Remember when you learnt cycling? The first time you stepped into a pedal and tried to balance the bicycle; the voice behind your neck telling you to keep pedaling and you will be fine. Learning cycling is a wonderful example of how difficult it is to “transfer” knowledge and that most of our wisdom is not just published in the Internet.

Have you ever heard of or read a book about how to learn cycling. I am sure there are books for that out there, but would you learn cycling from one? Without practice, patience and using all your senses, you will not succeed nor overcome the fear of falling down. Learning cycling shows how difficult it is to learn other than by just doing and experimenting.  About 80% of knowledge in our brain is tacit and cannot be written down.

I have recently stumbled over a nice article by Noam Cohen, in which he argues that the citation rules by Wikipedia, introduced as a quality mechanism, can also hinder knowledge sharing.

“In the case of dabba kali, a children’s game played in the Kerala state of India, there was a Wikipedia article in the local language, Malayalam, that included photos, a drawing and a detailed description of the rules, but no sources to back up what was written. Other than, of course, the 40 million people who played it as children.”

The same article also linked me to a great video called “People are Knowledge –  Exploring alternative methods of citation in Wikipedia” by Achal Prabhala.

At this point one could ask, what about social media? Knowledge sharing happens through conversations. But, let’s be honest, how many tweets would you need to explain sufficiently how to cycle? There is an inherent limitation in written exchange compared to face-to-face exchange. Ana what about video? Visual exchange can make learning easier; for example, I have read a dozen articles about how to repair my old espresso machine, but only the video explanation made me fully understand how to do it.
On the other side, Mike Davies argues in recent post:

“The lack of very local digital content is acute in Africa and is one reason even Google’s strategy is challenged here. Google Trader (among others) have offered cool new technologies, but without any real content they’re just not being used.” (http://blog.esoko.com/2011/08/mark-davies-part-ii-content-is-king.html)

But he also conludes that “we should also recognize that content can come from a multiple number of sources. Isn’t that the lesson we’ve learned over the last ten years? That content provided by your neighbour may be equally or even more relevant than that provided by your government, or by CNN.”

Through my experience with the hyperlocal open data platform in Frankfurt, I have realized how little information is available on the local level in Germany – information such as finding out why a red traffic light lasts longer or shorter (by the way,  there is a regulated framework called the “Richtlinien für Lichtsignalanlagen” – Guideline for Signal and Street lights). It is maybe a small detail, but that is what citizens care a lot about in Frankfurt.

So, it seems we need to work on two issues, making more knowledge explicit, particularly local content. And we also need to be aware that most knowledge won’t be on the Internet, and especially piles of opened data will not change that either.

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How and where does most of our learning happens in our daily work life? The visualization above illustrates how intensively the learning process can be, as it can even happen in ordinary places such as the water cooler or the telephone.  At our most common daily places and through our daily used tools is where expertise or experiences (tacit knowledge) are exchanged, and so this is also how and where ideas are raised, e.g. during discussions in places such as coffee houses.

Social media offers some powerful new ways of knowledge sharing, but hence its often asynchronous exchange, it has its limitations with many technical barriers. Everybody using Skype conference calls can tell a story about the technical constraints that this implies. The filter problem is not close to be solved. Services such as paper.li give the impression that we are rather accelerating the information overload.

Social media can reach far more people (e.g. Twitter) and is often the only choice for distance exchange. But can it seriously compensate face-to-face learning? The visualization shall show that knowledge management with social media can support or extend existing practice of  sharing.  But technology-driven communication has many barriers we need to be aware of. It is these barriers we need to focus on more.

Related posts:

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For years, I have heard that the web is becoming a platform, where one can easily use a website as a tool box.  Community sites installed just with a few clicks and knowledge sharing communities are on their way. But as in most cases, there is always a hard point, and in this case is to get people involved. Although technology plays a less important role, it is still a critical factor whether people like to join and engage. Many ready-made-website fail to deliver the most important thing: To help people find stuff and help them exchange.

Technology constraints vs. user needs

Of course there are examples of simplified websites, which focus on user needs such as Gmail or Flickr. But knowledge sharing in a community is often way more complex if you have to combine different forms of media, a library of existing resources and so forth. I have tested numerous platforms and until today I have just been disappointed because each time I had certain needs and always had to put these under technology constraints. Although it should be the other way around and technology should help me make it better and easier.

Professional circles vs. passion driven communities

One big differentiation is important. I am talking here about professional communities, where people exchange about their work. These communities are much more difficult to establish. If people have a real desire to exchange ideas, for example, about their hobbies, a bizarre designed forum could work perfectly and would be more dynamic. There are many examples of dynamic communities that existed way before they were named Web2.0 or social media. To me, work related communities focus a lot on the knowledge management principle: Find the right information where and when it is needed.

