Infinite Possibilities: Amy Gahran’s
Contentious and the power of blogging
In a wonderful blog entry from July 15, 2004, Amy insists that the term “knowledge management” has become corrupted by consultants eager to solve every business’s knowledge problems. She suggests that knowledge management “boils down to arranging ideas.” Simple, yet profound, and leading us in new directions.
She views arranging ideas as the key task for writers, editors, content professionals, and instructors. This process of arranging ideas consists of three core tasks:
• Recording your thoughts
• Organizing and storing your thoughts
• Sharing your ideas and observations to enable mixing, matching, insights and creativity.
Phase two of this idea, pushing it a bit farther, Amy writes on July 27, 2004 about how arranging ideas can spawn new ideas. She notes: “It seems to me that there may be infinite possibilities for creative thinking (not mere cleverness, but truly creating new ideas) because, in my opinion, context creates meaning.”
Where’s the creativity?
Having opened the door for new visions of creativity emerging from thoughtful and productive bloggers as well as those whose professions fall under the large encompassing umbrella of the term “knowledge worker,” she notes the limitation: weblogs and wikis do an efficient job of “storing and labeling info-chunks so they can be easily retrieved and shared.” However, this storage-and-retrieval strategy doesn’t enhance creativity. “At least most of these systems are not designed specifically to enhance and leverage creativity.”
She’s absolutely right. They don’t. but having tried numerous strategies over the years (file folders, mind maps, whiteboards, sticky notes, colored pens, etc) for increasing the richness of my thinking by keeping ideas in some kind of fertile juxtaposition, I find the blog a wonderful tool for storage-retrieval and serendipitous juxtaposition!!
When I began to blog, I knew that I would be using the tool in the service of my research work with the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative
(NLII). So I set out to capture ideas, both great and small. I try not to “muse” and ponder in a stream of consciousness fashion, leaping from idea to idea, but rather to structure the idea and fill it out. This self-imposed discipline stops me from the jotting habit: jotting down an embryonic idea and praising myself for my insight, without developing the idea. And developing ideas, pushing them, detailing them, synthesizing insights, in short: ARRANGING IDEAS, is, for me, the only way to deepen thinking and improve the quality and usefulness of the results.
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf introduced twentieth century novel readers to the power of stream of consciousness writing. But in both cases, that magnificent flow had been carefully crafted to produce a work of art. To leap from famous novelists to ECAR Research Bulletin authors, I’d like to quote Karin Steinbrenner’s excellent bulletin,
The Information Architecture Imperative (January 2003). In her overview she notes that one of the challenges for information-intensive organizations is the laissez-faire manner in which information is handled. “Ninety percent of all information is unstructured, maintained in documents or other formats.” That’s a staggering figure.
90% of all information is unstructured
I want my blog to begin acting as a digital repository for my research, writing, and presentations. I want key insights from my reading to be captured and processed and archived, so that when I decide to move deeper into a topic or link two topics to see what the conjoining might suggest, I want that knowledge to have already been synthesized and structured in a stage one process.
The Context Dilemma
I’d like to continue the question that Patricia McGee began asking in our
collaborative blog on learning objects and knowledge Management. She asked: can we make content context-free, and should we be trying to do that? The tension between granularity and searchability has been present since the beginning of the dialogue in the mid-1990s.
Let’s look at blogs as if they were designed to become personal digital repository for ideas large and small, for ideas at various stages of development. What might the benefits of deliberately crafting your blog entries as granular learning objects which could then be retrieved and re-used to increase productivity and creativity?
When I first began my individual blog, I quickly realized that if I structured/designed entries to a specific purpose, I might reap some exciting benefits. What do I want from my blog?
1. Access to the products of my creative thinking and musing and reading
2. I want them electronic, on the web , and searchable without extra effort on my part
3. I want them to cross-pollinate with each other, with other blogs, and so feed into my research, writing, and presentation
Once I identified these desires and expectations, I then found the blog an alluring place to pursue ideas which otherwise would remain tiny letters on yellow stickies, neatly pasted to an article I can no longer locate.
One key article and one blog discovery took me further in my search for a creative and productive tool in my knowledge work. The first caught my interest about a year ago, when I was preparing for the
NLII’sFeature Focus Session on Learning Objects, being held at Ohio State University in October 2003. In an article called
“Is the Academy Ready for Learning Objects?” Stephen Acker, Dennis Pearl, and Steven Rissing of OSU, discussed the current attitudes of higher ed toward the learning object issue.
Two key ideas caught my eye. First, a new way to view the traditional textbook, as a “portable library of “learning objects,” chapter sections, illustrations, and charts, described individually…” (p.85) When we expect to meet resistance to the idea of modularizing class content, a comfortable analogy is always helpful.
The second idea was more abstract and more potent with new directions: “Interdisciplinary enthusiasts countered that knowledge grows as outsiders review what has become invisible within a traditional discipline.” The game is not about reducing each discipline to tiny discrete fragments, but rather to encourage diversity, to allow knowledge to be constructed and organized in multiple ways.
In summary, the OSU trio insist that “Learning objects invite new contexts, extended meaning, discovery, conversations across chasms.”
I like this idea very much. Next, Amy Gahran’s ideas from her blog
“Contentious"
