All tagged cognition
Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide's Neurolearning Blog give us some insight into blogging in "Blogs as Our Brains: Can We Escape Chaos?" They touch on a couple aspects of blogging and cognition that make things chaotic: tagging, learning preferences, and even organizational skills.
Malcolm Ryder has some fun with "Business Intelligence versus Business Knowledge: Who Cares?" I particularly like his thoughts about business intelligence, or more accurately, the process of seeing patterns in the constant wave of data, information and knowledge.
Erik Hollnagel does Cognitive Systems Engineering research in the area of human performance and accident analysis / prevention. He has a brief write-up on The principle of Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off (ETTO) that I found interesting. The bottom line: it is the system that has to be diagnosed to understand why an efficient "short cut" failed when it normally worked just fine.
I discovered Anti-Knowledge by Bruce LaDuke recently. What struck me was the central role he gives to the power of the question in his framing of how human knowledge develops.
I came across "The knowledge management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management" from the 2001 IBM Systems Journal. The authors use the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle to motivate their discussion, suggesting that IT is only one of many pieces to the puzzle for knowledge management. And they also acknowledge that there are pieces they may not know that create still other pictures when the pieces come together. They also provide a great set of references for the curious.
Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily writes High IQ: Not as good for you as you thought, in which he discusses research that looked at IQ and "self discipline" as predictors for academic performance. The surprise? Self-discipline was more highly correlated than was IQ.
George Siemens points to an article on Task-Switching, Emotional Motivation, and Reward from Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide. They in turn are writing about a paper on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that studied people who are asked to switch tasks. There might be a connection to multi-tasking.
Rashmi Sinha put together "A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular)" that I found to be illuminating. The short version: tagging is a simpler process because it lets us annotate something with all the concepts that it fires in our brains. Categorization forces us to pick one of those concepts.