This website covers knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, amongst other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.

Learning by watching and doing

JP Rangaswami has an interesting perspective on knowledge management as it relates to instructional design and "learning" in general.  The post is longer than average, but the setup and discussion are worth reading, Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 5: Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is not really about the content, it is about creating an environment where learning takes place. Maybe we spend too much time trying to create an environment where teaching takes place, rather than focus on the learning.

... More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.

[discovered via Jim McGee]

While that second quoted paragraph sounds creepy, it is the connection to Facebook that JP Rangaswami is making that creates the interest for me.  The Facebook "news feed" for an individual is a great way to see what they have been up to, particularly if they incorporate information from other sources, such as Twitter and their blog(s) and their Facebook status updates.

Just thinking about this a bit more, I don't know that Facebook, as it stands today, covers what JP is thinking.  I think one would need something like the Me Collector with the additional feature of providing a mechanism to selectively publish my activities back out to the world or to selected members of my own community.  I note that Steve Rubel has just created the Steve Rubel Aggregator with Tumblr, where he aggregates Twitter, Facebook updates, his blog and Flickr.

The comments on the post are an interesting conversation in themselves.  And here is an earlier post by JP on Facebook and KM, Facebook and the enterprise: Part 3.  The focus of this older article is on how Facebook provides access to relationships, conversations, and transactions.

I'm on LinkedIn - Now What?

A guide to mind mapping for note-taking