My daughter has closed her first year at the local primary school. The exposure to new technologies during this first year was 0.0% of all lessons. If you linger along the corridors and across the classrooms of this school you will remember your own primary school days back in the seventies. Nothing has changed (Did you know that? 
…
Therefore, I admire the “One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)” project by Nicolas Negroponte. It seems that OLPC has done important steps from vision (see e.g. the initial TED presentation) to execution (see e.g. the updated TED video). Nevertheless, what I do miss is an impact assessment: what has the usage of the OLPC really delivered for the children and schools involved?
July, 2008
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One Laptop Per Child (for Germany please)
Monday, July 28th, 2008Knol – Better use the steam cleaning equipment…
Sunday, July 27th, 2008So, Google has started the beta of Knol. The Dutch steam cleaning equipment producer Knol seems to be quite happy, because I won’t be the only one that simply typed in “www.knol.com” and was surprised by what I saw…
More seriously: I was a bit disappointed after a “short walk” through the Google Knol offering. There are just too few articles, sorry “Knols” (aka “a unit of knowledge”), to make it attractive to publish own ones. I’ve searched for a “knol” on Berlin and I’ve found only two articles. None of them has to do with Berlin as a city. The “knols” contains only few links to other resources. On the other hand if you search e.g. for “obama” you’ll find 19 “knols”. So, which one is the most convincing? Am I supposed to read through all of them?
Conclusion: I don’t see the value-add of knol.
Have you learned your lessons?
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008Steven Wieneke, Technical Fellow in GM’s Global Engineering group, presented an interesting approach to lessons learned in the monthly call of the SIKM community.
Steven has rolled out a “visible learning process” at GM Global Engineering that not only includes lessons (“things gone wrong and corrected”) but even more important learnings (“things gone right and valued for reuse”). “Subject Matter Responsible Persons” drive the development of know-how and references assets in more than 60 communities and nurture the exchange of experience (complete presentation). Unfortunately the time was too short to have a look at the implementation side of the concept, e.g. how the users retrieve assets for a specific context and how they assess the value of the assets. Jack Vinson has also commented the SIKM call in his blog.
An article in InsideKnowledge describes the main knowledge management activities at GM and focusses especially on the “closed-loop learning” promoted by Steven and his group.
Another interesting article on GM and knowledge sharing is the “Wikinomics Report Card” by Ben Letalik.
Awesome Visualizations
Sunday, July 13th, 2008Jonathan Harris introduces us to the web’s secret stories in a TED talk. And, it’s indeed astonishing to see the tons of stories sparsed across the web be visualized in new ways.
Please try it out: Universe is a 1000 times more interesting and beautiful to consume than Google Analytics… From Jonathan’s website you may also have a look at the intriguing “We feel fine” or the fascinating “The Whale Hunt“.
In a short interview with Adobe’s Think Tank magazine Jonathan states that he designs
“[...]On paper. I do all my thinking on paper. I can’t think behind a computer screen. When I sit at my desk with my hand on the mouse, my creativity stalls, and I turn into a robot, efficiently executing what’s already in my mind.[...]“
Building Great Knowledge Management Teams
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008Mary Abraham, Knowledge Manager for Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, points us to a Harvard Business School report in a recent entry of her excellent blog:
Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge reports on a new study that demonstrates that while past performance may be a reasonable indicator of future performance, “the quality of colleagues in his or her organization also has a significant impact on the [star's] ability to maintain the highest quality output.” In other words, hiring a star without the supporting team will greatly diminish your chances of replicating or exceeding past performance.
and asks the following questions at the end:
What does your knowledge management staff look like? A group of under-engaged disaffected individuals? A collection of motivated but unsupported stars? A team of diverse people that consistently produces high quality work product?
Well, I would definitively agree that the quality of the colleagues has a significant impact. Dedication and passion for KM are also key ingredients. What I particularly appreciate at SAP is the right mix of achieving specific objectives for the business (“what”) and having a lot of degrees of freedom in the choice of the methods (“how to achieve the goals”).
Thanks to the KnowledgeBoard newsletter to allude to Mary’s blog.
