Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Another month is gone with very low blogging here. Actually, my whole last month’s life revolved around blogs: I worked on my blog course, I met Romanian bloggers, I wrote papers on blogging, I lead a workshop on blogging… And I blogged a lot in Gabrielia, my blog in Romanian language, and in my other blogs.
I tried to give a new impulse to my blogging students, challenging them to talk about a few specific topics, such as:
- do I need to use all the available blog features? What is the 20% of absolutely necessary and most used features?
- what do I do to promote my blog and what are the results?
- do my readers perceive me correctly?
- could I use my blog as a professional portfolio when looking for a new job?
- what are the advantages and disadvantages of an online course, without any face-to-face interaction?
There wasn’t much feedback. It looks like you can learn the technique, but if you miss the spirit…
There were some notable exceptions, but more about this in a later post…
I sent a paper to the Business Informatics conference organised every two years by my Alma Mater in Bucharest on the use of weblogs in education, titled “Collaborative Learning using Weblogs”. I had another topic in mind for it, but the time was very short and I thought I could base my paper on a blog post made few weeks before on blogs in education(sorry, only in Romanian, but some of the links are relevant!). The post was triggered by a information request made by a Romanian journalist from Jurnalul National while I was still in Luxembourg.
Well, bad assumption – it proved to be really difficult to turn a blog post into one section of a scientific paper. The rules of these two are completely different:
- hyperlinks in the blog post versus explanations in the paper (with the corresponding references);
- personal feelings and opinions versus objective findings;
- a friendly tone vs an impersonal one;
- free form versus an imposed structure.
I made it till the end. But I will never again assume that it will be easier to write a paper on a specific topic because I blogged on it before!
And of course, I sent an abstract to the ECKM ’05 which will take place in Limerick, Ireland, titled “At the Crossroads of Knowledge Management with Social Software”.
I intend to reuse parts of an internal report written for CRPHT on Social Software, and to have a closer look at the manner in which Social Software supports KM, with emphasis on particular KM activities at the individual, group and societal level. I’m planning to illustrate my statements with examples from various weblogs, wikis, social networking and folksonomy sites.
I’m not only “emotionally involved” with ECKM (and I have plenty of reasons to be so: participated in 3 of the 5 editions, know a lot of the “usual suspects”, member of the organising committee, Larry Prusak as keynote speaker), but I also have a particular reason to be there this year: if everything goes well, I’ll already be in Limerick in September, working on a new and exciting project.
I’m already in contact with my new team mates, as we are considering a possible participation in a workshop on Distributed Software Development in Paris, colocated with the IEEE International RE Conference 2005.
The deadline of the “User-Centered Evaluation and Online Communities” call for book chapters is at the end of the week, and I still don’t know if I will make it or not. I have a few good ideas, but there’s still a lot of work needed.
How was that nice quote? I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Thanks, Google;-)
April 23 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
A bright and exciting period of my life ended this week: the post-doctoral research stage sponsored by ERCIM came to its end this Monday. A lot of thoughts to share and conclusions to draw… Unfortunately, there was no time for blogging.
In the last three weeks, I made huge efforts to finish my papers and reports, to keep up with OSN2005, to find a new job, to empty my apartment in Luxembourg and to enjoy a tiny bit of personal life. I am really amazed that I am still on my feet – it’s been a tough, but rewarding period!
I hope to catch up in the following weeks, during my vacation in Romania – there are so many drafts on my blog I would like to finish and publish!
I’ve spent the last few days in Volmarstein, Germany, attending a Leonardo project meeting. One of the Romanian students attending my blogging course was there too, so naturally we couldn’t stop from giving the others a 5 minutes lecture about blogs and what are they good for. The conclusion? Claudia created a project blog in less than 3 minutes and invited all the team members to join. I am curious to see if the initial enthusiasm will last, and we will live to see most of them posting!
The first thing I discovered in Volmarstein was the wi fi in our hotel. It was really great to be able to stay in touch with the world while working with our colleagues located in the Ruhr valley.
And now that I’m spending one more night in Stuttgart before taking a Carpatair flight to Romania, I discovered another wi fi spot in this not-so-classy hotel found on the Internet.
