I was raised to respect my elders, and it pains me greatly to go against my proper upbringing; however, I cannot sit idly and show respect for Daniel Schorr and his commentary on Twitter and new social media when he clearly knows nothing about either.

Mr. Schorr (a sign of my proper upbringing) was introduced to Twitter http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101265831&ps=cprs by Weekend Edition host Scott Simon and senior strategist for social media Andy Carvin.

I would caution Mr. Simon and Mr. Carvin to conduct future science experiments of this sort. Introducing a 91 year-old to Twitter on the air shows the holes in not only Mr. Schorr’s understanding of new social media, but also NPR’s and other traditional media outlet’s understanding. I am not certain what the point of the interview was, but I think it was an attempt to illustrate the virtues and challenges of using Twitter across the generations. For those of us who are happy the old world order is crumbling, it came across as a lame attempt at coaxing the aging and resistant into the new social media water.

Mr. Simon calls him “relentlessly contemporary”, but I could not disagree more vehemently.  He comes off as a dinosaur, an anachronism talking about the five miles he walked to and from school each day as he waxes poetically but erroneously about Twitter and its impact.

While excruciating I encourage you to listen to the roughly 15 minutes of pain as Mr. Schorr establishes a Twitter account with the help of his friends. The real agony began when Mr. Schorr began pontificating about what was missing in new media the presence of which would make a difference compared to what old media offered. Given his struggle signing up for Twitter I doubt he has much experience in this realm, and hence little business commenting at all.

What really infuriated me (and showed just how much he and NPR are out of touch with the young folks today) is when he talked about the loss of editing as an art form. According to Mr. Schorr with the ability for ANYONE to self-publish the editing function is lost allowing an erosion of the quality of news and information available.

This statement shows he is missing the very transformative quality of new media. He is right about the easy entrance to publishing, but the model works because it is publishing first and then filtering. The nature of an open community does not mean editing is gone—quite the contrary. If you open yourself to the never never land of the internet you are standing naked to your core. By hitting send you are saying yes to scrutiny far beyond the red pen of a brilliant managing editor at a Washington bureau.

While I am happy NPR and the other major media outlets are venturing into social media, I wish they would understand the aesthetics of the community better. You don’t have to show deference for those who have gone before us in all that you do. It would have been far more interesting to hear from a Millennial or my Net Gen godson about how they use Twitter. Their experience would have at least been authentic as they actually use the tool. Wouldn’t you rather hear from someone with experience than hearing what the tool does not do from someone who had yet to Tweet?

I was recently at the Learning 2008 Conference in Orlando, Florida.   I delivered a breakout session on the topic of social networks to a group of about 60 people.  Afterwards I was approached by Derrick Davis of the Gallup Corporation.  We had a fascinating conversation about the influence generational difference has on employee engagement.  Derrick through Gallup is about to release a report discussing the similarities between Generation Y and Traditionalists.  My Boomer friends may be the most caught off-guard when they read Derrick’s report.  Listen to what Derrick has to say.  No doubt you will find it interesting.     

If you have taught in a virtual classroom, you realize how quickly technology evolves.  What I don’t think most faculty consider is the direct impact that has on how we learn.  Moore’s Law has (the notion attributed to Intel guru Gordon Moore that technical capabilities double roughly every 18 month) certainly   caught me by surprise on more than one occasion.  It seems just as soon as I master one tool, the tool evolves beyond my capacity leaving me in the dust.  In fact, I have seen the technical capabilities of the virtual classroom advance within the semester I taught.

The evolution of technology has eclipsed the evolution of humankind’s ability to absorb it.  However, a new way of thinking about this allows for the evolution of learning.  The podcast discussed this evolution, and gave a link to a blog on the topic.  http://connectivism.ca/ This new way of thinking is called Connectivism, and the virtual classroom three years from now will certainly need to understand this and adjust accordingly.  The idea behind Connectivism is in connecting to others we form competence.  The more connections we make, the more we learn.  What is different about this is technology allows for this activity, and “frees” us from having to remember.  Our knowledge becomes a collective stored in our connections.  The virtual classroom three years from today will have to therefore offer students much more dynamic functionality around organization and tagging content.  Otherwise, the learning will suffer.  This is a huge paradigm shift from traditional pedagogy and frankly andragogy.

For the most current thinking on this topic, I turned to Kevin Kelly founder of Wired magazine.   http://www.kk.org/ I saw Kevin speak last week on this topic at the Learn 2008 Conference at the Masie Center.  He talked at length about the evolution of learning due to this phenomenon.  The virtual classroom three years from now, will be that much more connected through the deployment and “perfection” of Web 2.0 and 3.0 tools.  The emergence of an entire second life through a virtual platform will have a particular impact on learning, particularly learning related to three dimensional topics.  For example, it will be much easier to train students on proper disaster recover procedures virtually than check clearing processes.  Regardless, as educators we will have to evolve as Connectivism grows.  Right now, there are many people who are not connected virtually.  As the social networking sites become more widespread, more people will be learning.  No doubt there is research being done now on how this happens.  We must design our courses with this learning in mind.

There has been much discussion in class (and always in practice) about measurement.  Practitioners like myself are always faced with the task of justify an endeavor.  It is interesting because it is not only at the funding stages, but all along the way.  After surveying the landscape thoroughly, I came to the conclusion that most ROI calculations on KM is at best an approximation, and at worst wishful thinking.  It is important to frame the Knowledge Management program narrowly enough to fulfill on objectives, but measuring these objectives is often futile.

I recently came across the work of Karen Stephenson, and my thoughts about measurement have changed.  Karen is internationally recognized in network theory, and she is president and founder of Netform International.  Karen is a trained mathematician and anthropologist.  She discovered that by analyzing dead civilizations, which she describes as networks, she was able to apply her findings to corporate settings.  Corporations, like ancient civilizations, are nothing more than networks of people.  Inside the network exists patterns that predict success or failure of a organization by the way information flows through the network.  She goes on to describe the difference between a hierarchy and a bureaucracy, and the role within the networks of key stakeholders.

What is truly fascinating about her work to me is that she asserts you can actually measure these networks.  Her company, Netform International, does exactly this.  She goes into companies and determines the value of their networks.  She helps companies determine key personnel.  Having read the work of Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) and Wayne Baker, Stephenson takes the idea of social capital to a much richer context.

I must admit part of me remains skeptical as I think about presenting the value of a my company’s network at the next executive committee,  Nevertheless, it cannot be any worse than the crude ROI numbers I calculate now.

This is the first time I have have blogged in awhile as I was out of town attending the Conference Board’s Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning Conference.  In addition, I was in New York on business interestingly enough looking at a e-learning solutions for the capital markets.  I will comment more on this later.

Like most people who are likely to read this blog, I am on too many mailing lists, both paper and electronic.  I try not to read most of what comes my way as if I did, I would have no time for anything else.  However, I do find the quality of the Conference Board’s material to be exceptional and relevant.  I write this because I DO read everything they send me, and it is for this reason I decided to attend this conference.  Many of the noteworthy names in KM were there.  For a complete listing please see the Conference Board’s web site.

A couple of themes emerged speaker after speaker which echo what we are learning in class.  This seemed like a brilliant intersection of the theory and the practice.  Meet people where they are, and embed the KM process in their routine, don’t impose it on top of the routine.

Perhaps more importantly than the meeting the gurus, was the opportunity to discuss with others who are in similar positions to me, the ways in which they have overcome their own organizational hurdles.  After sharing my own experiences with them, I concluded I am actually farther along than I thought.

Warren Sterling, Ph.D., Director, Development Partnerships for Teradata gave an interesting presentation about Technology and KM/OL.  He spoke more from a CRM framework, but he gave some interesting points to consider regardless of application.  For example, he distinguished between structured and unstructured data.  This has a spillover effect on tacit and explicit.  Most of what is interesting to a business is the unstructured data.  That is all of the things a business “knows” about its processes, cutomers, products, etc.  This information is usually not captured.  The way I interpreted this is that unstructured data is actually a subset of tacit information.

