Week 4 Article Summary

Week 4’s reading is focusing on personal knowledge management. I’m going to start with the first 2 articles on wikis. They are both fairly short and we briefly discussed wikis in class in week 3.

7 Things You Should Know About Wikis.

This article provides a good introduction to wikis. My first personal experience with wikis, as I’m sure is with many people, is Wikipedia. The article mentions that some students see it as a “reliable source of information.” I personally don’t think it is reliable. I took the IS Social Issues of Computing course and we talked quite extensively about Wikipedia and found many examples of how bad information can get into Wikipedia. With anyone able to edit content, the potential for inaccurate information should be kept in mind. Even with person monitoring the content changes, the amount of information out there is enormous and a task that certainly could not be perfect.

However, the upside of wikis can be enormous. At my work, we are just starting to use wikis to get information about meeting and other collaboration projects. I do find it useful to see meeting minutes published in real-time. I can make that the notes are accurate and not lose memory of the meeting by the time someone types up the notes and publishes at a later time. I do see great potential for wikis, but once people start to use them, I’m not sure they have much of a use past their current functionality.

Wiki Article from Spectrum IEEE – One Click Content, No Guarantees.

I really enjoyed this article. Two things stuck out to me. The first was that this type of collaboration leads to mediocrity and that Wikipedia is almost as accurate as Britannica.

So if in a group you have a couple of people with the right answer and a couple of people with the wrong answer, do you end with mediocrity? How can the editors of Wikipedia know what is right and what is wrong. I know someone how was trying to get update for her company into Wikipedia and the editors would not allow the changes. So if one person has great knowledge that is too much to validate, it will likely be thrown out. Therefore, I believe that you do get mediocrity in Wikipedia. It may not be wrong, but it also is probably not the most earth-shattering information either.

I was amazed that per science article, Wikipedia as an average of 4 mistakes, while Britannica has 3. First of all, that’s a lot of mistakes per article. Secondly, I would have thought Britannica to be much more accurate. Even with the relative newness of Wikipedia, people are monitoring content. I’m sure that errors in Britannica are reported, but the spirit of Wikipedia lends itself to more self-monitoring.

Personal Knowledge Networks Emerge with Grassroots – Caldwell – Gartner 2002

My first impression of this article is that it is a look into the future (which is today) from the past. The article makes some predictions about what the future of PKM will look like and does a pretty good job. It states that PKM will be used via PDA and desktops. PDA, with the iPhone and Blackberry, are very prevalent as we discussed with Ed Brill in class. They are helping people to get organized and communicate in ways we weren’t able to in the past. More and more people are telecommuting (again as Ed Brill pointed out in his presentation).

The article as makes the prediction that KM will shift from corporations to individuals. This is a very interesting concept that was also stated in the book, The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. The book states that a shift in power has occurred from countries to corporations to individuals. With individuals being able to publish content for the world to see, I believe this concept is definitely coming true. Individuals like Ed Brill are blogging and producing content; thus personal knowledge management is growing.

Google has done a great job enabling people which PKM tools such as Google Desktop. In my mind, they are really leading the way in collaborative technology, and doing it at no cost to consumers. The article does predict this technology and I believe that it will be more widely used in the future as consumers see the value.

The Many Forms of E-Collaboration: Blogs, Wikis, Portal, Groupware, Discussion Boards, and Instant Messaging. Fichter.

Wow, what a sweater the author is wearing!!! That’s really something.

I really liked the opening part of the article that talked about if technology is always necessary. I run into this all the time. For the amount of effort that some software projects take, it is not always worth the time and money spent. Technical persons, from my experience, want to automate everything and sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. The author is correct; technology should only be a support, not the driver in many cases. We talked about this concept in the last class. Is technology leading change or supporting it? I believe that some technology does help to lead change, but that’s usually not the case.

Most of the ideas presented about the collaboration technologies are not new. I think most everyone in the corporate world has experience with the tools presented. As the author talks about, many companies do not allow IM. My company has banned it, but I really don’t think they should be as long as it is within the firewalls. Sometimes I think that the company just may not want to deal with the potential threats that technology could bring until someone finally pushes it. Ed Brill said he IMs all the time and IBM is probably on the cutting edge of making sure systems are secure. The author does make a good point that a company should do what it needs to and maybe most people in my company don’t need IM.

Personal Toolkit: A Framework for Personal Knowledge Management Tools. Barth.

This article really builds off the last one at the start. Do what makes sense and don’t do what doesn’t. Sound like the karma cliché, “do good things and good things will happen to you.” I really liked the opening sentence about “personal tools that can automate, accelerate, or augment human processes.” This again hits on the idea of does technology create change or does it support it. The article is talking about PKM, but this really applies to all technology. “Accelerating” change accurately describes the evolution of technology.

The thing that stuck out the most to me about the article was the non-technology aspects of the model. At the end of the last class we mapped out the different nodes of KM. This article really touches on many of the other aspects of KM. It talks about learning and other skills that are difficult to capture as information. The article presents ideas as a major component beyond just the information. I highlighted some of the words I liked that expressed KM in the article and they are; judgment, intuition, people to help you, experience, education, trends, relationships, patterns, decisions, recommendations, actions, experts, emotional, political, communities, leadership, listening, and thinking. This was my favorite article out of the readings for this week.