I am not sure if I woke up at 4 am tempted by the wi fi, or it only made my sleepless half of the night more enjoyable.
March 05 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Ever since BlogWalk2 I thought of the possibility to adapt the Open Space technology for being used online. Of course, it wasn’t the same – a lot of its special flavour would have been lost, but still…
When Ton wrote about BlogWalk5 and the Traveler virtual environment, I told myself that maybe this is what we need for continuing the BlogWalk discussions online.
Then Magdalena Boettger was brave enough to publish her old notes from BW2 – after months and months- and I sent her mine, not daring to publish them anymore. Her answer to my e-mail mentioned again my own concern:
In Amsterdam we noted again that Open Space is fun and creative and lively
but the problem is how to keep the results and ideas and to work on with
them. We have to care for that some next time. But how?
This evening I was experimenting with Technorati Tags and I decided to check what was tagged with “flow”. Via Chris Corrigan’s Parking lot, I landed on a web site offering Open Space Online services. It sounds really interesting, but…
No external online moderator is needed. COMOSO, the virtual Facilitator
guides all participants simply through the process of the conference. The
participants themselves are the experts: They meet because of a shared
interest in a major theme. It is their knowledge, their questions, their
suggestions, and their dedication that co-develop new ideas and solutions.
They also provide a sample documentation. And the prices sound fair. But I wonder if it really works without a moderator – probably they mean that one of the participants has to take over this role.
I think this is wishful thinking, but even if it’s interactive and well organised, there are other dimensions that could be added. As it is right now, it is a plain, uni-dimensional tool. But just think what it could become if John, Jens and Helen would give you access to their online identities before the meeting (Bloglines subscriptions, del.icio.us and Flickr tags, Technorati profile as a link to one’s own blog(s)). Or if you could browse them during the discussions or afterwards! Just have a look at the About section of this blog – isn’t this all the information that characterizes us nowadays?! The 43 Things or his Orkut communities give you much more information about a person than you can get from reading a formal CV! Of course, this could be only the information that the person agreed to make public.
And then I surfed further, and via Riccardo Cambiassi, I found this “cool new service: evnt; a kind of del.icio.us for events”.
Few words from the Introduction:
evnt is a project developing a range of web based software applications for
handling events, location and calendaring. We are currently building our first
application, an online tool for calendar sharing. With the beginnings of this
open platform in place, we are now expanding our activities towards developing
other situated tools, based on a common platform, that support multiple and
diverse projects in the area.
This made me dream even further: not only looking for people reading the same things as you are, but also looking for people who are going to attend the same event, or be in the same town.
I had moments in the last few days when I felt overwhelmed – so many things are happening every day, that being away for a day or two makes you feel left behind. But now I’m beginning to guess the big picture – there is a direction, something new is being build under our eyes, bottom-up, without an initial blueprint, without a unique command point – like in the blog-related impressionist painting metaphor discovered by Lilia visiting the Art Institute in Chicago.
February 08 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
That’s great! Now we have Romanian Blogging Awards too! Gabriel Mihalache, whose excellent blog I discovered not so long time ago, decided to organise this competition on his own. Yesterday, reading his blog, I discovered not only that Coniecto was among the nominees for the “Most Professional Blogs”category , but also that our baby, Prinsea, is nominated in the “Most Practical Blogs” category.
We started Prinsea(the name of a children game in Romanian, meaning “catch me!”) with the intention of providing technical information (and not only!) for both actual bloggers and to-be-bloggers in Romanian language. We are four authors by now (Gabriel, Troniu, Dragos and myself), but I have signals from others who would like to join us.
The categories set up by Gabriel are: rumors, best of the best, happenings, theory, tricks – this could give you an image about the content!
I’m using Prinsea in combination with Roblogs – the course blog – for teaching blogging to a group of Romanians. It proves to be an interesting experience – even if it’s more time consuming than I ever imagined!
I don’t think the Romanian blogosphere is mature enough for organising competitions, but I welcome Individualism‘s initiative as an excellent way to raise the awareness on the blogging phenomenon in Romania, and to help us find each other. I discovered a couple of new blogs – very promising voices! There are a lot of Romanians blogging in English, from Romania or from abroad – but also people who blog in Romanian.
Well, if I succeeded to catch your attention, you can vote here.
January 02 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Yesterday evening I spent more than 4 hours on blogging and documenting the PKM workshop at KM Europe. In Amsterdam I succeeded to post drafts, but since then I couldn’t find the time and spirit to detail them. At a certain point, I was ready to give up. I was on the point of convincing myself that it isn’t worth it after such a long time. I had the impression of becoming a sort of “conference historian”, very different from the “conference blogger” I intended to be. Then I discovered a comment of Monica André to my post about KM Europe Day 1, reassuring me that it is worth it. And I decided to go on.
Why did it take so long? Because in the mean time I visited several other blogs, looking for names, links and enjoying my time.
Well, at about 1 am I decided I was done. I was ready to hit the Publish button, when some bad memories visited me, and I decided to make a copy of the post before hitting the button. OK! Selecting… and … everything vanished! I tried several tricks, nothing worked! Gone, gone for ever! I tried to repeat the steps, in order to understand what caused the problem. It didn’t happen again! And then my eyes fell on the calender: starting with November 30, Mercury is retrograde! I calmed down and went to bed – I can’t fight Mercury, anything but this, I am a Virgo and Mercury rules the Virgo sign. I’ll have to make peace with him!
Astrology is one of my hobbies – and because I thought you could learn a bit from my mistake too, let’s see what happens in such times, when, seen from the Earth, Mercury seems to move backwards:
Astrologically, retrogrades signal a change in pattern. The matters in life
associated with that planet tend to take a more inward focus. As the planet
doubles back over territory it just covered, we also must do things over, go
back and reinforce that which we already started. Mercury governs ideas,
communications, commerce, and travel.
What does all this mean? Plan for delays. Mercury retrograde signals
complications in holiday travel plans. It’s a tricky time when unexpected delays
and detours crop up all around, many times connected with traffic, weather,
machinery or communication snafus. The goodies are out there, but they may not
come in the package you expect. Opportunity may knock on the back door. Keep in
mind that help is available if you reach out. Despite, or maybe even because of,
this month’s glitches and snafus, you could make some very good
connections.
Mercury retrograde comes every 4 months—it’s not the end of the world—but
it is wise to understand that you may encounter misinformation, misdiagnoses,
and realities which do not fit your expectations. Be flexible during this time,
allowing room for misunderstandings and miscommunication. Where precision
matters, double check the details. When Mercury is in Saggitarius, our focus
tends to be on the forest rather than the trees. (from Molly’s Astrology
for December 2004)
More on this here. But don’t panic! Just recognise it was Mercury when odd things like this happen to you and slow it down a little! What’s interesting is that all modern horoscopes advise people to back-up their harddisks before these periods. And Blogger had some problems today, did anyone else notice?
I would be happy to hear your stories on this. 30 November till 20 December – what went crazy during these days. If you don’t believe a word, just ignore me and go to the next blog on your list! But don’t tell me I didn’t warn you 😉
December 01 2004 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This week I’ll be in Amsterdam, visiting KM Europe,(8-10 Nov) and attending ECITE,(11-12 Nov).
If you’d like to meet me there, I’ll atend the PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) workshop on 9Nov – details on the Wiki homepage – wiki.knowledgenetworker.net .
This time ERCIM will only partially support my trip – my conference budget is almost gone! but I’m convinced it will be worth it. Let’s hope the flue I caught in Italy will not come back!
November 07 2004 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Paris, 29.09.04
One day before ECKM, I was invited to a special lunch where the former CNAM-IIM KM MBA professors where supposed to meet Karl Wiig. In case there’s anyone here who does not know who Karl Wiig is, he’s called the father or great-oncle of Knowledge Management, because he was the first who ever used this term in 1986, at the ILO conference in Zürich.
The lunch was planned by Charles Despres – the IIM Director, and Daniele Chauvel– the KM MBA Director. Actually, Charles and Daniele co-organized the ECKM this year, together with Academic Conferences.
The lunch was at Fontaines d’Elisabeth, a small and cosy restaurant close to the Elisabeth Church next to CNAM.
A few words on the participants:
– Nicholas Leck – from Entopia –used to be the head of a EC workgroup on KM initiatives
– Andrew Lewis and his colleague – from Nemesia
– Michel Grundstein
– Gilles Proriol- Cognito – a company involved in knowledge cartography networks software
– Franck Halmaert – AlmaTeam
– Andre Yves Portnoff
It was a lovely meeting with excellent food and wine, but mostly with interesting talks. Karl Wiig told us about his Norvegian origin, about being retired (he doesn’t believe it himself – he’s only officially 😉 retired! ), and declared himself happy that his newest book which I ordered via Amazon did not arrive on time. Why? Because otherwise I would have been able to attack his ideas!
We talked about different professionals using the concept of “Knowledge Management” to name very different things – this being the cause of tremendous misunderstandings. This reminded me again the story of the six blind wise man trying to describe an elephant. Changing its name? Karl Wiig told us about the replacement word he thought of – and this would be epistemics. Mentioning the fact that in Romanian, knowledge is translated in two different ways: (1) as the process of knowing (cunoastere) and (2) as the result of the process (cunostinte), Karl Wiig noticed that the first approach was dynamic, as opposite to the second, which is static. This made me think that the first approach belongs to societal, human resource sources, while the second originates from the technological domain.
It was interesting to see how such an important person was paying attention to what other people said, asking them questions and not imposing his point of view. I think this is one of the important features of a free spirit, you can’t speak about knowledge management without being open to learn from every experience and from any person you meet! And during the next two days, Wiig kept on passing from one room to the other, talking to lots of people, asking questions, offering his ideas.
I had the chance to talk also to some of my “teaching colleagues” about our grup of students- their special way of learning as a group. I was happy to receive a confirmation – it was not only me who noticed they worked better in a group than as individuals. We all agreed on the rewarding experience in itself, and on the fact that selection criteria should be improved.
In the evening, there was a cocktail offered by the ECKM organizers, where registration was also possible. This gave me the chance to meet some of the participants before.
Charles Despres tried to introduce me again to Karl Wiig, and both of us played our roles with dignity, getting acquainted once more, till we started to laugh lout. Actually, Charles kept promoting me during the whole conference as a star, which was bad, because after 3 days I almost bought the story myself;-)! This is it, we all have an ego, no matter how deep we try to hide it!
I had finally the chance to meet Sue Nugus in person, who was of great help to me in the last 5 years regarding my conference participation. And met again Prof. Remenyi, the person who brought me to KM as a potential research field, almost 6 years ago.
And two other nice ladies, Iris Reychev, from Israel, and Helen Richardson from New Zealand, who were going to present their papers on Friday, in a session I was going to chair. I kept telling everyone that I am from Romania, I got a research fellowship, spent 9 months in Germany, and now I’m in Luxembourg for the other 9 months. I think I told the story 50 times during the 3 days. So when Iris asked me if I speak any Romanian, I said: Naturally! Her parents immigrated to Israel from Romania, and she was still able to speak Romanian, even if she was born and grew up in Israel.
A very interesting conversation with Tiit Elenurm, from the Estonian Business School, made me lose the last chance to get a drink (all I desired was water!), becase the bar closed. Anyway, it was worth it! So I accepted the dinner invitation, and joined a group made mainly of the organizers, but also of few conference guests.
Roy Williams – whom I had the chance to meet at the very first ECKM in Bled, Slovenia, Tiit Elernum and I debated the future of e-learning, talking about the paradigm shift. Of course I brought Stephen Downes’ ideas in the conversation – it was inevitable:-)
Attracted by the discussion going on on my other side, I got acquainted to Elena Bou from ESADE, Spain. She and Charles were talking about career targets and the dream position. As several times before, being asked an unexpected question made me give an unexpected answer – unexpected even for me. It was about my dream job after my fellowship comes to an end next year. Charles asked me what is my major criterium : fame? money? a particular place in the world? more free time? And my answer was: usefulness. This is how I’d like to be: useful – not rich, not famous, but useful. I’m actually looking for a job that would put most of my skills to work, and would make a difference in this crazy world, making it just a tiny little bit better.
I know this sounds a bit odd and idealistic, but this is how I feel.
And then another gentleman showed up: it was Ib Ravn from Denmark. After introductions, we got very fast to informal learning, and I said Danish people are better than most of the other nations at informal learning and knowledge sharing. Ib asked me why do I think so – and what came into my mind where their tradition in longlife learning – after all, Grundtvig was a Dane, and the flat hierarchy in the Scandinavian companies. And also because the Danish culture is not one of competition, as the American or German ones. He agreed with the arguments, even if he didn’t totally agreed with my first statement. We continued our talk in the next days, and Ib’s presentation was one of the best I heard at the ECKM.
October 06 2004 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I left my poor blog starve to death these days. According to Suw, it should be easy enough to resurrect it. Hope it still works! I’m not good at all at managing my priorities – I kept on posting drafts with one-two ideas and a link, but never succeeded to come back and write comprehensible sentences for publishing them. Someone called me a procrastinator – well, this is what I am. I always want to do more things than I’m able to in a limited time period…But let’s come to the point that made me blog at 1 am:
Few days ago, I found a message on the onlinefacilitation discussion list at Yahoo, talking about Stephen Downes’ “fantastic presentation” on Reusable Media, Social Software and Opennes in Education at a conference in Utah and pointing to both the PPT and the MP3 files. I downloaded the PPT and it made me curious – a “Blogger of e-learning”? what could this mean? Then Friday afternoon, after finishing my presentation about Open Source Communities I was working on for the last few weeks, I downloaded the MP3 and copied it to my MP3-USB stick, to transfer it on my laptop at home. But waiting in the bus station, I thought it could be nice to walk a bit- it was a beautiful Indian Summer day- and listen to the presentation. I intended to walk for 10-15 minutes, but after one hour I was still walking and listening, carrying the heavy laptop on my shoulder and totally charmed by what I heard.
What was it all about? The presented paper was titled “The Turning Point”. I have the feeling that this is what we were looking for when at BlogWalk2 we agreed there was a bit more behind the “blogging metaphor”, but we were not able yet to express it.
It’s about open vs.closed – and not only regarding learning matters. For me, it was the perfect timing -I had my head full of features of the Open Source culture. What Downes says is that we have the chance to turn toward a new approach in learning, and to transform the current broadcasting- where learners are actors and are obliged to play a pre-written role – in conversations. I read about markets being conversations (The Cluetrain Manifesto), about blogging as conversations(finding your identity in conversations with others – Lilia Efimova), and I had in mind the extraordinary examples of Barbara Ganley (who changed totally the learning style of her students using blogs as support and stepping out of her teacher role to become one of them) and of Lee Bryant (who’s company managed to grow a knowledge management system organically, by talking to extensive numbers of people involved) at BlogTalk 2.0.
That story of the Little Prince goes the same way. (If I would like to get education, I would look for a friend and I would make a long trip together with him. This way we would come to know what do we need for life!)
All we have done by now was to transpose the old methods of teaching and learning to the digital space provided by Internet. And most of us were feeling that this was not enough. It is useful, because it supresses time and distance constraints, but it’s not enough.
Downes says “In general, new technology is introduced in two stages… First, it duplicates existing products and services… Second, it obliterates them…” We are still in the first stage, but advancing toward the second will force us to make some choices. While the traditional media and the traditional learning system will struggle to keep their advantages, there is a chance for us to be able to build a new type of learning that’s open and conversational.
Asked what would be his definition of e-learning, Downes says e-learning should be like electricity, like water, and not like LEGO. It should be available in the wall, and it should be changing every day.
He brings a lot of examples of open models that eventually replaced the closed ones, claiming that we need simple, decentralised and open learning software (a “Blogger of learning content”). “Otherwise LMSs will eventually kill learning, instead of fostering it.”
“We need diversity, symbiosis, backpropagation and emergence.”
“Instead of organizing learning, we should find out how networks re-organize themselves.”
“Nobody can learn only by listening, nobody can teach only by speaking.”
And here comes what he points at as the second stage: we have to gain our voice and start speaking, we have to gain access. Learning has to become something people do for themselves. This is why we need open structures.
This speech of Downes gave me wings: I was constantly asking myself how the world would look like if people would be encouraged to learn what they want, how they want, and when they want. To pick up their own masters. To be able to find friends to do parts of the travel with.
Blogging made this possible – nobody can dictate you what blogs to read, nobody can force you to make a post if you’re not ready with digesting your thoughts. We can see the signs of this new type of learning – some people are doing it already, and – accidentally or not – most of them have something to do with blogs. Is this something for the grand public? Not yet. But, as Downes says, it’s important to start by giving an example yourself. “We need to contribute what we know to begin this atmosphere of learning. What that does, it’s to create the marketplace, the model and experience of sharing, a part of the network. And that’s really all you have to do. You don’t need to rewrite the world- you just need to contribute a bit of it. Feed forward!”
I found the speech really great, and having the MP3 record made it even more interesting- it was really as I was there at the conference, blogging it live! And by sharing this with everyone, Stephen Downes really made his point and gave us an example!
September 12 2004 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I had a crazy, but wonderful period. I attended, one after the other:
– the I-KNOW ’04 conference in Graz, Austria (30 June-2 July)
– BlogWalk3 in Vienna (4 July)
– BlogTalk 2.0 also in Vienna (5-6 July)
– the PACE project meeting in Santiago de Compostella (8-9 July).
During all this time, what was happening around me was much too important to let me time for breath. I didn’t dare to blog, even if I was given all the chances to do it! I guess I wanted to experience everything at full intensity, even if in my head, I was blogging all the time!
I arrived back to Luxembourg three weeks ago, in an empty apartment, realising that my electricity and gas were cut off in my absence. Back on Earth!
It felt like I arrived here for the first time: it was a continuous struggle with the bureaucracy to get accepted and find my place here. Then I had to register to several other authorities, to move all my stuff from Germany over here, to buy basic furniture…
No that this was done and I found my peace again, I think I can go back to blogging.
I felt bad all this period about deserting my blog, and I made great efforts to come back. Then I read Bloggers suffer burnout in Wired and I thought maybe the same happened to me: I’m done!
Two days later, I discovered Nancy White‘s post about trying to catch up, and I felt a bit better.
Probably I will never suceed to catch up, even if there are so many things about these past events I would like to talk about. But why not start again now, and see what happens afterwards?
During BlogWalk3, I had few apparently neutral talks that made me reflect on my blogging. First, speaking in a group about my thoughts being spread throughout several blogs, Elmine told me she considered blogging about my personal life only in Romanian unfair. She argued that people reading Coniecto can only perceive one of my facets and are prevented from knowing me better. Then, speaking about my passion for astrology and sharing pros and cons during lunch with JJ Merelo and Fernando Tricas, JJ asked me: Do you blog about this? And I said yes, often, but only in my personal blog I keep in Romanian(which is a mixture of links, quotations and stories about myself).
Doubt was already planted in my head. By trying to keep my personal life out of my so-called professional blog, I made it sound false. I missed a voice. OK, people were able to guess a lot about me just by looking at the kind of things I usually post. But I think Elmine was right: this is not fair! A sort of gap developed between me and my own blog, keeping me from writing when I was mad and sad. I think I am ready to accept now that this is me, and there’s no use to hide that I have doubts, fears and preferences, just like any other human being!
So, back on track, trying to put my “fractured” personality together right here, in what was meant to be a serious, strictly professional weblog.
After reading yesterday Olaf Brugman’s serie of posts about the spiritist perspective on social development and knowledge management and finding it really interesting, I feel a lot better about thinking of studying the possible influence of stars on people’s inclination to blog.
Blogs can foster our weirdest ideas, serendipity arises on the edge (I read this few days ago in a blog, but I can’t find my bookmarks anymore), so why not?
August 06 2004 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
BlogTalk2 is ready to start. Yesterday, we had a very interesting BlogWalk3.
I’m looking forward to writing more about this- probably on the train tomorrow!
Now, BT2 just started!
July 05 2004 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
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