The Art of Knowledge
Emotion and Learning
Gord just posted something on emotion and learning. He references an article that outlines basic faults in most educaitonal deliveries.
- "E-learning that simply throws cold, hard facts at the learner's feet is fighting an uphill battle. We are biologically primed to identify with stories, not facts
I used to buy into the whole story telling theory about learning. I do believe it's one of the best ways people learn. The problem is, and it's a rather large one, most training doesn't have time to cottle, it doesn't have time to maybe know that a learner got the information. That's besides the point.
The reason I didn't like the idea initially, was that it doesn't address the real issue that I have been struggling with. All people learn differently. Simply trying to find the least abrassive medium in which to pass on knowledge is not the answer. Having everybody drive the safest car doesn't mean everyone will drive safe. Ok, that's not a real good analogy but you get my drift. People learn differently. By trying to apply guidelines and rigor to curriculum, whether it be a CBT or a long story that draws from all aspects of the task, you are setting yourself up for a fall. Accountants learn differently than IT people. An adult wanting to accomplish a task due at CoB needs faster more poignant, exact infromation, then a teenager being educated about the wonders of the Industrial Revolution.
Systems need to be biological and cusotmizable to a user's needs. The needs in which the knowledge or education needs to be absorbed has to be defined before the learning can start. Trying to win points with learners by taking the path of least resistance may work in the short term, but I can almost see the complacent calls of falling ROI after the time elapsed to write a line of code or balance a spread sheet has taken 2 days.
Link posted by JVMM : 6:02 PM
Business Objects
Business Objectsi s a company that sells Enterprise solutions to the market. They have this really cool thing called dashboards. A dashboard manager is basically a:
- Dashboard Manager enables you to deploy dashboards and scorecards that highlight business metrics that are critical to organizational strategy. This visibility helps users focus their efforts on initiatives that have the biggest impact on corporate strategy. This alignment to strategy improves organizational performance through better decision making. And Dashboard Manager is agile enough to let you quickly evolve your dashboard as business strategy changes.
Ok so what's a dashboard?
From what I gather, and no they don't have a straight forward definition, (I guess that would be like Microsoft saying, "This is a window.") it measures productivity and provides a corporate wide face to all tasks. It allows for the common voice on high to send down the message through the infrastructure via technology.
What suprises me is that they don't consider IT one of their core competency components when it comes to revolutionizing business. Last time I looked, and it was yesterday, most companies revolve around IT. IT funds initiatives via streamlined efforts made to streamline processes. It always amazes me a little when people think of IT as this autonomous component that knows what they are doing at all times. Honestly, IT may be the most screwed up part of any company. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is volatility and exponential change. IT has to deal with rapid movement and become synonymous with change, if that's not the breading ground for metrics and tracking ROI, I don't know what is.
What they basically do, from what I gather, is that they take information or business processes and they transfer them into objects. I.e. they take what you did today and make that available to you tomorrow. The medium in which it is available can now change and become adaptable to user preference or atmosphere. Let's say you get a task via your dashboard and then accomplish your task. While you are doing work the app tracks your resources and categorizes them for future reference. Your end result, whether it be a balance sheet, email, or report is then transferred into an objects database and meta tagged (maybe) with XML to make it viable for other relative tasks. It also creates a huge knowledge base. Anyway, it's kinda cool what they are doing...and apparently they have been around for a while.
Link posted by JVMM : 5:45 PM
#1
I have no idea how this happened but I got the #1 slot (well today anyway) for "Knowledge Blog". There has been a lot of search results popping this thing up. Cheers. I feel guilty now about not writing in here for the past week. I'll get poppin back tomorrow. I've just been programming like a nutso. C++ and me...well...we are fighting and his big brother C# keeps showing up to laugh at me...
Link posted by JVMM : 3:41 AM
Technological Issues Towards Knowledge-powered Organizations
By: George A. Vouros
Right away the name of the paper grabs me. But as I delved into it it just seemed to be a lot more of the same old terminology thrown around. A lot of theories about theories that sound like they are being copied right out of someone else's book. The ideas of technology and education, or KM, obviously go hand and hand. Are there uphill battles that need to be addressed? Absolutely. Is looking towards the past and quoting what you have been reading for the past year going to get us there? No. There's no exam besides results after all the research has been done.
