Off the top of my head I can say that I learnt two great words:

Homophily: the tendency for individuals to associate with similar others: ‘Birds of a feather, flock together’.
Propinquity: nearness in place, relation, nature or time.

Some interesting stuff, but a lot to absorb. The data gathering part of SNA seems too labour intensive for my liking. Maybe tools will evolve to help simplify this process. When they do, I’ll have a go.

At the end of all this, the person who’d been sitting next to me leant over and said, ‘very cheem, what?’. Yeah, it was. 

In the afternoon a knowledge cafe with 14 KM practitioners from different companies showing and sharing their projects and experience. Awesome. Lots of opportunity to talk to other practitioners. Not like a normal conference – much better.

I drank far too much coffee at the conference, so before the caffeine buzz subsides…

One thing that made me cheer (on the inside) is that in every conversation I had, there was someone saying that Knowledge Management is a term that should not be used outside of the KM community. And this time it wasn’t just me saying it. O.O

In other words, don’t mention KM when talking to rank and file staff. One reason is that it’s unnecessary jargon that requires layers of workshops and communication to ‘get the KM message across’. But the main reason is that most staff will think that ‘KM’ equals ‘more work’. Many times I’ve heard “so now you expect me to do KM in addition to my usual job?”.

Over the past 4 years I’ve explained this particular problem to management, who’ve nodded sagely. We commissioned a report which found the same issues raised in staff interviews. Message loud and clear, but somehow always sidelined. I suggested that we try ‘Ninja KM’ or ‘KM by stealth’, but nobody was listening (or they didn’t get it). So now I’m delighted, because now I can say that I’m not alone when I recommend to others something along the lines of: “Think ‘KM’, but say ‘problem solving’ (better still use terms which talk directly to your audience’s context)”.

Instead of saying ‘Knowledge Management’, try ‘resource management’, ‘risk management’, ‘asset management’… or whatever makes immediate sense to whoever you’re talking to.

[edit: James Robertson owes credit for being the first to articulate this idea, here's his post in Column Two that made me slap my forehead and go 'yes, that's it'. It's from 2004, so it's not a new idea at all. It's funny how ideas take a while catch on and hit a tipping point like this one did today.]

• individual writing
• collaborative writing
• peer correction
• peer policing
• exam practice
• examples of good writing for our classes
• show off your students’ work to their parents
• correct and learn from common mistakes

The tool she’d used for this was 37 Signals’ Writeboard: which is a simple one-page wiki. It allows multiple authors and editors, version comparison and commenting, all the usual wiki stuff – but on one page: “just like a Word document”, Caroline explained.

Caroline took us step-by-step through the Writeboard set-up and then went on to show how easy it is to use. She added that this wiki tool was simpler to use than other online tools like blogs or more conventional wikis, (I reckon because each Writeboard is only a single page). Writeboard’s simplicity is its strength. Because of this, she explained, any teacher or student can get to grips with it quickly.

She gave some tips on what to watch out for when running a wiki writing activity:

• students misbehaving
• comments (Mother tongue, Singlish or target language?)
• difficulties with email invitations

She also gave tips on how to make it work:

• check the Writeboard regularly
• set very clear instructions
• photocopy screenshot with password

Here’s Caroline’s presentation:

Click to download Caroline’s presentation from ICTLT

Billy Tan explained how he’d been testing out Delicious with his General Paper students to help them make connections between issues and motivate them to read more. He showed how students, who had set up their own Delicious accounts, had made connections between different issues within one article by assigning multiple tags to individual articles.

Their exit survey showed that 90% of students liked using it. They found that was an easy and effective way to manage and share online information – all you need is internet access, a browser and to remember your login and password.

Among teachers, their results showed that Delicious allowed colleagues to easily archive and share online resources. Karen Yap showed how tagging makes it easy for teachers to retrieve and organise online information. Their exit survey for these teachers showed that 100% agreed that Delicious is good for sharing, 75% of which strongly agreed.

I asked if they’d had any problems with people tagging this differently or mis-tagging. They said they had. To deal with this they recommended that users agree on how to name tags before setting up a Delicious project to avoid mis-tagging. They added that standardising account names is also a good idea.

Individual or Department Delicious accounts? Both speakers agreed that personal accounts were the best option.

Click to download their presentation from ICTLT.

They also handed out a DVD made by Innova JC called ‘What is New Media?’ which showcases the great stuff they’re doing.

Innova Junior College is the Centre of Excellence for New Media and New Media Arts.

His main point was that these students tend to view (and use) blogs as a means to vent their feelings. He showed us how this manifested in free-form rants, which were far from the aims of his lessons. He confirmed this by showing us the results of survey he asked some students to complete last week.

He was quick to admit that his first attempt at using blogs with these students at integrating blogs into his classes resulted in work that (at best) lacked focus, and (at worst) had these teenagers revealing things about themselves that he was concerned might expose them to risk if the blogs had been in a public space on the web. His blogs were all closed to public access – he chose to use 21 Classes to help address these concerns by keeping the blogs closed and viewable only by his class.

His strategy for dealing with the challenge included setting clearly focused writing tasks, not calling the blog a ‘blog’ in class (instead refering to it as a portal) and starting the blog with very positive and simple writing activities.

One teacher in the audience asked if Nick had used this blogging exercise to explore issues of cyber-wellness and safe practices for minors online. Nick pointed out that he only saw them for two hours a week, so he didn’t have time to explore these issues with his class, although if he had time he would have liked to. It seemed to me that he had already helped his students toward managing these risks by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than those they’d resorted to before.

Here’s Nick’s presentation:

As Mitch Resnick explained, the aim of this tool is to get kids really creating. He made the point that kids might be able to use digital tools, but this doesn’t really mean that they’re digital natives. He added that they will not be true digital natives unless they’re able to make the tools and manipulate these themselves in a process/cycle: Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, Imagine, and so on.

Some great examples. But one of the most impressive things about the Scratch site is that there’s a community of people who’ve made stuff using the software. The variety of uses is impressive, but the depth of communication and reflection fostered by the community is truly impressive. Gonna get my own kids using this.

Here’s video tutorial showing how easy it is to make a Scratch game/animation: