Wrapping Up

Since this is the last week of class, I’ve been thinking back to what I’ve learned over the source of the semester. I think this is probably my favorite class that I have taken in the LIS program thus far, and I’ve already taken quite a few. I’ve enjoyed how the class materials made me question so many things related to knowledge, information, data, what I know and how I know it…it’s helped me to look at things in a different way, which sounds trite but it is honest.

As I move beyond this class, I know I will examine information and knowledge differently. I am already noticing how information degrades and evolves over time, and how the larger world affects the very definition of knowledge.

As far as my folksonomy statement goes, I tried to tag my articles in a way that made sense to me. I tagged everything as “knowledge management” and then I tried to add secondary tags such as “social media”, and “knowledge transition.” Any additional words that seemed appropriate were also added. I just tried to keep it simple but thorough.

Transitioning Information

I have a couple more blog posts to do, but class is winding down. I’ve enjoyed this class way more than I thought I would. I imagined, at the beginning, that this whole blogging thing would be a drag, but I’ve rather enjoyed it.

This week, I went backwards to an article I tried to read several times over the semester. The article is by Wolfgang Stock and it’s about informational cities. This was my fourth attempt at this article and I actually finished it this time. This article kinda hurt my brain. It’s definitely one of the more complex readings of this semester, for me.

One of the things the article touched on was how knowledge changes with time. I started thinking about true that is in our culture. I was pretty close to my great-grandmother when I was growing up. She passed when I was 14, so I got to have a pretty nice chunk of time knowing her. One of my favorite things was for her to tell me stories about when she was a young girl. Her family moved to Ohio from the south via covered wagon. My inner Laura Ingalls Wilder loved that story.

My favorite story, though, was a story from after they moved to Ohio. They settled into their new home and my great-great grandmother took my great-grandmother and her sister to visit the pastor’s house. My great-grandmother and her sister had never seen an indoor toilet before. Nor had they ever seen toilet paper. The girls thought that the toilet paper was some sort of fancy ribbon and they stole it for their mother to use in a dress for them. When their mother found out what the girls had done, she whipped them with a willow switch.

This story came up for me as an example of knowledge changing. Knowing what toilet paper is and how to utilize it is not what we, now, would consider to be knowledge. It would probably be no more than information or data. But to my great-grandmother and her sister it was absolutely a kind of knowledge. At one point in time, and maybe still a little bit, using the computer I am typing this post on would have been a kind of knowledge. I think that in my lifetime, it won’t be knowledge anymore. It will have passed into the realm of things people just know, and become a kind of information or data.

What thing do you think has transitioned from knowledge to data/information in the course of your life? What do you think will transition?

 

Stock, W. G. (2011), Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 62: 963–986. doi: 10.1002/asi.21506

Privacy and Knowledge Management

I read several articles this week but nothing from those articles really triggered a blog post. I was thinking about knowledge management and privacy, though. I watched a program this week about Edward Snowden and it’s what got me thinking in this realm. Snowden most definitely had knowledge and access to knowledge that the majority of people on this planet did not have. He could access top secret government files and was privy to other information because of his job. Snowden felt that it was his duty to share his knowledge with the public as a whole, because at it’s most basic, privacy was being violated through various means.

What are the responsibilities of librarians to privacy and knowledge management? One of the first things that come to mind is the Patriot Act and the Library Records provision. That provision gives the U.S. government the right to view patron records without a warrant or any oversight from courts. That’s a pretty disturbing piece of legislation, to me. What is the librarian’s responsibility here? He/she has access to knowledge (the patron circulation records) and can give a copy of those records to authorities, should he/she be asked. What obligation is there to the rights of the patron? Is their privacy being violated by sharing this knowledge? What does the librarian do if they personally object to the sharing of this knowledge? Do they comply anyway?

Another scenario came to mind. Medical librarians often provide knowledge about health issues. They can work in libraries or hospitals or private clinician offices. Perhaps it is their responsibility to share knowledge and education patients about preventative healthcare or on how to manage recurring health issues like hypertension and diabetes. If a patient shares knowledge with a librarian about their health, perhaps a series of health issues they haven’t informed their doctor about, what responsibility does the librarian bear in this scenario? Does she violate the patient’s privacy and share the knowledge with the doctor or is she bound to keep this information to herself?

How do you draw the line in knowledge sharing? Where is the line between necessary revelation and privacy violation?