Some excerpts:
- Towards this aim, people must work at the "knowledge level": get the right information at the right time and at the right form to perform a task in real time, get connected with colleagues that may provide solutions or hints towards solving problems, form groups of people with different areas of expertise and/or different competencies to achieve a shared goal, be equipped with the necessary applications and data to fulfill their tasks and form decisions in real time. More than that, people should be able to provide feedback and share their knowledge, which must be actively and constantly captured, stored, and organized in the background, so as to be exploited in tasks performance and be disseminated to interested colleagues.
- O'Leary (1998) and others point that the knowledge that an organization stores in its repository may be categorized to be knowledge about proposals that the organization made in the past (proposal knowledge repository), knowledge concerning news about organizations' specific topics (news knowledge repository), knowledge about the best way of doing things within the organization (best practices knowledge repository), and knowledge about peoples competencies within the organization (experts knowledge repository).
- These may be bases exploited by expert systems, formal representations of argumentation structures that record group decision processes, formal representations of business processes, or database schemas. Ontologies (Gruber, 1994; Guarino, 1996) are expected to play an important role here and work towards this aim has already been done: representation ontologies make explicit the commitments for structuring knowledge bases, and therefore a semantics-preservation mapping between different knowledge-base constructs is needed for integration (which in most of the cases is not obvious). Domain ontologies make explicit the conceptualization of a specific domain and can be used for mapping domain concepts from one knowledge base to the other. This is also not trivial, given that different ontologies may provide different conceptualizations of a domain at different levels of granularity, with different organizing principles and different implementation languages
- The focus is on what we think are the key technologies for implementing an organizational memory: collaborative applications with transparent and collaborative interfaces; information integration and ontologies; knowledge representation of business processes and ontologies; and knowledge acquisition, data mining and discovery…. The challenge is great. Not only for designing and developing the key technologies, but also for devising the interplay between the technologies and for supporting the collaboration between the applications themselves, in the context of an active organizational memory system. A paradigm for such interplay of technologies and systems' collaboration is the development of collaborative tools for ontology construction. Such tools involve a number of agents that collaborate among themselves towards the construction of a commonly agreed ontology.
Large repositories of information are great, having a system that involves the user making changes is great (though time consuming and destined to fail due to actual user interaction), the idea of ontologies that overlap and break down the barriers of classification and personalization of information is great. However, nobody has shown me anything on this. No system, other than the roots of autonomous and grid computing have shown me a glimpse of anything more than a marketing strategy in programming/EA clothes.
These appear to be the guidelines slated for the achievement
- the development of frameworks and programming methodologies for the development of collaborative agents;
- the development of ontologies in conjunction with linguistic resources, which will provide the conceptual system and vocabulary for information retrieval and information presentation in multilingual settings;
- the development of standards for integrating heterogeneous information sources and for sharing information between them;
- the synthesis and presentation of information, so it can be delivered and be utilized by different device types; and
- the development of powerful data mining and knowledge discovery tools for dynamically acquiring users' preferences and interests with the minimum user feedback.
Towards the end of the article it did a pretty good job in trying to identify ways in which systems should be drawn to attain, retain, categorize, and make efficient information. It did a nice job of laying a foundation. Oddly enough this is the 50th foundation paper I have read on the topic.
Link posted by JVMM : 3:17 PM
Bread Crumb: Read after finals...
Why Three heads are better than one (How to create a now-it-all company)
Link posted by michael : 2:44 AM
If You Wanna Be a Playa
I was just informed that there are open meetings for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They are held in DC too, just across the pond. Now for those of you who don't know, these are the guys who sit in a room and think stuff up. Seriously, some of them work in vaults. But more importantly, these are the guys who either build up a technology or shoot one down. They endorse you and can elevate you or they can at least send you back to the drawing board with a few new ideas. They have their hands in every pot when it comes to standardization.
They do some cool stuff in elearning.