Information seeking vs. engagement

I have less time. Nowadays, I can engage in so many communities, mostly when I am not even online. Why should I also join in your community? Perhaps because this community gives me the information I need: quick, easy and maybe even in high quality.  From this perspective, for example, a Ning website is a disaster. Flashy, blinky things focus on a personal presentation instead of orientation, coherence and relevance. Have you ever tried to find something on a Ning website?  How many communities are really active on Ning? Okay, to be fair, technology and a user centered website is one factor, but let me raise some more points:

• Most of these social network websites are features loaded and focus very little on plain people to people exchange.
• Although you have as a webmaster a set of options to change your network, it is not enough. You need to be able to tweak in detail to make a platform user-centered. Listen to your members and make changes according to them.
• Facebook, Linkedin, etc. are great tools to network and to mobilize, but offer almost no flexibility to build a community of practice. It is the Facebook way or no way. More important these big platforms have no interest in real exchange and learning. It is not their business concept.
• A questionable approach are widgets, where content is distributed all over the place. Photos here, documents there. A RSS feed is easily another information stream with little relevance.
• Each community has its own culture of exchange and different requirements. It is so difficult to find the right platform for that. Instead one needs to squeeze requirements to technology constraints.
• Confidentiality. Latest from Facebook, it is always a risk to give your data to such a platform. Also other platforms have a clear exit strategy for their users. You can leave easily and take your data with you.
• Community develop over time. It is impossible to foresee what is needed and what not for your platform in the future. Often a wonderful list of features is tempting, but so much is not really needed later on.
• If you want to make information finding for users the easiest possible way, the whole information structure behind a site becomes easily complex. The more is done through intelligently tagging in the background, the easier it becomes for users to find something.

Alternative?

Either you are lucky to find a service that offers you what you need or you opt for the usual stony way to build your own website. I know it is not a great alternative, but I believe we have to realize that so many web technologies are still in its infancy and we have just started to focus on the users as the center point of such technologies. I know it is not the best to shot at Ning as an example alone, but their latest turn in their payment policy shows a typical dilemma. Nobody knows where such providers are in a few years time.

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There is often that notion that once you have access to the Internet or to other information and communication technologies (ICT), the whole world of information lies rights at your feet, so you only need to pick the best of it. But in contrary, it can become incredibly time consuming to verify information and to make yourself a trusted source. In the field of ICT4D, this issue is particularly important. In many cases people do not have years of experience working with ICTs and have actually learnt them just the auto-didactic way – using the Internet for their own benefit. Let’s take the case of farmers in rural areas of Africa.

Kenya. Photo: © Curt Carnemark / World Bank

Farmers in developing countries

The other day I had an interesting conversation with a colleague, who has been working already for decades in the rural development and agriculture field around the world. We talked about the potentials for ICT in agriculture and in specific farmers. One of the major challenges is neither access nor literacy, but simply trust. Why should a farmer trust an information coming from somewhere as an SMS? Farmers make careful elaborations, before they change certain practices. Information from a website can help, but at the end of the day what counts is the advice of trusted colleagues. So, we have to realize that information through ICTs often have only a small impact.

ICT and agriculture

In the case of agriculture, behavioural change through extension advice is even more difficult to happen through ICTs. For decades, it has been well known that advise has no effect if simply some guides and brochures are sent to farmers. More effective is a participatory process, where farmers learn from each other directly. So why should farmers change practices they have done for years when they get advice through SMS or any other channel? “It needs a lot more than ICTs,” pointed my colleague.

In contrast, market information particularly through mobile phones is more successful because of the price information, which are much easier to trust than a particular advice for the next cultivation. But even in this case, they had to be introduced in groups of trusted people. Otherwise, who would trust a SMS from anywhere? Would you? There have been cases where rumors spread through SMS have even led to violence.

Demystify the Internet in Rural Africa

Take yourself as an example, how many sources do you really read or how many people do you speak to before you can take the information for granted? ICTs allow for incredibly easy publishing and disseminating of information; but the information is still not worth a penny if it is not trusted. Linda Raftree has a great post, where she describes her experiences during ICT training courses in Ghana.

“Another question that surfaced was ‘Is the internet true?’” This led to a great discussion on how information comes from all sides, and that anyone can actually put information online. It’s truth, and anyone can’t believe everything one reads, it’s not regulated, you need to find a few sources and make some judgment calls.”

Although all this information is not new at all, so many ICT approaches forgot exactly about that challenge. The information has to only be delivered somewhere and that should bring change. The problem is that trust is built slowly through social relations and these take a lot longer to grow online.

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Mobile phones have tiny screens and keyboards, and need an agile finger to handle them. Yet some pioners believe mobile phones might be a key learning device for the future, and have even come up with smart ideas to make learning on the go a motivating and interactive approach. No doubts that if mobile learning (mlearning) works, it can potentially reach millions of people, who have difficulties to get access to learning materials, otherwise.

Moodle for the Iphone

For Steve Vosloo “…The cellphone is the kindle of Africa, until the prices of ebook readers come down…” (Tweet) Steve Vosloo from the M4Lit programm at the Shuttlewoth Foundation in South Africa sees here a potential for youth education. He experiments with an interactive mobile novel (www.kontax.mobi). “We want reading to be social (community) and engaging (interactivity). We’re reaching teens where they are — on their mobile phones”. He points out, “Teens don’t write enough”, but “teens love their phones.” So, could technology be an incentive to make youngsters learn?

My friend Inge de Waard is working on another interesting mlearning project around health. In her case, physicians working on HIV/AIDS care, in remote locations, are offered to learn through mobile phones about the latest medical information. “The didactic material consists of 3D animations simulating interactive clinical cases which are adapted to mobile devices.” The project is currently developing a mobile version of the well known learning plattform “moodle.” This way doctors not only get the course material to their mobile phone, but potentially can interact with colleagues around practice experiences.

For Robert Hawkins of the World Bank the future of education is around ubiquitous learning. “With the emergence of increasingly robust connectivity infrastructure and cheaper computers, school systems around the world are developing the ability to provide learning opportunities to students “anytime, anywhere”.