I wish I could answer my own question.

Social Media Inhibits Knowledge Sharing, Maybe?

I am fascinated by social media, in case you couldn’t tell. It’s deeply embedded in our lives. Even if we don’t heavily use Facebook or Twitter, the logos are in ads, on TV…social media is everywhere. As I have been reading about social media and knowledge sharing, I started to wonder if, instead of fostering sharing, social media could actually inhibit sharing?

For example, people that want to engage in social media do so through tweets or statuses. When can include people we were with at the time in our statuses. But, even though they are “tagged”, the status still belongs to the original poster. There’s some kind of social status connected to your posts being original and creative. In a group of shared friends, does this create a rush to be the first to create a status message about a joint event? Do we become less likely to share personal details about our lives outside of social media, in the hopes of having more original content to post on social media?

I wanted to see if this thought had occurred to others, so I Googled several different variations of “social media causes isolation.” I was not the first to hit on this point. Sherry Turkle gave a TED talk in 2012 and hit upon this very point. She points out that social media allows us to refine out interactions in a way that face-to-face communication does not. In person, we speak in the moment and don’t have time to over-analyze our thoughts.

Time ran an article at the end of February, 2014, that hit even closer to the answer I was seeking. It questioned why people, specifically men, will share on social media but not talk to their significant other. Interesting reading but not exactly what I was looking for.

If people want the status of being “original” on social media, what does this mean for people in a work group? If this only applies to our private lives, will this eventually spill over into our professional lives. We already are cognizant of plagiarism and other ways that people can steal our work products. Is wanting to be the cool kid on social media going to in act another kind of stealing?

What do you think? Can social media hinder knowledge sharing?

Why Do You Share On Social Media?

I was reading one of the articles on the syllabus that pertains to social capital and knowledge sharing. The beginning of the article posed the question “why do people share knowledge on social media?” I put this article down at this point because I wanted to try to answer why I do it.

I have “knowledge” in specialized areas. I am a professional writer, a world traveler, I’ve had weight loss surgery, and I am an avid reader. In these areas, then, I have knowledge. My friends know me, of course, and so I have social capital for a variety of reasons within that group. But I don’t only impart my knowledge to my friends and family. I share it with strangers via social media. But…why?

I thought about this question for a long while. Why do I share my knowledge on social media? There’s clearly a motivating factor or I wouldn’t do it. So, what is the motivating factor?

I was able to quickly come up with a few reasons someone might be motivated to share knowledge on social media, the majority of which don’t apply to me.

• Status: It could make a person feel important to dispense knowledge. They could become regarded as a field expert or subject matter expert, which carries some status.
• Superiority: Providing knowledge to others can give a person a reason to feel superior to others, if that is a factor that motivates them.
• Money: There are people that are paid to disseminate knowledge via social media. They do so to be paid for the number of tweets they send or the number of “likes” a Facebook page receives during a specific time window.
• Greater Good: Providing your own personal knowledge for no specific reason other than to help someone.

The only one of these that applies to be is the last one. Particularly in relationship to the surgery I had. Weight loss surgery is a very long and confusing process, especially in your insurance is paying for it. They have many requirements and hoops you must jump through. I am an Admin for a weight loss surgery support group that is based on Facebook. I am not paid for the time I spend in the group moderating posts or answering questions. This group has over 5,000 members and generates many posts. There’s no real archive so much of it is repeating information. My motivation is purely to help. I felt very confused and lost during the insurance approval process.  I had no one to help me and I had to figure it out on my own. I want to save others the confusion I had and making mistakes I made.

In order to contribute knowledge, individuals must think that their contribution to others will be worth the effort and that some new value will be created, with expectations of receiving some of that value for themselves (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998). These personal benefits or “private rewards” are more likely to accrue to individuals who actively participate and help others (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). Thus, the expectation of personal benefits can motivate individuals to contribute knowledge to others in the absence of personal acquaintance, similarity, or the likelihood of direct reciprocity (Constant et al. 1996).

The above quote is from the article that triggered this post. After I resumed reading with my defined list in mind, I was kind of surprised about this statement. Do I have to receive something in return? I thought about this and why I moderate the support group and I truly get nothing from providing information. The authors then posited the following information about Relational Capital.

A basic norm of reciprocity is a sense of mutual indebtedness, so that individuals usually reciprocate the benefits they receive from others, ensuring ongoing supportive exchanges (Shumaker and Brownell 1984).

