Roell on Knowledge Worker

Martin Roell has an extended and thoughtful blog entry on the term “knowledge worker”, Das E-Business Weblog: Terminology: “Knowledge Worker”. It starts with a reaction I had to his paper that I blogged earlier (see Roell: Distributed KM.) He then surveys some deeper discussions of what is at stake and ends up with a pragmatic point about communication in business (which he, not I has to do) and the importance of being understood by managers. Setting aside the pragmatics, here is a list of alternative terms that overlap in interesting ways,

  1. business person (what’s the difference between knowledge worker and business person?)
  2. epistemologist (someone who studies knowledge)
  3. philosopher (someone who loves wisdom, but doesn’t necessarily possess it)
  4. sophist (someone who thinks he is wise, but probably isn’t)
  5. office worker
  6. clerk
  7. computer (in the old sense of someone who does computations)
  8. manager

Continue reading Roell on Knowledge Worker

Surviving by accident: print your blog

digital information will never survive and remain accessible by accident: it requires ongoing active management. The information and the ability to read it can be lost in a few years. (“Digital Information Will Never Survive by Accident” in SAP INFO)

So what can we do individually to ensure that some of the content of this age survives, “by human accident”? What if we had a Print your blog day once a year when you print out your blog entries for that year on acid-free paper and stored them in the attic. Given that there are millions of blogs, and that these blogs describe other things on the web, we might get a reasonable accidental record as an alternative to centralized archiving projects.
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Blogs are news

Blogging made it to the cover of The Globe And Mail in an article by Graeme Smith titled, “Bloggers learn lesson: Don’t trash your boss”. The story, which ultimately is anecdotal and uninformative, tells about a woman fired from her job with the Nunavit Tourism agency when she posted pictures that were not complementary.
Much more interesting, and the lead article of the Educause Review, is an article by Stephen Downes on Educational Blogging (September/October 2004,†Volume 39, Number 5. p. 14-26.) This article has one of the best short histories and discussions of what blogging is that I have read, but you have to get past the opening section on school children using blogs for the meat. Downes gives a good list of educational uses.
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What happens to dead universities?

SFU News – SFU integrates TechBC students – Feb 21, 2002 is an article about how Simon Fraser University is taking on the students stranded when TechBC was closed. TechBC was an interdisciplinary university set up in 1999 and soon closed due to budget and student issues. One of their undergrad programs was in Interactive Arts (for more on the program, see the interview from Switch.)
So what was the full story on TechBC?

One good and one bad book

Two books and a story. Samarkand, by Amin Maalouf is about Iran and Omar Khayy·m and his Rub·iy·t. At a deeper level is about different dreams for the islamic world from the poet to the fanatic. Clancy’s The Teeth of the Tiger is why I will never read another Clancy novel. Warmed over characters that are the children of previous heros are just part of the problem. The premise of a secret organization privy to all the secrets of the CIA and FBI is unbelievable. The good guys are even less believable. Clancy sets up the good gudys by having others talk us how smart they are. One big backslapping circle of characters without humility. I find it hard to believe this was a best-seller – it isn’t even good enough for airport reading. Easily the worse book I’ve read in a decade.
Alas Clancy is what people will read to orient themselves to the islamic world instead of Maalouf.
Continue reading One good and one bad book

Roell: Distributed KM

Distributed KM – Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing,by Martin Roell, is the a paper he presented to BlogTalk 2.0 in Vienna in July 2004. He starts with a point that can’t be made too often, knowledge is human, it is not an attribute of information systems or a fancy version of information. More importantly, knowledge is not a collection of objects, it is an aptitude or capability in humans to re-create on appropriate demand.
Roell then swerves off to talk about “knowledge workers”, a horrid phrase that should be banned. The paper redeems itself by turning at the end to blogs and how researchers can use them as open filing cabinets. I like the idea of “knowledge journals” – it suggests that knowledge has a narrative rather than being a system of fact-jects. Whether research blogs ever lead to collaborative projects or not, they capture fragments of the path, which in the humanities is all we have.