George Siemens tells me knowledge is
developing faster, it changes more quickly, and it is more central to organizational success than in any other time in history.
The new class of collaborative internet tools seems to be enabling this change. In fact the web and internet seems to be a manifestation of the ‘hive mind’ or an embodiment of the ‘collective consciousness’ concept. To quote George Siemens again, this is creating
Change pressures arise from different sectors of a system. At times it is mandated from the top of a hierarchy, other times it forms from participants at a grass-roots level. Some changes are absorbed by the organization without significant impact on, or alterations of, existing methods. In other cases, change takes root. It then causes the formation of new methods within the organization.
I can rapidly gain knowledge in areas that I was previously blissfully ignorant of. I don’t see this as deprecating the value of refined specialist knowledge but in a information saturated world I am constantly refining my skills of knowledge acquisition: research, analysis and synthesis. These skills can provide agility to respond to the new methods, structures and spaces George Siemens describes.
This is happening right now with the new breed of internet tools, is directly affecting the way I work. To illustrate:
The Proof of Concept (PoC) team tag resources to inform each other of relevant websites using a del.icio.us tag ‘myednapoc’ which is feed to me via RSS. Together we expand our collective knowledge and inform our discussions about designing tools to help with managing the collective knowledge itself.
BlogBridge supports the above RSS feed and general information management by collating and filtering.
Google Web Alerts are being used to inform me of who’s quoting edna and education.au.
Wikipedia is a starting point in research for getting the broad concepts of a topic or provide a background briefing.
Here’s how we share knowledge of useful innovations research into the collective consciousness as manifested online using del.icio.us, RSS and BlogBridge:
Post a Comment