Some posts on the web these times about Education 2.0, Classroom 2.0 and so one...
As a lecturer in MBA's, some feelings on all that stuff:
- first of all, a nice report , with comments, rather optimistic, showing new trends
- then less positive views and comments
- some good lists of new exciting tools for education..
I tried, as a lot of professors in Europe, to use and spread those techniques, from informal networks with ning for classrooms to some moodle or dokeos courses.
- Informal networks are more used by students for fun and self image promotion than to create efficient student and alumni networks (and why not!)
- Education system in Europe favours too often traditional teaching, where professor "pushes" its information to the students instead of modern way where students
- work first by themselves on books, dvd's, online material,
- then work together, in a cooperative mode, on relevant projects ("learning by doing"),
- and only then meet professor than teach "by difference", filling the gaps and transmitting additional relevant knowledge...
My deep feeling is that globalization of education (all those new courses in China, in Africa, in central and eastern Europe, ...) is changing the game, with more need, for economic reasons of modern Web 2.0 techniques.
But key inhibitor remains professor's culture, habits and traditions....
Web 2.0:
a large bag with so different feelings and philosophies.
Can "subversive" concepts become institutional?
Can those tools and techniques, reflects of self image, with a total appropriation (what do I do now..., my specific passions and friends..., it's happening now..., my special tricky way to access information...,), become a common practice for everybody?
Will people seek contact and networks or go back to CAN (Computer aided narcissism) ? This one open the question.
That can explain this "war", within organizations, to make Web 2.0 a mainstream. Why this fear for web 2.0?
At the same time, Web 2.0 becomes global...
...And a very good clever blog by Internet visionary Tim O'Reilly, the man credited with creating the term Web 2.0
Fantastic video to re-stimulate your minds (if necessary).
A Microsoft research using photos of real or virtual objects "scraped from around the Web, creating multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation".
Some short thoughts on that:
- This idea of making real hyperlinks between photos, videos open the question: Who code the links? who makes the relations. To day the "machine" is still a bit unable to do that (image semantic recognition...)
- Real life vs Web virtual life. Have we so much time?
Good back to real school and/or to real life after a long summer...
- Even if you are not necessarily a military fan, it is evident that DoD (US Department of Defense, may be the bigger worldwide purchaser ) plays an important role in definition of standards, in rationalization of IT.
(Cals, Step, CMMI, ...). This Dod article about processes gives interesting views about defining roles, within an ERP implementation challenge, for Business Process Owners, separating clearly management responsibilities and technical responsibilities....
- About the remanent strategic alignment question: " must we change organization first, an then implement IT solution , or must we facilitate/force changes with IT first" , P,P,P,I, thinks strategy, processes and people issues must be treated before IT solution choice... More complex in real life.
- IT governance and application portfolio techniques not so easy to sell internally in companies...
- Clever way for vendors to (story)tell BPM importance...
Good News: Knowledge Management still alive.
In spite of vendors appropriation of KM logo ( just type "Knowledge Management" on Google and you will find 90% of the connected sites are selling something, products, tools, consulting, ....), fundamentals of KM are surviving.
Recent contributions:
- Relation of KM with semantic web and web2 (with this permanent problem of the balance between "coding the world" and creativity freedom!). See too that nice reaction on this topic
- Thoughts about economy of Knowledge, stimulating contributions and co
- and, and, and, and, and ....
If you want to follow periodically the trends in KM (or anything else!), a good way is to use Google alert , to receive information in your mailbox...
Try too, through Google labs, to see that KM queries are nowadays
- less "fashion" than 3 years before (because we know enough about fundamentals?)
- that queries are mainly done now by far east and emerging countries (does that mean that they discover now the concepts, or that innovation by knowledge will come more and more from this part of the world?)
Must management concept be seriously treated?
Real world modelization is useful. It is good to reflect real thoughts by concepts and frameworks.
But where is the limit between ready to use, "gadget" concepts and real thinking?
Just look at this site. Not so bad, but ....
Let's take, as a basic example, the famous overused BCG growth/share matrix.
We can go further on that on wikipedia, with a bit more in-depth approach.
Look at this one * (I really like this second degree representation). A good representation of the visualization tools. Try it.
Is that enough to understand, or do we need a full business school education on that?
Basic conclusion:
"The map is not the territory" ( Korzybski, "founder" of General Semantics)
Information (even with a good visualization technique) is not Knowledge!
All those models and frameworks become useful only if you have the opportunity to really use them in real situations, in real life!
* I have been warned of this by this nice forum on intelligence (in french, I am member since years...)
For those who have time to surf, or need special data, this list is exciting
I am a user of a lot of these, my current favorites are Google Labs, Answers, LII, Wikipedia, Gutenberg, ScienceDaily, Google maps....
For my MIB students and their marketing plans, look at bplans.com !!
Add your own relevant findings!