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| The Gurteen Knowledge Website |
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Knowledge-Letter
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Gurteen Knowledge-Letter: Issue 96 - June 2008 |
 
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The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a monthly newsletter that is distributed to members of the Gurteen Knowledge Community. You may receive the Knowledge Letter by joining the community. Membership is totally free. You may read back-copies here. Gurteen Knowledge-Letter: Issue 96 - June 2008 Contents 1 Introduction 2 Setting targets for knowledge sharing 3 Upcoming KM Conferences 4 How culture made your modern mind 5 Knowledge Cafe Workshop, London, Sept 2008 6 12:00 am has no meaning 7 Enterprise2Open Unconference 8 Where do I find the time? 9 How the world has changed 10 The Knowledge: David Gurteen 11 My Upcoming Activities 12 KM Event Highlights 13 Subscribing and Unsubscribing 14 The Gurteen Knowledge Letter Introduction The big event of the last month (apart from the launch of the Apple iPhone 3G of course) was the release of a vastly improved version of Jimmy Wale's Wikia Search engine. If like me, you tried the first release last January and were sorely disappointed then go take a look at this new version, it is still rather basic but now actually usable. You can perform a search and then modify the results. Its pretty intuitive other than the fact that its not obvious you can drag and drop the items to change the order of the results! Its a Wikipedia of search. But like Wikipedia it seems to me that it may prove to be easily gamed. If I wish to boost certain pages and down play others to my own ends then I can. It may not be so bad though as I assume things get averaged out but much depends on how the code works behind the scenes and how the community handles such attempted manipulation. This is going to be an interesting development to watch especially if it takes off like Wikipedia and a community of editors keep it regularly updated. Its not going to dislodge Google overnight but if the gaming turns out not to be a problem then over time the search results should get better and better and should make it a great alternative to Google. You will find more about it in this Computerworld article. Setting targets for knowledge sharing Dave Snowden tries to get this message across time and time again and so do I! If you try and set targets for knowledge sharing you have failed to understand the subject.See my website section on Measures for some of my views. Upcoming KM Conferences I thought I had a pretty comprehensive list of upcoming KM Events but this one is huge. You can also see the KM Group on Upcoming for more events or this set of event calendars that I maintain. How culture made your modern mind Its interesting to think that maybe we have developed our cognitive abilities through learning to consciously teach our children and of course each other. Dare I even say "share our knowledge"! It is one of the hottest questions of our time: how did our cognitive abilities explode, leaving other animals for dust intellectually? Yet perhaps the biggest opportunity opened up by a theory of mind and an expanded working memory was the ability to learn, and to systematically educate other people. Animals learn by random observations of what other animals do. It is very seldom that they recognise the value of an innovation by their peers and then copy it themselves, such as shaking a tree to make fruit fall.Unfortunately, unless you subscribe to New Scientist, you cannot read the full article. Knowledge Cafe Workshop, London, Sept 2008 You may recall that I ran several knowledge cafe workshops for StatoilHydro a month or so back. These were so successful that I have agreed to run a public workshop for the Arkgroup on September 10th 2008 in London. I am really quite excited about this. Take a look at the brochure. 12:00 am has no meaning Sometimes you go through life with a little blind spot. I have, for as long as I can remember, never been sure whether to put am or pm after 12:00 noon or 12:00 midnight if I am not using the 24 clock which of course I normally do to avoid any confusion. It never occurred to me that appending am or pm to midday or midnight made no sense whatsoever. Am I the only one? It took a Google Search and this Greenwich Meantime site for the penny to drop. A.M. and P.M. start immediately after Midnight and Noon (Midday) respectively. This means that 00:00 A.M. or 00:00 P.M. (or 12:00 A.M. and 12:00 P.M.) have no meaning. |
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