So, is that what motivates me to participate in social media? If I post my own knowledge, when I need the knowledge of others, they will reciprocate? I guess that could be true. This isn’t something I would have ever arrived at on my own because I don’t consciously feel this as motivation. I mostly feel confused, though. I feel as if there is an option missing that would explain my participation in social media, but I am unclear what that is.

What do you think?

 

Why Should I Share? Examining Social Capital and Knowledge Contribution in Electronic Networks of Practice Author(s): Molly McLure Wasko and Samer Faraj Source: MIS Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1, Special Issue on Information Technologies and Knowledge Management (Mar., 2005), pp. 35-57 URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25148667.

Starbucks Is Knowledge…or Something

I love Starbucks. I am quite the fan. It’s kind of ridiculous how much of my money they receive. When I saw the word “Starbucks” in one of the article titles, I knew I was going to read that article at some point. The citation is at the bottom of this post.

Thus far, this has been my favorite class read. There are several reasons why this article is my current favorite. First, there are the tone and writing styles. This is the most reader-friendly article I have encountered in this class. I didn’t feel like this article melted my brain. I also didn’t feel like I was missing any part of the article. The authors did a tremendous job making this article accessible to the reader and I appreciated and enjoyed that fact.

Second, I enjoyed the purpose of the authors’ study. They wanted to know what role social media played in customer knowledge management (CKM) in a business that possesses physical stores. The differentiation here between Starbucks and other social media savvy businesses is that some of them do not have physical locations, such as Amazon.com. Amazon uses a lot of social media to inform customers of sales and receive feedback from customers. However, a customer can’t go to Amazon and shop. This makes Amazon customers a bit different from Starbucks customers because it presumes that the customer has a computer, has an Internet connection of some sort, understands how online shopping works, etc. These probably seem like simple tenants in today’s world, but I know people that do not online shop and don’t have Paypal accounts. Technology scares some people. Starbucks doesn’t require any of these things. All you need to shop with Starbucks is a location near you and a desire for something to eat or drink. I know many people that have never shopped with an online retailer, but I don’t think I know anyone that hasn’t been to Starbucks. This is another way that this article was very approachable for the reader: it fits inside our frame of reference.

Third, I was particularly struck by one of the lines from the article. It read:

Second, Starbucks redefines the roles of its customers through the use of social media by
transforming them from passive recipients of beverages to active contributors of innovation.
Starbucks closely follows the principle of ‘‘design with customers’’ (Sigala, 2012) by allowing
its customers play the dual role of creators and evaluators of ideas (Thomke and von Hippel,
2002; Tidd et al., 2005). Implementation of ideas contributed by customers at Starbucks
stores further fosters customer loyalty (Chua, 2011). The introduction of products like the
‘‘Mocha Coconut and Coconut Cre`me Frappuccino blended beverages’’, culled from
MyStarbucksIdea, are courtesy of the knowledge acquired by Starbucks from its customers.
Also, ideas such as ‘‘Have a Starbucks Calendar available on the website to let us know
about . . . promotions as well as when the seasonal flavors are available . . . ’’ culled from the
CDS, show that the knowledge drawn by Starbucks from its customers is not confined within
its products and beverages. Customers appear to possess a significant stake in the creation
and evaluation of innovative ideas that encompass the entire breadth of its business. The
widespread support for Starbucks can thus be attributed to the manner in which it
collaborates closely with its customers.

I REALLY liked the idea of being a contributor to innovation. While Starbucks isn’t solving the energy crisis or global warming, they are performing their own kind of innovation when they create new menu items. Starbucks actively surveys the social media outlets and listens to what customers are saying when it comes to drinks. I’ve been told by former baristas that Starbucks pays attentions to what “off-the-menu” drinks are being created by customers, too. They use this information to create new items for the menu. Most importantly, Starbucks asks and wants their customers to interact with them through social media to define the items that the customers want to see on the menu. Not many businesses allow their customers to participate in this way. In this small way, the customers transfer their knowledge, as a group, to the company. They participate in the innovation process by providing information to Starbucks, via social media, that Starbucks couldn’t acquire any other way.

I like this a lot. I know that I use social media to relay thoughts to businesses, but many don’t respond. Starbucks ALWAYS responds and now I know that my comments are being used for multiple purposes within the business. That makes me feel good about them as a company and I want to continue to be a customer. Feeling heard is a huge part of the human experience and I think consumers feel like they aren’t heard a lot. That Starbucks makes this effort is tremendous.

This article made me think that it would be awesome to read about how knowledge transfer influences behavior on the part of the customer. I shall see what I can find.

Chua, A. Y. K., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social media: The case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 17(2), 237-249.

Information Trust: How Does It Happen?

I read several articles this week, but one in particular got the ole noggin going. I read an article by Ibrahim and Allen about information sharing and trust during crisis or major events. This article got me thinking about the levels of trust regarding information. So, when thinking about managing knowledge, is trust one of the ways we manage the knowledge? What I mean is that the brain has numerous sorting devices at its disposal. We have to quantify and qualify information constantly. In managing knowledge and information, is trust one of the things we use to manage information?

For instance, say I have a friend that is a known liar. For whatever reason, this person tells many lies. I am having a conversation with this person and they tell me that the stock they purchased is a “hot tip” and I should contact my broker to purchase the stock, too. I can now do three things with this information:

1. Dismiss it because I don’t care
2. Act on it
3. Dismiss the information because I don’t trust the source

It’s the last option that intrigues me. If I know this friend to be a liar, then the source is suspect and everything that comes from that source has a taint. Is this a way, trustworthiness, that we manage knowledge?

Another take on this might be when the source is trusted but the information is still suspect. For example, my best friend tells me she started a new diet in which she can eat all the calories she wants, as long as she limits her carbohydrate intake to a specific range. My best friend is a trusted source. I have no reason to believe she would lie to me or tell me something she didn’t fully believe. However, being that I already have information stored in my brain that contradicts the veracity of the diet plan, I dismiss this information because I don’t trust the source. The source not being my best friend, but the diet creator (incidentally, I just described the Atkins Diet, pretty much).

Let me take it one more step for this scenario. What if I obtain a copy of the diet creators credentials. They are reputable and knowledgeable in the nutrition field. I now have no reason to not believe this diet as a healthy way to lose weight…except I still dismiss it.

Am I following some kind of primal intuitive force that says, “that diet is bunk,” or and I still dismissing the information because there’s not enough trust with the source? Because there isn’t an appropriate level of trust with the diet creator AND because my brain has to manage so much information already, the diet is dismissed.

I don’t know if I am stretching here or not. I feel like trust is a huge piece of managing knowledge. It’s how we know which news stories to believe: we trust CNN, MSNBC, or FOX. If Joe Doe’s News Blog is reporting a story, well, maybe we don’t trust it as much because Joe Doe has no trust credit with us.

I need to keep thinking about this topic.

 

 

 

Ibrahim, N. H., & Allen, D. (2012). Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 63(10), 1916-1928. doi:10.1002/asi.22676

Can You Effectively Transfer Knowledge?

Sometimes, my readings hurt my brain. I started reading about knowledge transfer and I had to stop for a bit. I felt like my brain was being melted. But I came back to it and it all made sense. And of course, I have thoughts.

Knowledge transfer refers to the process of of knowledge being transferred from point A to point B. Points A and B could be organizational tools, software, or even people. People are what really interests me here. As I was looking back at the organizations and businesses I have worked for, I was thinking about how knowledge transfers within those organizations. Part of my current job is to train internal and external users on various things. I actively participate in knowledge transference in this way.

What about when people don’t want knowledge to be transferred? I have two scenarios in mind. The first is when people just don’t want to learn. It’s pretty hard to transfer knowledge to someone that doesn’t want the knowledge. I have conducted many training sessions in which people are just flat out refusing to learn. They are texting or reading their e-mail, completely not paying attention. The transfer of knowledge fails in this scenario because I can’t transfer my knowledge to someone that is actively not wanting to engage.

The second scenario, which I have seen play out in businesses, is when a person blocks knowledge transference for personal reasons. I have seen this scenario occur in every single place I have worked. Some people have knowledge about their job and are asked to share their knowledge with others so that their job can be performed should they become ill or leave the company. Some people do not take kindly to this request. They view the information that they possess as adding to their job security, in some fashion. If they transfer their knowledge to another person, then they (the original knowledge holder) have less worth to the company. Basically, someone else knows how to do their job and that’s threatening to them as a person.

How does an organization combat an unwillingness to participate in knowledge transference? Is it as simple as dismissing the employee? Or, is it more complicated? I am pondering these questions.