Using the words structured and unstructured has helped me with my project for class.  My project is an attempt to capture all of the unstructured data about my company’s e-commerce’s activities.  I would not have used this framing, but in doing so, it has allowed for a systematic approach to capturing the data.  I think this was Warren’s main point.

He went on to discuss several technologies that aid in the capture of this tacit of unstructured data.  For example, he talked about the E-Motions Database Research (University of Southern California).  This attempts to answer the research question,  “What if you could capture the face animation vectors and determine how people reacted to stimuli?”  He referred to it as Facial CRM.  In his presentation he asserted that 50-90% of interaction information is non-verbal.

How do you capture this non-verbal information and then codify it?  The example he gave was at an ATM machine.  What emotion is present as people are conducting a transaction at an ATM machine.  Clearly this is the first step at capturing tacit data in this case emotions.  While part of me finds this fascinating, there is a part of me that is terrorized by the implications.  George Orwell was right.

I would like to apply this technology to the sales process.  If I use this example in my business, it would be useful information to have the emotions of a portfolio manager captured in a database as he or she made transaction decisions.  It would provide the covering sales person a competitive advantage.  The question of course is, who would give consent to be observed in this fashion?  I plan to e mail Warren and ask if any studies of this sort have been done.  I will report back my answer.

It occurred to me as I was reading this week’s articles that it would be interesting to frame the conversion of “data” to “knowledge” through the notion of employee engagement or employee loyalty.  One theme that seems to be emerging in class Krishna and Paul in particular, is that of not wanting valuable resources to walk out of the door.  Valuable resources being people and the information that is contained in their heads.  It is interesting to consider that both law firms and financial services firms illustrate Drucker’s notions of the Knowledge Worker.  If practitioners leave Goldman Sachs or Paul’s firm, there isn’t a machine in place to replicate the income created by these professionals.  It seems to me that everyone knows there is a “mercenary” attitude of professionals towards their own clients or revenue stream, but I have yet to see senior management factor this into decision making.

In another class I am conducting an analysis of the behaviors that make Relationship Managers (i.e. Sales People, Business Developers, Managing Consultants) successful at a professional services firm.  It seems to me that most professionals who are responsible for a revenue stream are navigating the changing waters of “Context”.  Those that are able to do this nimbly, tend to be the most successful.

If you take Davenport, Harris, De Long, and Jacobson’s perspective that “Context” is decisive–in their model it is the corners ton–and that there are several variables that comprise “Context” (Strategy, Skills & Experience, Organization & Culture, Technology & Data), then it follows that not all variables are weighted the same in each setting.  Part of what I gathered from this piece is that there is a skill that the manager must employ to assess which is weighted the most heavily and make decisions accordingly.  If the culture of the firm or company is changing, or the market is capricious, then it becomes challenging to determine the “Context”.

Why I raise the issue of loyalty or engagement is that it is easy to see why someone would choose to be loyal to themselves, or loyal to their client if the “Context” was dynamic regardless of the reasons “why”.  Either way it results in people not wanting to share data or information.  This hoarding of data or information does not lead to knowledge creation.

In May’s issue of Wired magazine, Dave Winer CEO of Radioland.com proud provider of Radio, wagered $1,000 that Weblogs will outrank the New York Times Web site by 2007 (based on a Google search of five keywords or phrases reflecting the top five news stories.)  He made this bet with Martin Nisenholtz CEO, New York Times Digital.

This presents an opportunity for us to BLOG!  I will try to create a hyperlink to Wired, but in case I don’t, here is a synopsis.

Each year Wired runs an annual “Betting on the Future” competiton with key industry folks.  What does it mean that Winer was included?

Winer briefly describes the changing economics of the publishing industry, and that the mainstream press determines a narrow scope of what is presented–usually only covering three main stories.  Weblogging came into existence as a response to the abundance of information available on the Web, but not published by the popular press.  Guerilla warfare tactics on Winer’s part?

Nisenholtz’s believes “Readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate, and coherent.  News organizations like the Times can provide that far more consistently than private parties can.  Besides, the weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media.”

BLOG me with your thoughts, or if you are interested in wagering your own bet, I take Winer’s view.  We can make a bet that spans the time horizon of this class.  I don’t want to wait until 2007 to collect!