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If the social web and social media can make such a difference, then their impact should be measurable. Certainly, the question is: How much can or shall be measured? A gut feeling alone might not be enough, particularly when one needs to convince others to engage in social media. Nevertheless, I think there are some ways to get better metrics to at least measure interaction, which go beyond tools such as Google Analytics. So this is an attempt to measure interaction in social networks and the success or value of knowledge sharing?

Campaign: Storytelling and social media
Beth Kanter has an excellent presentation on storytelling & social media. First of all, she emphasizes that counting metrics alone makes little sense as they need to be part of a bigger framework. She takes the case of a campaign, which might have some good analogies to single social network platforms or communities of practice.

“Return on Investment is a much broader concept that doing math. If you lay it step-by-step, it includes these:

• Smart Objective
• Defined Audience
• Clearly articulated benefits statement that looks at tangible and intangible
• Use of metrics to measure your results
• Results translated into dollar value (donations or time saved)
• Financial calculations: net gain, opportunity cost, or comparison to other method
• Communicating the results”

Social network: Knowledge sharing and learning
If I translate that to my case, I have not got the smartest goal in terms of quantifiable results: A high value and share of knowledge. Lets say it is quite generic. But as Richard Dennison writes here, that is exactly a problem:

If you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. We are driving quality, innovation and creativity out of our businesses and institutions in favour of quantity. It has been shown again and again that our obsession with targets simply perverts activities to meet those targets at the expense of doing something useful or meaningful.

Nevertheless, I think there are at least some metrics that let you see how intensive or broad your interaction is. A while ago I collected already some metrics thanks to Rachel Happe.

I tried to approach this issue the following clusters and example metrics:

Representation
If you really want to achieve a high value you need a diverse representation.

• A good platform has a certain mix of representations: e.g. countries, organizations or departments, etc.
• The representation can be measured by visitors, members, contributions.
• You can set a criteria raster. For example, an own organization is less important and external stakeholders are more valuable.

Contributions
The percentage of contribution is a key indicator of the willingness to engage, and whether your website is attractive or not. For example, if more than 10% of your network is regularly participative (i.e. contributing), you have then achieved quite something.

• Frequency of new resources and the average percentage of member contributions.
• Mix of contributions, e.g. links are not as valuable as blog posts through a ranking.

Interaction

• Ratio of comments vs. resources: Average percentage of comments on each contribution such as blog posts, links, etc.
• The ratio of comments towards members.
• The amount of blog posts linking to other blog posts in the network.

Content (quality)

• The bounce rate of your website says how much people were interested to click further.
• Average time spent on pages.
• Page views. The more people browse pages – the more interest they have.
• The average amount of tags used by each contributor.

Outreach of website

• Growth of members or newsletter subscriber
• The amount of invitations sent from your platform.
• The amount of links to your platform.

Of course these metrics do not bring you much further in terms of quality, but I guess that could be solved by analysing the sample content or making a survey. But, who can say what content has higher quality for learning? It is not that easy. What do you think? Do you maybe have more metrics?

I checked in the past days external statistic systems such as Google Analytics and they only offer a few from the above metrics. So it is important to choose a platform which offers you more statistics. Measuring this by mailing is much simpler. In a next step I will try to get this information out of a Drupal platform and then contemplate more about Beth’s point to not only leave it on counting.

Two interesting attempts of calculators are here:

• The PBwiki ROI Calculator
• Calculator for social network campaigns

No related posts.

During last days I have been going trough different ICT4D papers, and then again I have been astonished to see that their focus was mainly limited to the issue of access although access to a computer or Internet is just a first step and does not mean you can fully engage in the web. Some time ago, while introducing a laptop to a relative, I observed how it is to move a mouse for the first time and how much more their is to learn and the complex steps that have to be taken before you master to browse the web and send your first email. There are many steps to be taken to use ICT as a mean for more.

The UNESCO has an interesting paper called Understanding information literacy: a primer, which highlights very accurate those different dimension for the higher goal of life long learning.

What is Information Literacy, where did it come from, how is it related to lifelong learning, and to other kinds of literacies, and why is it critically important to every nation, its institutions, and its citizens, in order for them to perform competitively and productively in a Digital World and a 21st Century Global Information Society, as well as to promote greater social inclusion, and freedom of expression and opinion

I summarized here the different steps of literacy necessary to fully leverage the potential of the Internet:

1. Basic or core literacies
   This term still applies to the core or foundation literacies of learning how to read, how to write and how to perform simple numeracy tasks necessary in everyday life.
2. Computer literacy
   Computer literacy means the efficient ability to know how to use and operate computers as information processing machine
   • a. Hardware Literacy
     Hardware literacy refers to the set of basic operations you need to know in order to use a computer such as a Personal Computer (PC) or Laptop, or perhaps a combination hand-held device such as BlackBerry efficiently.
   • b. Software Literacy.
     Software literacy refers to the “invisible” set of general-purpose procedures and instructions that the computer or telecommunications hardware requires in order to perform its functions properly.
3. Media Literacy
   Media literacy embraces everything from having the knowledge needed to use old and new media technology to having a critical relationship to media content in a time when the media constitute one of the most powerful forces in society.
4. Distance Education and E-Learning
5. Cultural Literacy
   Cultural literacy means a knowledge of, and understanding, of how a country’s, a religion’s, an ethnic group’s, or a tribe’s traditions, beliefs, symbols and icons, celebrations, and traditional means of communication (e.g. orally) impact the creation, storage, handling, communication, preservation and archiving of data, information and
   knowledge, using technologies.
6. Information Literacy
   … empower people in all walks of life to seek, evaluate, use and create information
   effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals.

Going through these steps one can imagine how long it can take and how much more there is to come once you have access. It is quite obvious that those steps or dimension for knowledge sharing and learning are an essential benefit getting through information and communication technology. But ICT’s are only means and access itself does not necessarily get you anywhere. This shows that the real challenge is to help people acquire these literacy skills. For example think back how long it took you to understand the basis and logic of an operation system, its folders, files etc.

Luckily, software is nowadays developed more intuitively as the “beta mode” websites show. Also, hardware is getting more user centered as the “iphone” shows. One imagine then the time it can take to engage through the web, to interact and collaborate. Social media opens new venues to engage in many of the above listed literacy. But all those nice fancy tools out there on the web have still to prove that they really improve literacy for all.

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In Phnom Penh, as everywhere else, the mobile phone is a must have accessory for the youth, and when they get together, they enjoy bluetoothing; or so Thomas Wanhoff told me during my stay in Cambodia. This basically means that they share ringtones, images, videos and games through their mobile phones. The other day I read that last year a quarter of Internet traffic was over the mobile phone. I myself use my mobile to access the web more and more, but I am still not completely satisfied since I do not get to interact easily enough through the social web. However, the iphone has really changed something in that regard.

And so, I wonder how the mobile web and, particularly the collaborative web, will develop? And will it work? By this I mean that I can interact with all sorts of tools via my mobile phone — edit a wiki, build a mashup, writing a blog post, and finally network more effectively. It is clear that the mobile will sooner or later bypass the personal computer by Internet usage. In developing countries the mobile phone is even more important because it will be the decisive tool to access the web as Joel Selanikio points out:

If I had told you ten years ago that by the end of 2007 there would be an international network of wirelessly-connected computers throughout the developing world, you might well have said it wasn’t possible. I am talking, of course, about the mobile phone network.

But, where are the applications and easy ways to do that on the mobile phone? One example are RSS feeds, which can be quickly delivered to mobile phones as Ndesanjo Macha described in a podcast how he accesses via his mobile phone blogs. Lighweight rss feeds are perfect for the slow GPRS connection. 

Most famous is of course Howard Rheingold’s book smartmobs.com. Already some years ago Rheingold described how deep the impact of the mobile web is for youngsters, who play role games in real time, and the game board is the streets of the city. One phenomena were the flashmobs, where a critical mass of people suddenly showed up somewhere to protest or party. Mobile citizen reporter is another interesting outcome but often it is limited to an uploaded photo.

In the field of mobile learning a lot has been discussed. As Teemu Arina points out nicely in a video interview about the future of learning.

Some years ago, Finland was very strong in the mobile side and people where laughing at the idea of mobile learning. But I think it’s coming. I think it’s integrating with the informal learning space, because being mobile means that the context is around you.  

There are still many limitation to the phone: the screen, keyboard, connection. However this is just a matter of time, and recent devices already make a difference. I wonder why  so little has been developed in order to interact and collaborate via the mobile phone in the social web.

Mobile social networks such as MXit in South Africa show the potential. I imagine some people will find it frightening to be always online, but it can also have a lot of advantages to have available Internet access everywhere. However, for developing countries it will make a huge difference to fully be able to participate in the social web because mobile phones are the future. I am sure I missed a lot of things happening. Please drop me a line if you know of interesting examples.

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From a knowledge management perspective Intranets are vital but so far inefficient. On one side, it is the only place where organizational information can be decentralized access 24/7. On the other side, the web behind the firewall is mostly top-down driven and hierarchical structured. The results are that only a tiny little fraction of social networking potential is possible and that most Intranets literally hinder possibilities to share knowledge.

Failure of Intranet
Well designed and managed Intranets cover most topics from an organization or company. However, if you look at the potential of social networking, knowledge sharing and learning, the internal web is in most cases failing terribly. Intranets represent top-down communication and no personal knowledge is offered, except for some neat yellow pages. Some companies already replaced their content management system with a wiki, where employees change things as they know better. Instead, the norm is content management system and useless work flows. So, person A writes a text, person B approves it, and person C publishes it. There is a higher chance to call some colleagues to get better information than finding it in the internal web. Thus, only a tiny fraction of what is really happening in an organization is offered. One consequence is that learning in an organization happens only outside the web.

The clash of cultures
There is a clash of culture between the Intranet sympathizers and those for open horizontal knowledge sharing. At the one end, there is the belief that information needs to be authoritatively managed and has to be standardized. Intranets often represent the wish of all relevant knowledge could be codified. At the other end, there is the belief that IT knowledge management solutions have to change, and emphasis should be on social networking. The read-write or collaborative web finally offers to the employees to use what fits best their needs. This, of course, changes the picture of what is happening in an organization. Intranets are planed mostly by small teams and too little focused is on the real needs of employees. Why do not let employees create their internal web then?

It will come anyway
I think the classical Intranet — a neat little homepage with different topics, a representation of each department, some yellow pages and maybe a document management system — is history in a few years. Having the three click blog installation, easy collaboration through wikis and web based office products, and be able to connect in own networks will completely burr the lines between the Intranet and Internet. For so many work related tasks, tools are already freely available in the internet and employees will sooner or later take use of that on a massive scale. It will come anyway and it surely might be a bit chaotic to some extent. But, which meeting is consistent, purely orientated on knowledge sharing and learning in your organization? Furthermore, it is a big chance in an organizational setting because it can deepen already existing work relations in an even more trusted environment.