Down the Knowledge Rabbit Hole

This week, I read the following articles:

• A Tale of Two Hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita Through a Knowledge Management Perspective

• A Confessional Account of an Ethnography about Knowledge Work

• Bounded Awareness and tacit knowledge: revisiting the Challenger disaster

 

I don’t know how to feel abut some of these readings, to be honest. I selected them totally at random, so there’s not really a unifying theme.

I thought the Katrina/Rita article was pretty interesting. I had many personal questions on why Katrina was so poorly prepared for when it seemed like everyone knew the storm was coming and was going to be very bad. I liked that this article explained exactly where the breakdown occurred with Katrina and how Rita was handled differently, as a result. This article also spend some time discussing “knowledge creation.” Last week, I was not on board with the idea that knowledge requires an action to actually be knowledge. Without action, it’s just information. I still don’t know how I feel about that idea. In this article, the author(s) discuss “knowledge creation” and how there’s a “doing” component involved. I like this explanation better.

If knowledge creation is conceived as a process that underpins disaster prediction, then the comparison between Katrina and Rita highlights two important aspects of knowledge creation: a “knowing” aspect, which concerns cognitive activities, and a “doing” aspect, which is the translation of cognition into tangible actions. A “knowing–doing” chasm represents a failure in knowledge creation.

I really like this explanation. It feels, to me, like the author is saying, knowledge is knowledge. You can either just think things or you can take it a step further and do things, too. I think I am on the thoughts-can-be-knowledge band wagon. I don’t think cognition requires action to become knowledge.

The article about Bounded Knowledge and the Challenger explosion was pretty interesting, too. I remember when the Challenger exploded. I watched it happen on TV. It was just awful. Bounded knowledge was new for me. At least, it was new in a knowledgement management way. Bounded knowledge sounds really similar to the legal concept of “willful blindness”, which I’ve heard of before. There was a quote I really liked from this article, too.

Were the managers dispassionate or just apathetic? Neither, the authors feel. The authors believe that the managers were as keen to avoid disaster as the engineers who opposed the launch, and other like-minded well-wishers, as they found no evidence to believe that any of these decision-makers would benefit in any way from a disaster. On the other hand, the authors presume that these managers were conscious of their accountability to the people and the government, should something go wrong. Hence the authors take it that managers approved the launch only because they genuinely did not perceive that the explicit information given to them by the engineers on the previous night about high failure likelihood was relevant. In other words, even though the managers had the very information in their hands that could have helped them avert failure; they failed to “see” its relevance to their decision to launch.

I liked this quote because I think it does a great job of explaining the concept of Bounded Awareness. I don’t know that I agree with the presumptions that the authors make. How do they know the managers weren’t just being apathetic? Apathy is itself a motive. Not a very good one, but it is a motive.

The last article was about ethnography and knowledge work. I was less impressed with this article. I’m not sure why other than it was a little dry and I had a hard time taking things away from it.

Knowledge vs. Information vs. Data

I was reading a few articles this week that talked about, you guessed it, knowledge management. What’re the odds? I’m still kicking around the ideas from last time about tacit knowledge and an entirely new set of questions cropped up. This time, it was about the 3 words in the title of this post: knowledge, information, and data.

One of the articles I was reading made a distinction between these 3 words and I don’t know if I agree with what was stated. The article stated that data is binary code or HTML. Characters that do something, but do not necessarily convey any information. This part of the discussion I agree with. A list of numbers or figures is data that one cannot really act upon.  It just…is.

Next, the author said information is the application of data. So, taking the HTML code and creating a webpage with facts about a particular subject would produce information. At this point, I’m still on board with this explanation. Let’s continue.

Knowledge is then, according to this author, information plus life experience, which allows you to take the information and apply it to your life. Thus, if you read a webpage about how yoga improves health, and this leads you to consider your own health habits and make changes, the changes you make are an expression of knowledge.

And…stop. For starters, my brain hurts after all that. Second, I don’t know that I agree. I guess what I don’t like about this explanation is that it feels like I bear some responsibility in the knowledge scenario. That, if I have information and I don’t use it to influence my life somehow, I’ve wasted said information. It also makes me ask what about “knowledge” I produce from within myself? If I produce a change without an inciting piece of information, is it knowledge?

This is very confusing to me. I am looking for more articles to help me soldify my thoughts, but right now, I simply don’t know what to do with this information (or knowledge, or data).