x28's Blog, Archive 2005

Do we need one think tool for everyone and everthing (standard), or are many different tools better (personalization) ? Read more....

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What data structures do humans think in? What data types should be supported by a cognitively adequate PKM tool? Read more....

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An interesting study identifies a type of academic homepages as sycophants, mainly because they link back to their departments. It is true that there are problems with these pages but IMO they are different. Read more....

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A difference between object visualizers and spatial visualizers has been discovered. What does that mean for personal information management techniques? Read more....

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Reading is antisocial, but writing is first and foremost about creating a community of writers ? Read more....

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How would the "library 2.0" look like? Users' tags for emerging knowledge, librarians' classifications for older, settled knowledge? Read more....

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In his inspiring article on "The Joys of Shallow Thinking...", G. Siemens notes the insecurity of education about how deep or shallow learning should be. I do think that deep learning of a topic is necessary, but not in its own right but as a sample or representative for the similar topics that, later on, can be touched more shallowly. Read more....

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How much work should the RSS aggregator do for me? Should it try to group the various feeds by some sort of context such as authors' topics or tags, or by day, or by geographical location? No, just count and perhaps cache them. Read more....

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D. Pollard pointed to the impressive ecolanguage.net that applies animated symbols to explain relationships. L. Arnold makes them especially powerful by leveraging techniques such as zoom, aggregation, and expanding / collapsing. Read more....

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In her Cognitive analysis of tagging, Rashmi Sinha hits the core problem when she points to our fear that we would make a wrong categorization decision. "We need to consider the overall categorical scheme." I think this fear can be mitigated when using cross reference links. Read more....

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2005-09-25

Stimulated by D. Grey's detailed posting "On the concept of a concept", I tried to depict my view of concepts. Read more....

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It is amazing how often it is useful to follow a detour when using desktop application tools in daily PKM tasks. Normally we assume that solving IT problems involves some steps along a click path where each click takes us closer to the target. In some cases, however, the first step does just the opposite. These cases require a different attitude towards IT tools: sense of orientation and overlook rather than task-driven just-in-time skills. Read more....

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Collaborative library (ColLib, via S. Downes) sounded very promising to me, since I am hoping for the peaceful coexistence of amateur tagging and professional classification that C. Shirky denies (Aug. 27th). His most plausible argument ist cost: Tagging is cheap. But for whom is tagging cheap? For the providers of the tags - okay. But for the consumers? Read more....

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In his great article from last week about Making Knowledge, D. Grey said many deep details holding true for everybody (regardless of individual cognitive styles), much more than I considered possible, probably everything that can possibly be said about this topic, the ultimate general description. Read more....

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"How can visualisations aid thinking?" This was the central question at a small symposium on Think Tools last weekend. IMO, they can probably relieve a certain constraint which one might identify to constrict thinking. Read more....

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Finally I had a chance to see Deepa Mehta in action, the Semantic Desktop System whose description I recently reviewed. Read more....

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On my this year's bicycle tour, I learned a lot about the relationship between navigation in the virtual vs. real world: I discovered another reason for the continuous annoyance with bicycle path signposting. And I became more aware about the problems of zooming on virtual as opposed to real geographical maps. Read more....

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Despite of vacation, a quick link to yet another great idea of M. Böttger. She suggests (in German) a differential psychology approach for studying the filing behavior of people.

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Probably I won't blog much until August 12th, due to vacation.

Annotation is a central topic for shared spaces, but unfortunately it is still a stepchild and suffering from many small silly technical problems. Read more....

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There are many learning/ personality styles inventories out there, but what seems still missing are profiles for personal information management styles. Read more....

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Interesting ideas about "think-tools" are offered by the authors of Deepamehta. Read more....

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Our university library is starting off into a new era of Open Access and RSS Syndication, categorized by Dewey. Here is the RSS-Link of the ten most recent self-archival publications, and if you have an aggregator similar like mine (see the 146 kB screenshot), you can sort them by DCC just clicking on the heading of the subject column. I think this is a pretty promising approach, which might soon combine both the capabilities of smart aggregator filters of the users and professional cataloguing by LIS staff.

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The difference between Mindmaps and Concept Maps is still confusing. I think Concept Maps can be compared with literacy, while Mindmaps are more "oral". Read more...

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Useful arguments that may help to overcome a major personal information management problem. Read more...

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"The end of the written word", this is much food for thought. Read more...