Downsides

• Obviously, one danger is that all information, conversation and ideas are spread over the internet. How can you find out about what your colleague is doing? The internal search engines does not grasp it and again the possible transparency and exchange is lost because of too many tools in too many places.
• In the beginning it does need a learning phase of how to use each tool best. The key is to bring the right mixture of tools together, which fits best to the organizational culture.
• A holistic approach is important, otherwise social software leads to an information overload. Therefore filters, feeds and consistency are decisive.
• Social software depends heavily on its employee’s engagement, contrary to conventional Intranets. If there is no motivation, then better stick to the old Intranet.
• Web knowledge sharing can be very efficient, but it does not replace direct face to face communication.

No related posts.

It is pleasing to reflect about the most visited posts, from this blog, during 2007. I wonder why some triggered more attention than others; and I am looking forward to applying some lessons learnt in 2008.

1. 4 examples for innovative mobile phone use in Africa
2. 10 challenges for web2.0 in organizations
3. What is enterprise2.0? Five pillars for efficient knowledge sharing
4. A learning story: My way to web2.0
5. Blog action day: E-waste, the downside of the growing web
6. Web2.0, knowledge sharing and IT departments
7. Innovative online activism mashup
8. An overview of blogging for development
9. 3 different conversations: blogs to fight poverty
10. Social webs in Africa

This top ten present five interesting highlights from 2007:

1. Web2.0 finally entered on a wide scale organizations and companies.
2. The web finally goes beyond PC’s and has a breakthrough on mobile phones.
3. Development aid organizations started to sense a potential in web2.0.
4. It is the southern hemisphere were many innovative web applications came from.
5. Web2.0 – the collaborative web is more seen in respect to knowledge sharing and learning.

My personal lessons learnt after half a year blogging are different:

• Orientation
  Through this blog, I try to focus on giving an overview of different developments and link topics. To fish interesting pieces in the information ocean and link them, gives readers an own perspective to continue. I am glad this seems to trigger growing readers. I am still puzzled about how important the linking to other interesting content is valued although it does not take as much work as writing.
• Consistency
  As always, the clearer you write the better people will get you. I see blogging as a reflection for my learning. So, I still cannot resist to write rather abstract sometimes, but I will try harder to write more concise. The most consistent posts got most readers.
• Personal
  Writing from a personal perspective is authentic and triggers most of the comments. I often resist writing too personally because I think content is more important than opinion. However it is quite tricky to find out what my audience values higher.
• Variety
  I am glad the variety of topics seems to be accepted as my subscribers grow. I am, honestly, simply to curious about many things to not write about them. Like the web, topics are simply so much interwoven, and I believe interdisciplinarity is the key.
• Time
  I invested quite a lot of time on blogging and I am happy about its outcome. To start doing so means to become part of a network with other bloggers, and that is inspiring.

Lastly thanks a lot to all of my readers for checking this blog out through the year 2007. All the best for 2008.

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This post is rather abstract. It depicts me being puzzled about choosing between blogs or books. The question is if these two media could even be compared at all? Today I heard a presentation on which it was said that the internet is no medium, in the way that you absorb no knowledge from it, and so, only printed publications make you reflect the content.

Obviously, I have doubts about the previously said, but there are many differences between blogs and books. Just to describe a few, here, on blogs, links give further information and also feedbacks are commented directly. On books, the content stands for itself and in many cases only the bibliography shows a reference. Blogs are quick and informal, hold personal–short or long–reflections and often try to keep up with the rapid pace of the web. Books are well thought and take months or years to be published, and are based on a framework of hypothesis. Books were for centuries the ultimate way to share and acquire knowledge, but this has changed with the Internet fundamentally. In the early days, the Internet was great as a book searching tool, yet the overall knowledge offered was rather weak.

Nowadays, the Internet offers tremendous resources to learn and even allow us to share and create new knowledge. This is a way of how we process knowledge and learn completely different, as indeed Philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann points out in this quote I translated into English:

We do not approach things causal linear. We do not try to tap a text from its inner structure, instead, we approach associative information; we sample much more, we work much more on the principle of collage/montage. Peaces of knowledge, texts, photos, all we find in Internet, we rearrange, sort it individually. We do not tap and understand things in the classical approach of the hermeneutic, simply because this new medium supports much more to tackle problems in an associative manner.

This is an interesting description which shows how networked learning can look like. Blogging, therefore, is a mean to start reflecting the sheer mass of information or bring it down to some puzzle pieces. The sheer incredible pace of information, however, cannot be reflected just by blogging and linking. Books give still space for reflection although on the next page there are not dozens of links to follow. To read a book from beginning to end is consequently a very different experience than to read blogs. I do not want to miss any of them, but I start wondering how to keep up with the pace of information.

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There are many different types of blogging. Rohit Bhargava shows us 25 different ones in his presentation, starting from insight over piggyback to bridge blogging. What fascinates me the most, it is the reasons why people blog. Throughout the last months bloggers tagged each other: Why Do You Blog? These are some examples showing how different but also how similar the reason’s for blogging are:

• How Blogs Have Increased Human Intelligence by a Factor of 5
• 5 Reasons Why I Blog
• Five Reasons Why I Blog
• Five Reasons Why I Blog
• Why I blog

Way more down-to-earth is a Pew Internet study which summarizes the following top reasons of why people blog:

1. to express yourself creatively
2. to document your personal experiences or share them with others
3. to stay in touch with friends and family
4. to share practical knowledge or skills with others
5. to motivate other people to action
6. to entertain people
7. to store resources or information important to you
8. to influence the way other people think
9. to network or to meet new people
10. to make money

Personally, I find much more inspiring what Esra from Bahrain writes about:

In this new age of information technology, not only are blogs used to inform, but to help us network with other like-minded individuals from across the globe. In the Arab world, political activism through blogging is becoming more common, and is actually influencing a lot of the mainstream media outlets, pressuring them to cover human rights violations.

Blogging can be used for cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, and there are more and more pan-Arab group blogs emerging. Personally, I share a group blog with other young writers from Mauritania, Tunisia, and Morocco; something which helps me understand their cultures better. Had it not been for blogging, I would be embarrassingly ignorant about them and their societies, even though these are fellow Arabs I am talking about.

The web and particularly personal stories from people in blogs make us aware of how it is to live in different places. Blogging bridges cultures, opens unlimited network potential, and helps us to overcome strangeness. But I see one problem, to bridge countries, cultures and communication, we need a common language such as English. However, when we are writing in one only common foreign language, we will eventually limit ourselves to not be able to express fully our thoughts. To be continued …

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Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) is still a fairly new theme in the development arena. Throughout the years ICT4D has diversified in many different sub-themes such as e-governance, e-agriculture, e-health, education, etc. Although there have been successful stories, the high hopes had often not been realized in many projects. Many initiatives did not work out and so many projects failed to establish a solid and sustainable approach for ICT4D. The reasons are multifold and some learnt lessons are the following:

1. ICT4D has been and still is narrowly focused on infrastructure.
2. Underestimation for the importance of training, qualification, and the different dimensions of connectivity.
3. ICT4D can only successful if it is a mean and not the end itself.
4. Many projects were not orientated on the needs. The benefit of ICT output remained often unclear.
5. ICT4D projects were often not seen from a holistic perspective. Many projects lacked a sustainable concept.
6. Just to offer information (e.g. websites or databases) leads to nothing when people do not see a benefit in it.
7. ICT4D has social, cultural, political and economical dimensions. In that regard technology is only one part.
8. Many experiments could have been avoided if previous experiences were considered (e.g. rural radios).
9. ICT4D works most successfully when its users take over it, creating and changing technology to their needs.
10. Lastly the ICT4D has only a fragmenting approach of sharing knowledge and learning experiences. Ironically, most ICT4D initiatives are not linked together – the potential of the web has not been bailed.

A major challenge, however, is the lack of proven impact for ICT in development. That’s why the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development devoted, lately, an own website to this challenge. The business sector has achieved significantly more, as the success of mobile phones shows. The grameen phone campaign has proven its impact to tackle poverty; which computers, networks and the Internet did not achieve in a decade. A tragic example are telecentres or Internet cafes, which in Africa now often go bankrupt because people rather spend money on their mobile phones.

The market-driven mobile phone phenomenon stood out amidst many donor-driven ‘pilot’ projects that had either collapsed or never delivered the promise, says Nalaka Gunawardene therefore in a critical summary of the first years of ICT4D.

But is it that critical when the web shows every day what is possible, and how sheer connectedness has its impact on development? Many countries have achieved important steps such as India’s approach to e-governance or Venezuela’s results of switching to free and open source software. However, very decisive, from my point of view, will be web2.0, the social web, or the collaborative web. Why is that; I will answer on my next post.

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Yesterday, I read a blog post about “How do you convince people to share failures?” and I also heard about an interesting lessons learnt website project which was implemented some years ago.

In that project station masters were asked to give regular information about their stations such as statistics. Secondly to list problems and challenges throughout the last years. They were asked to describe how they tackled the problems. What were the failures and the success? This information combined with some criteria were filled to a database. With that every station master could find colleagues with similar problems and could contact them.

To me, it seems like a simply mechanism with a great result. A knowledge sharing tool which concentrates on learning experiences and connects people and knowledge.
But how would you do this nowadays in the realm of web2.0? Two questions came up to my mind:

• Does web2.0 really help us exchange lessons learnt in such an effective manner?
• Can tagging be the right way to find each others lesson learnt easier?

Web2.0 and lesson learnt
I have my doubts whether web2.0 goes this far yet to connect the right people with same problems in such an effective way. Social network tools give you features such as recommendations, feedbacks and a whole range of perspectives. But is that all you are looking for in that moment? In the best case, you can have a community of practice where you can address your questions. Valuable experiences are still hidden behind numerous links, which I can identify easier with social bookmarking, but still have to hope that Google will deliver me good results.

Tagging
In my opinion tagging is very powerful, but often underestimated, because it gives us relevance. Look at a tag-cloud and imagine you can click through endless relevant sub-tag-clouds. You can navigate through an ocean of wisdom, connecting knowledge and the people behind it. Imagine tagging is used wider than to just give broader information (e.g. general topic) but includes many much more information such as the “character” of a lesson learnt (success, failure, slow, expensive, high impact etc.). Many people already do that in social bookmarking, though it is very individual.

• Would that mean I can connect experiences the way it was down with a sophisticated application for the station masters? I wonder whether tags for evaluation can work as good as the topic-wise ones.
• How could the word “slow” be separated in a tag cloud from the word “software” so they do not stand next to each other?
• Do I really need this, or do topic clouds bring me anyway quicker to the field of my interest, and comments deliver the evaluation to me?

My aim is to use the power of a network itself to connect to experiences directly. I think that in most cases an application such as the station master is too much of an effort. It needs criteria and complicated programming. Can’t this be done easier with web2.0 technology and the wisdom of crowd?