The Adaptive Learning section details a workshop on advanced technologies into learning. Ignore that date because some of the stuff on there is still pretty hot.
Link posted by JVMM : 11:01 PM
In Response to Mike
- I don't think that's necessarily true ("People using new technology should be followed and emulated because they know where the future is going to be"). So many early adopters try everything... I agree that the "future is already here" in the sense that you can certainly find people doing and using the "next shit" far in advance of the masses, but I guess I want to know how you delineate the early adopters who get off on technology for technology's sake and those who are adopting useful tools that the masses will come to take for granted like electricity...
side note: I for one think using wireless at donna's, assuming that it had a decent network, is still a pain in the ass unless the hardware catches up and becomes easy to use and uncomplicated.
I think it's a process of staying on top of technology. I don't think following what is being syndicated or standardized is a bad way to go. I find that the masses are usually 5 years behind when it comes to technology and that is shrinking by the second. But, to totally wait around and see what is going to be popping and what isn't, I feel is a wrong way to go. I like following the big boys. I like seeing what IBM, CISCO, NIST, big Gov't contractors are doing. I have seen lately that there are trendsetters who adapt technology to the user but only after it has been thoroughly tested and utilized by their infrastructure.
For example, today I went and met with a small company here in Baltimore that hopes to jump in on the voice over IP networks. I wrote about this awhile ago in my other blog I think. But, the main thing is that every phone can have an IP. If every phone has an IP that means it uses a network outside of the phone company. That also means it's probably open source. More importantly it means that the phones functionality can beomce limitless. Now is this mainstream? No. Will it be mainstream? Absolutely. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the future of technology is already here. At least the future for the masses is already here. Trying to corner maybe 2 or 3 of those technologies and working them into old school processes like learning and education is a great idea.
Link posted by JVMM : 10:48 PM
Ronald Holmes Blog
R.C. Holmes has started a blog. Take patience in knowing that he is not a web professional and his formatting may be a little off. I will do my best to help him as the days go by. I can assure you that the visit is well worth the time.
Link posted by JVMM : 5:36 PM
#99 Transcends the Ice
Here is an article called "Following the Puck". It opens with the Great on talking about why he was so successful.
- Legend has it that when Wayne Gretsky was asked why he was so successful as a hockey player he responded by saying that he always tried to skate to where the puck was going to be, not to where it was.
The article goes on to say:
- As in the past years, survey respondents across all sectors of higher education continue to identify "assisting faculty integrate technology into instruction" as the single most important IT issue confronting their campuses "over the next two or three years." However, the numbers have dropped dramatically since 1998, falling by half across almost all sectors.These declines reflect not so much a declining importance of instructional integration as the rising priority of other issues; financing, ERP upgrade/ replacement, and wireless, that now compete for the time and attention of the survey respondents, typically CIOs, and also compete for increasingly restricted institutional resources (people and money).
The article finisheses up with:
- Taken together, these data and other information from the 2003 Campus Computing Survey reflect the movements of a digital puck that is going, concurrently, in many directions: a continuing campus concern for instruction and the instructional infrastructure, a new focus on administrative systems, and real, long-term pressures on technology budgets and resources.
Unfortunately, the inherent (and now continuing) tension between rising expectations for IT-enhanced instructional resources and administrative services and reduced funding for IT budgets ultimately affects students who come to campus to learn about and also to learn with technology. The recession manta, again heard on many college campuses do more with less, and do it better makes for an interesting sound bite but fails to provide a clear path or a strategic plan for IT resources, services, and operations.
Link posted by JVMM : 5:18 PM
Bahhh (Like a Sheep)
There are some interesting posts I have been reading today on the idea of group collaboration. Most of them outline the positive role they take when they incur a small initiative or broad issue. For example "What are some things the school should be teaching?" or "What should be done about the new technical staff' lack of ROI?". But when hardcore down-the-line decision (i.e. "The new Java App doesn't seem to be bug free but we are 3 months over due. What should we do?") need to be made there seems to be the recurring trends of:
I got this post from here.
Link posted by JVMM : 5:06 PM
