Sound Knowledge Strategies

Web 2.0 and Concept Maps

What does the term Web 2.0 bring to mind for you?--MySpace, podcasting, LinkedIn, Skype, Google maps, wikis, flickr and blogs? Or Technorati, Ajax and mashups?  It's challenging to keep the list of tools and technologies up-to-date because new ones are appearing all the time. And what if, like me, your primary interest is knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and sense-making.

I had a chance to grapple with these questions over the past couple weeks as Patrick Hindert, Managing Director of S2KM, Denham Grey, Knowledge-At-Work and I developed web-based knowledge resources for a presentation Patrick made on September 6 to the Cincinnati Bar Association. We worked as a virtual team supported by primarily by SocialText, Skype, and concepts maps.

"How Does Web 2.0 Impact Lawyers" is the title of the root concept map of a rich knowledge model  designed and produced for Patrick's presentation. I invite you to explore the root concept map and the other concept maps and knowledge resources attached to it.  It's an example of the functionality that concept mapping offers in the Web 2.0 space:

1. Concept maps can increase the effectiveness of virtual teams. They help align everyone in a team or workgroup so that there is a common shared vision--the vision is made visible in the form of the concept map. Patrick, Denham and I worked together asynchronously with SocialText, Skype and concept maps as our primary tools. The organization of the initial draft concept map changed quite radically as we better understood and re-formulated the hierarchy of concepts, sub-concept maps, and discerned inter-relationships.
2. Concept maps facilitate sense-making. The content is organized hierarchically--the most general concepts at the top, and particular examples at the bottom. The context is extablished by a focus question. Key relationhips among concepts are made visible. The units of meaning that concept maps are built from are the same units of meaning your brain uses to store knowledge, i.e., propositions--two concepts connected by linking words that describe the relationship between them, e.g., "Web 2.0" "is defined by" "Communities and Social Networks."
3. Concept maps facilitate innovation and insights. It sounds paradoxical, but having an organized knowledge framework enables people to see connections and inter-dependencies that would otherwise remain invisible. In the rapidly changing social and business environment driven by Web 2.0, this is a core benefit.
4. The CMapToolsTM software used to create concept maps is free to schools and universities. It can be obtained from the CmapToolsTM webpage of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, the developers of CMapTools. The commercial version, Insight, is available from Ceryph.
   

There are links from the concept maps in the "How Does Web 2.0 Impact Lawyers" knowledge model to the Weblaw20 wiki and from the wiki to the concept maps. These linkages create a new virtual knowledge structure, one that's enriched by the wiki's support for collaboration and content development, and the visual knowledge organization and inter-relationship benefits of concept maps. Explore the wiki, click through the to concept map, and back to the wiki.

After your exploration, I'd be delighted to hear from you--your comments, questions and insights.

 

Peter Drucker's Humanism

Peter Drucker, father of modern management theory, died Nov. 11, in Claremont, CA at the age of 95. Obituaries have recounted his historic contributions to modern management theory; Drucker was the first to bring attention to the shift into what he termed "Post-Capitalist Society" (1993), a society in which knowledge, and the creation of knowledge, replace capital as the principal source for increasing profitability and as the engine of economic growth. Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker," and believed that the principal challenge of business in the 21st century is to increase the productivity of these workers.

For me, Drucker's most important contribution is the deep humanism that guided his prodigious intellect. His core values included integrity, democracy, community, and a workplace that enables employees "to realize their potential." He argued that one of the principal ways of increasing the productivity of the "knowledge worker" is to offer "exceptional opportunities to be effective."  These opportunities include understanding how one's work contributes to the organization's strategic goals, and the chance to make meaningful contributions to the customer and the world. Assisting people to make sense of their work acknowledges not only the corporate need for profits, but also the human need for meaning.

Prof. Joseph Novak shares Drucker's value for knowledge and carries on Drucker's efforts to "provide people with exceptional opportunities to be effective." Novak, who developed concept mapping in the 1970's, led a research team at Cornell University to discover and create more effective ways to facilitate knowledge creation and meaningful learning. Concept mapping has provided a generation of students and teachers in dozens of countries with exceptional opportunities to be effective learners and knowledge creators.

In the 1990's, Novak applied concept mapping, and principles of meaningful learning, to the work of R&D teams in a multinational consumer products company renowned for innovation. While the details remain proprietary, broadly speaking, what Novak did was to create concept maps of the collective knowledge of R&D teams in relation to a question that focused on the team's job of creating new, profitable products. The results were impressive: effective team learning, a shared vision that aligned all team members with the company's goals, boosted morale, and increased useful knowledge. The combined effect was markedly shorter time-to-innovation and successful new products. Additional benefits included team members' increased sense-of-agency and pride-in-work.

In recent years, concept mapping has been used to augment performance and enhance innovation in business by mapping team knowledge, core values, core competencies, software user requirements, and the competitive business landscape.

For the past two decades, I have been involved with the application of technology to create environments and tools that enable students and workers to engage with knowledge in the way experts do. This work puts understanding, knowledge creation and meaning making at the heart of the enterprise.  Inspired by a series of conversations with Joe Novak (who chaired my doctoral committee at Cornell), I decided to attend the 1st International Conference on Concept Mapping in Pamplona, Spain, in September, 2004.  I was excited by the results shared by conferees--teachers, researchers, and business people--from over twenty countries.

In the weeks following the conference, I decided to create See What You Know (www.seewhatyouknow.com) to mesh all I've learned about designing environments to enable knowledge creation and superior performance while engendering community, fresh-thinking, creativity and honoring the power of human intelligence.

I work with clients in the tradition of Novak and Drucker to unleash creative intelligence, to enable people to be exceptionally effective, and to increase their ability to make sense of their work and their world. I use a collection of facilitative processes I've developed over the years--during my ten-year management career at Apple Computer, Inc., and in my work as an educator. See What You Know's clients are creative individuals, and innovative, knowledge-creating organizations that value knowledge and the people who create it.

I look forward to sharing this exciting work, my thoughts, experiences and results with you in the coming weeks and months. I look forward to meeting and getting to know kindred spirits from around the world.

Here are links to Peter Drucker's 1994 Godkin Lecture at Harvard, "The Knowledge Worker and The Knowledge Society", and an interview with him. I hope that you find them useful.

The Godkin Lecture, Harvard: Knowledge Work & The Knowledge Society (1994)
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The Corporation That Plays Together Stays Together: An Interview with Peter Drucker
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Visit My Website
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