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I have already written before about the concept of open source, but this time I want to highlight the potential of free and open source software (FOSS). I attended a while ago an interesting presentation on free and open source software by Andrea Götzke and Balthas Seibold. What I found most interesting about the presentation were the manifold effects of FOSS:

• Economy
  Cost savings from purchasing software. The market barrier is low for new businesses, but the overall added value is higher because the software can be developed locally. With services for hardware and the web, FOSS offers local employment and development of software and generates though more income locally.
• Education
  FOSS offers universal access. The freedom to study the code of software. In Venezuela, for example, FOSS gave access to education because the whole infrastructure is much cheaper there and own training capacity was built. FOSS can act as a free knowledge transfer and create human capital e.g. through software development. It, therefore, can lead to a “brain gain”. FOSS allows and needs a complete different approach of collaborative work project with high value on common learning.
• Culture
  The development and usage of FOSS can contribute to the country cultural heritage. Own developed software products can be better adapted to local needs and offered in many languages. Own software solutions open new venues of knowledge sharing and learning.
• Law
  Open source software is freely available and guarantees legal security. FOSS offers a sustainable technological independence.

Free Open Source Software represents certain values – sharing, collaborating, community and social development. These values have deep roots in human nature and could be found in all societies at all times. They believe this model – developing software by a community of peer reviewed activists, participants, employees and gifting the results back into the community to be further developed by others thus extending the cycle – could be extended to economic and social development in Africa. It is in this context that the FOSS model emerges as a powerful model for African development. From Brenda Zulu

Challenges

• For a high reliability on FOSS, a critical community is needed, which constantly tests and changes the source code. It needs open culture, which is not always prevailing.
• Proprietary software is also available illegally and cheap, so it offers no incentive to switch to FOSS.
• In many countries the FOSS community is very small and the interaction in a network needs the web and therefore connectivity, which is often not available.
• Much has been done in translating software, therefore many web software is available in different languages. But that is not the case with document material.
• In many countries a whole training infrastructure has to be build to switch to open source software. For example, the Venezuelan Government decided to adopt open source some years ago, and build with it many resources, own training and development infrastructure.

I often got the feedback from practitioners that it also depends on the needs of each particular case. Proprietary software can be a better solution or is anyway the only one available. I am sure I missed many points and factors, but I will continue later on with that topic.

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While reading “everything is miscelleanous“, I found a quote by Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Assiciation, in Library Journal back in 2005:

“Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.”

Of course it contradicts from my own experience and organizational blogging. In my opinion, the communicative and networking aspects of blogging are often underestimated in how it contributes to personal learning by writing thoughts or “just” linking and commenting on other sources. Stephen Downes describes how blogs and other web tools enhance personal and networked learning in a video. Even more intriguing to me is Weinberger’s argument: “Knowledge – its content and its organization – is becoming a social act.” With the example of wikipedia, he argues that the web enables us to interpretate, define, express and link knowledge in a new way. Simple said knowledge is not given in a top-down approach like the Encyclopedia Britannica, “knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps; it requires active engagement.”

Knowledge sharing and learning through the web is horizontal and with a steady flow. So an article has not date when it is finished and corrected. It is constantly edited, because of new facts or other perspectives from people. A blog post is a node in a network, which has comments or counter arguments in other posts. And wikipedia proves that knowledge, created by many people, is possible. Check out the book “The Age of Conversation” made by 100 authors. Imagine this in an organization. The intranet top-down communication would make no sense because the employees make their own web (e.g. wiki). One consequence would be that people, who know best, write the document and not necessarily the person in charge of it. In his book, Weinerger quotes Jimmy Wales talking about the neutrality of an article: “An article is neutral when people have stopped chaning it.” I wonder whether Michael Gorman would think the same today. Just last week a German journalist called Hans-Ulrich Jörges, from Stern social media, (e.g. content from blogs) “loser generated content“.

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I just finished reading Allison Fine‘s book “Momentum igniting social change in the Connected Age.” I really liked it because it explains in detail how we should reconsider cooperation and external communication in an organizational context. Fine speaks mainly of civil society such as activist organizations but I think her thoughts can be applied for all kinds of nonprofit organizations (the authors of wikinomics would probably say the same for enterprises). She argues in her book that we have just started to exploit the full network potential and elaborates what the difference for the Connected Age is.

A nonprofit organization shall see its work and purpose closely connected to stakeholders such as partners, members or volunteers. The consequence is to join an “authentic two-way conversation“. This can be achieved by orientating the organization towards open source thinking. In contrast to the proprietary way, where organizations are vertical structured and act as information holders. “Just as learning needs to be more open and transparent organizational planing cannot be the proprietary, closed process it was in the broadcast days.” The open source approach emphasizes on listening to the audience, requesting feedbacks and engaging on equal basis with partners in a network. Openness is the key factor, so within a network everybody is a participant and internal and external boundaries of an organization get blurred.

For Allison Fine it goes as far as that “activists organization must lead by letting go. It’s counterintuitive but true that the more decision making you push away from the center, the more powerful a networked effect. That’s the power-to-the-edge-concept.” The web gives the opportunity to get feedback and interact directly within a wider network of potential like-minded people or even with competitive organizations. But this network approach, in her opinion, has to be facilitated “to fuel conversations” and to engage in social media exchange. However, “technology does not create a sense of community itself, but it can provide a virtual inexpensive place to gather to make community happen.”

But for Allison this not just an option to choose: “Those organizations that ignore the power of social networks will see their relevance and effectiveness sweep away like acid from a leak battery.” Not much more to add than: Yes, it is the web. Yes, it is what people make out of it. Yes, it gains momentum.

Interview and podcast with Allison Fine by Britt Bravo

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Lost in the old web
Throughout the last years I have had mixed emotions about the Internet. On one hand, I was amazed about people, news, themes etc., but on the other hand, I was not satisfied with the overwhelming load of information and the difficulty of obtaining it when needed.

Running around to collect information
I used Google to research all my information and often repeated the same steps to find the same websites. I looked endlessly through websites to find eventually some information. I relied on all sorts of websites in hope that they would post something appealing for me. Basically, I ran though the web to find relevant information without mayor results. I always knew there was more than that and I could not catch up with the latest information.

Watch out! A new web has arrived!
One day a friend of mine pointed me to delicious – a social bookmarking tool where people from all over the world share links. I imported my favourite links onto the server and saw that many other people had already bookmarked the same links as well, and even had many other interesting ones. I was convinced that people knew much better than search engines. I also discovered that there are many people out there in the web who write riveting thoughts in their blogs. And that these blogs and social bookmark sites are basically networks made out of links, information and people.

Kick the overload of information!
I knew of RSS, a universal content format, designed to make the content of a website everywhere available. But after a while I understood that I could grasp all kind of information through feeds. So I threw away my fishing rod and got a fishing net instead to bring all relevant information out there on the web to my laptop. Now I can see when friends upload new photos, see changes in our jointly used Google calendar and have all the information compiled to my needs.

Becoming part of a community
So far I was pretty passive and contributed only with bookmarks. But because I appreciated all the valuable information, I decided to get active and start a blog to reflect on it what I read and learn from the web (networked learning). Suddenly I became a node in a far reaching network and started to interact with many people who had an interest on the same topics. I left all portals behind me and began valuing the contribution to the web of so many people out there like wisdom of crowd.

Sharing is the key!
All the richness of information comes from the participation of many people. Therefore sharing is the overall premise. I finally understood much better the power of hyperlinks and discovered how even complex themes can be greatly connected through the web and used for learning. You can virtually see how information finds its way through the web. Lastly, I discovered that tagging is a great way of making sense for all this information, and it is okay if everything becomes miscellaneous.

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I have just spent three days of intensive discussions with interesting people from around the world, who work in different areas of knowledge management for development (KM4DEV). Besides of some sessions, the three day event had an open sharing and learning approach by leaving it up to the participants to fill in the agenda. The concept seemed a bit confusing in the start, but turned out to be very creative and inspiring.

So here is some feedback of things I found especially interesting from the workshop:

• Web2.0 and knowledge management
  The workshop itself was the best example of how important face to face contact is and how it opens many venues for learning. The collaborative web nevertheless, gains great importance all in the knowledge management field. Many people are involved in an online knowledge sharing or are planning on building a new generation of sharing and learning platforms. Interesting to me, however, is that wikis were seen quite skeptical and rather complicated. The linkages between tagging, RSS, Blog, wiki and social bookmarking were discussed, but only some organizations have started to integrate them.
• Graphic facilitation
  Nancy White gave a great session about how graphical facilitation opens new avenues for expression, reduces complexity and helps to give a picture of a process or constellation. It really encourages me to do more in visualization even though I am not very talented in drawing. Micheline Chartrand also made a nice post on that session.
• Styles of presentation
  There was not a single power point presentation during the workshop, nevertheless there were funny and inspiring presentations: A lot of of drawings, different kinds of performances such as singing and acting, and videos such as the one for social bookmarking. It is of course just a copy of the great RSS in plain English video.

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Unconferences are spreading around the world and it proves that Internet communication behaviour, knowledge sharing approaches, and the open source philosophy transcend into real world. But what is unconference? Basically it is a get together of people who would like to exchange certain themes. Interested persons can join the two day discussion and brainstorming. One important rule: everybody is a listener and a presenter at the same time. The event is organized over a wiki. It can be practically organized by anybody.

But what makes it so special and different? Some weeks ago, in April, I was lucky to join a barcamp, a form of unconference, here in Frankfurt. Robert Basic and Franz Patzig initiated it. In the following weeks the wiki gained life and people signed in as attendees, proposed topics in the realm of web2.0 and coordinated logistics and even a sponsor. Here are some interesting impressions that I got from barcamp Frankfurt:

• At the beginning, as there was not a fixed plan, everyone was curious waiting around for something to happen. After half an hour or so, two initiators explained the concept. This was followed by short but funny introductions of each one of the 150 attendees, who, most of them had very different backgrounds and worked in very different fields.
• After the little introduction, everybody crowded in front of the board (photo) to see the offered sessions and to add an extra one or join with another similar one. That was enough to start the various presentations. Some people did sophisticated power-point presentations for creative commons while others talked freely about knowledge management in enterprises. Discussions arose and new sessions developed out of them.
• The event offered an informal atmosphere with many open minded people. You could easily ask questions to each other and network. Small groups were formed spontaneously to discuss and to brainstorm. The common interest and open approach in how to address problems was very interesting.

To me, it seems that unconference is overlapping with open space, which is more of a method while behind unconference there is a philosophy. It is fascinating how unconference motivates people to network and collaborate. In that regard, it is quite different to conventional conferences because it is a bottom-up approach, highly creative and can be used for all sorts of topics. In Canada transit camp discusses local development, and in France a wine camp was organized. Some other examples are Kenya or India where Barcamps were also organized. Lastly, this fascinating initiative is explained in detail in a book, which is of course written as well in a wiki.

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