Knowledge and Knowledge Management in the… Read More »Communities of Practice, Virality, and Josh Billings

Danger, Will Robinson!

If you were to go into my Outlook mail box(es), you would be lost with little hope of finding your way back.  I don’t know what I use for organizational categories and I rarely plan it out.  Generally, I use what comes to mind.  The reasons for all this chaos is that I rarely think about a repository for my own reuse – I have search engines for that.  I… Read More »Danger, Will Robinson!

The Burden of Proof

My daughter says that Richard Scarry was scary.  My wife loves this song.  I have proof now that she is not crazy and that this song is real. You never know what you will find in the library.

Déjà vu

I picked up the Ackerman article and was immediately struck with a sense of Déjà vu.  I am sure I have read this paper before.  In fact, it’s in my references for EndNote citations.  For the life of me, I cannot figure out where I read it previously or why.  I looked in my usual repositories – EndNote, my list of PDF’s, the laptop’s search function, and even Bibsonomy.  Well,… Read More »Déjà vu

Terrible things, yes, but great

Wow, what a couple of weeks!  Who would have thought that a company would be in the middle of a scandal about using Facebook data without permission against us?  Oh wait, that’s happened before… Well, at least Cambridge Analytica did something really new with it.  It sort of feels like we are living in the middle of Wag The Dog.  I wanted to write a post that incorporated KM, sharing,… Read More »Terrible things, yes, but great

It’s an occupational hazard kind of thing…

When you study something, you start to see it everywhere.  I’m a competitive intelligence manager at work.  I help sales people sell better or product teams build a better product, depending on who you talk to.  Sometimes I do both.  Lately I’ve been selecting knowledge management articles about knowledge transfer, competitive advantage, and learning.  As Alex Vandergrift said, “…It is reasonable to conclude that useful knowledge can be derived from a diverse… Read More »It’s an occupational hazard kind of thing…

And the Oscar is…

Truthfully, I have no idea.  I’m just using that title because my wife purchased an ‘Oscar-palooza’ package from the movie theater, so for the next week or so, we get to watch all the Oscar candidate movies.  That will probably be something like 1.67 movies a day.  Phew!  Therefore, I need to get this post out there before the big adventure starts.  One of the big movie candidates this season is ‘Dunkirk’. … Read More »And the Oscar is…

If you don’t write it down, it will never happen

Last week, the blog post was about adages, and how they represent lessons learned.  This week, after reading about codification and economics, I’m looking at how people encode knowledge.  This week’s articles (see Bibliography, below) have returned to the idea of somehow encoding knowledge; which, because we are all unique individuals, ultimately become unique knowledge as it combines with our own set of tacit knowledge that we have.  In treating… Read More »If you don’t write it down, it will never happen

Bandwidth

“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

Adages, Idioms, Proverbs, are Lessons Learned

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