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I assembled a little statistic of my previous postings. In 43 postings, I linked 82 times to 69 other blogs or pages, which belonged to 49 people. Of the 8 blogs I linked multiple times, 3 are female, 4 are male, and 1 mixed (M2M). Of the 37 links going to these, 18 went to women, and 19 to men. My blog map does not reveal a clear structure. Only that I like to link several times to the same posting, perhaps to link the same thoughts together in different contexts.

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Many people use presentations which many people don't like and which don't leverage the potential of modern programs. But they are a compromise of two opposite styles. Read more...

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Why consuming information is different from eating chocolate and borrowing eggs. Read more...

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Why discussions via blogs are different from those on mailing lists and forums Read more...

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Knowledge technology is now ready for emancipation from single-tracked, excessive textualization, but IP policy is not! Read more...

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The debate about D. Grey's "Personal Learning" post and G. Siemens' comment intrigues me. Read more...

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About "feed overload/intimidation syndrome" and feed selection habits. Read more...

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Here is yet another teacher's account describing his efforts to involve people in blog discussions, to balance participation, "to activate the long tail". I think, when people are urged or even mandated to blog, the novel phenomenon is thoroughly misrecognized. Read more...

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Last week I learned about a cognitive styles difference that I had not known before: "Radial" vs. "Cartesian" (M2M). While the latter is more absolutely oriented, the former focusses on relative, incremental, change. The incremental, preliminary characteristics, the revisability and rearrangeability is very important for me. Read more...

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I have described now quite a lot of my tool-using habits, but have yet to conclude this by covering the basic desktop usage. More...

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Many bloggers described their use cases where they prefer paper and pencil to keyboard and mouse. I often use a primitive tool that emulates paper's immediacy affordance best. More...

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Many bloggers have discussed the difference of "data", "information", and "knowledge". Here is my attempt ...

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Description of a visualization technique usage scenario which could be much more effective with improved tools. Read more...

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D. Grey explains concept maps vs. mind maps and shows examples. As often, I find the mind map more appealing and creatively stimulating than the other example, although it is a restricted tree structure. Why is that? I experimented with several versions and considered the Boettger distance. Read more ...

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Blogging is not urgent but important. Same applies to blog listening which is the competitive advantage of the weblog world. It's more about "just in case" knowledge than "just in time" knowledge. It may not be everybody's taste, therefore. If problem-solving is one's direct and main focus of KM, bloggers' evangelism will probably not convince them. But there is a growing discomfort with the "neat, clean and often sterilized understanding of problem solving".

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In the stone-age of the Web, I was a supporter of the Virtual Library, or its predecessors, like the EuroGopher Subject Tree, where I incidentally became the maintainer of the History branch (see details in a German newspaper article). I helped with the general German resources catalog, and the history trees on worldwide and national level. I still have a lot of sympathy for the project, since I do not hate trees and hierarchies (as long as they are made sufferable by reasonable "see-also" cross references). Therefore, here are some thoughts how the VL might relate to RSS, Topic Maps, and folksonomies. Read more ...

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J. Vinson wrote a great piece about note-taking on paper.

"You might talk about X-Y-Z-A-B-C-Y, and I can lump the Y's together by simply smashing some text into the margin. Or I can draw lines and arrows and conceptually group things with circles and squares."

This is exactly the reason why my preferred (see #28) note-taking technique is not efficient enough for taking notes during oral conversations but only for excerpting literal artefacts (which is a pity since I learned yesterday that the oral side of the cultural divide is the more important one). When I use my slide creating program to be able to later connect the two Y's, I can do almost everything with the keyboard, Insert > Textfield > Horizontal, but the "Y" can't be typed unless I click somewhere.

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After reading M. Lessard's "Expression et transformation de la connaissance" in today's Zero Seconde, Kleist (1777-1811, "Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden") would perhaps have written a comment "On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Blogging" into his blog. See also chapter 1.1 in this PDF.

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In corporate intranet blogging, the novel information flow is IMO more convincing than the conversation aspect. The respective roles of both can be illustrated by comparing the blog to pinball. More...

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Magdalena Boettger depicts the difference between personal and organzational KM as plausibly as I have never seen it before: using a continuum along a dimension of growing interpersonal and intertemporal distance.

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Great debate on loose vs. controlled vocabularies. But can two cognitive styles be debated? Knowledge management, IMO, needs to accommodate them both. More...

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