I've been corresponding with
(Mr.) Jan Eggers of the exceptional blog Dirtgrain. Jan is a
teacher who writes often of the frustration of dealing with an
education system that is dysfunctional, bureaucratic, co-opted by
corporatists, shrugged off by parents as a cheap day-care centre, and,
nevertheless, full of teachers who give a damn and want to make a
difference. He tells it like it is:
The Learning Asylum, by Jan
Eggers
Committed to the learning
asylum, they come in droves to breathe stale air mocked by the jetliner noise of
ventilation. Attention trapped--daydreams
killed-- by windowless rooms and puke
yellow carpets. Fluorescent headaches pang down, wilting creative energy. Stagnant chairs clash with
restless limbs, learning drivel pinning them
down. They forget their place in
nature.
Where are poems nourished? In a snowy forest, a grimy street corner, a threshable field-- in an ever changing milieu-- not in the wilting classroom. So many able poets-- manacled by education.
If we had more fearless, never-say-die, articulate proponents of
education reform like Jan, maybe we could really fix the
system.
Image above is from
Child's Pay, the award winning video from MoveOn that CBS refused to
show. The video depicts American children working to pay off the
staggering and obscene Bush debt. It could also be said to depict the
jobs that will be left if actions aren't taken to end offshoring of
American jobs, and if improvements to the education system aren't made,
in contrast to the grossly underfunded, misguided and cynical Bush 'No
Child Left Behind' program.
Since February 1st, David
Gurteen, one of the pioneers and brightest thinkers in the field of
Knowledge Management, has been busy, to my delight, reinventing the
discipline as Personal
Knowledge Management (PKM). As readers of my business posts know,
that's what I've been advocating for some time. A group of leading KM
luminaries has been discussing this all month on the AOK (Association of
KnowledgeWork) discussion group, an online community of practice
moderated by Jerry Ash. This has been tremendously helpful in enabling
me to flesh out my own vision of how PKM could work, the latest
rendition of which is diagrammed above.
It's not as complicated as it looks, and is best explained by taking
you through an example of how it would be used.
When you turn on your laptop, what shows up is your 'virtual' office:
Your workspace, which looks very much like a desktop, and is piled high
with pictures of documents and messages, laid out exactly as you last
left them. The Workspace Manipulation Tool features a hand as the
cursor, and allows you to move and reorganize documents and messages on
your virtual desktop, exactly as you would in physical space. But it
also allows you to save any precise configuration of documents and
messages, and file it away for later use, giving you a 'clean' desktop
for another project.
Highlighted on the virtual desktop are the current documents and
messages that you last looked at. As it turns out, they consist of a
report that you're researching, a web page that you were half finished
reading, and a message that you were composing in reply to the web
page. When you use the hand-cursor to 'open' these documents again, the
Document Annotation Tool opens, and the hand cursor turns into a pencil
cursor. The Document Annotation Tool converts each open document into a
virtual piece of paper: You no longer have to concern yourself with
what application was used to create the document, or what format it is
in. You simply use the pencil cursor to highlight, add to, delete from,
comment on, and cross-reference to other documents, exactly as you
would instinctively use a real pencil to make comparable annotations on
real paper. The Document Annotation Tool understands what you are doing
and invisibly does the heavy lifting to translate your changes
commensurately in the document's 'native' application (MS Word, HTML
etc.) You can do all your
work with this one, simple application. So you scribble in a table in
your unfinished message, make editorial changes to your report, and
highlight the relevant parts of the web page you were reading. When you
go to Save the highlighted web page, up comes the Workspace
Manipulation Tool's hand cursor to let you virtually place it where you
want on your desktop, or virtual filing cabinet. You also use the hand
cursor to add the web page author's contact information into your
virtual Address Book.
You're ready to send & save the now-completed message as well, and
when you do so, the Workspace Manipulation Tool automatically opens up
your Address Book and the Connector tools, which provide the suggested
address and a list of possible alternatives, and the suggested medium
(in this case e-mail) and alternative media (IM, VoIP telephony etc.)
for connection to the identified recipient(s). As always, before the
Workspace Management Tool saves and stores a document or message, it
asks you who you will 'permission' to access, either by subscription or
by just-in-time peer-to-peer browsing, that document or message.
Before you complete the research report, you decide to check the day's
news. Your virtual workspace has an inbox with colour-coded documents
that have arrived for you, integrating personal e-mail and sources to
which you have subscribed. Using the Workspace Manipulation Tool, you
set aside the personal messages and open the RSS newsfeeds you
subscribe to. The Document Annotation Tool opens, allowing you to make
whatever notations you want, and save or send whatever parts of the
annotated newsfeeds you wish to. There are no menus or commands to
remember -- these Personal Content Management Tools are extensions of
your hand, and they have the intelligence to understand your intent
from how you move the hand and pencil cursors.
One of the items in your newsfeeds was about something that intrigued
you -- the collection of shot-glasses from cities and establishments
all over the world. You open your address book and create a new 'tab'
for shot-glass collecting. The Network Builder/Expertise Finder tool
automatically opens and asks if you would like to identify and add to
your address book others interested in or expert in this subject, and
you say no, for now. It then asks if you are interested in subscribing
to RSS feeds on the subject, and when you say yes, it provides a list
of appropriate subscribable sources, with the cost of subscription if
applicable. When you make your selections, the Subscriber tool
automatically enters your subscriptions, using the personal identity
information aggregated in your Metadata. When you go to place the news
item about your new hobby in your virtual filing cabinet, you find
there is already a matching tab on this subject set up for you ready.
To complete your research report, you need to get some information on
UXGA technology, and on a company called Quarx that manufactures a
critical component that uses this technology. Using the Workspace
Manipulation Tool you open your address book and open a new tab on
these subjects, and the Network Builder/Expertise Finder tool again
opens automatically. This time you reply 'yes', to a search for
experts, and the Super Address Book, which spiders everyone's
permissioned content, as translated by the Metadata tools, to identify,
rank and qualify both experts and communities of interest, provides a
list, ranked by popularity. It turns out one of the people in the San
Diego office of your own organization is something of an expert on the
subject, so you click on her name to contact first. The Connector tool
provides her Virtual Presence video contact information, her Skype and
regular phone number, her e-mail and IM address, and others, but
notifies you that she is 'Out of Office' for a week. Rather than
waiting for her return, you select the last option from the Connector
tool, 'Browse Permissioned Content', and you are connected peer-to-peer
to her machine. You find what you need on UXGA, and while you're at it
you subscribe to her RSS feed on High Resolution Imaging technologies.
But you still need to find out about Quarx, and your colleague's
content doesn't help there, so you go back to the list that the
Expertise Finder produced and select the Director of Research of Quarx
itself from the list. The Connector indicates he is in and available,
so the Connector transmits a Conference Request and gets a positive
reply. Up pops the Virtual Presence screen, with the smiling face of
the Director of Research, as the camera light on your own laptop goes
on to confirm he can see you, too. You display a page from your draft
report, showing the information you need to complete about Quarx, and
the Director replies to most of your questions, but defers on one
question citing confidentiality issues. You immediately sidebar an IM
message to your boss advising her of this, and are instructed to ask an
alternative question, which you do. You get a satisfactory response,
thank the Quarx Director, and hang up.
I hope this gives you an idea of how this suite of very simple and
intuitive software tools could function in a business environment. What
I find exciting about the concept is that not only could it
dramatically increase knowledge exchange in business, especially between businesses, and hence
improve the effectiveness of nearly everyone in the workplace, but the
same suite of tools could have almost identical personal application, finally
making all the functionality of the laptop accessible to everyone, even the
computer-illiterate. It could allow each of us to connect simply with
friends and loved ones, and join and build powerful and enriching
communities of interest. And it would free us forever from all the
complex tools and formats we now need to learn merely to manage a
virtual workspace, annotate virtual documents, and communicate
virtually with each other.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
