If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original

Two things came together for me today. One I was reflecting on the E2.0 meetings that I attended last week and the 2nd was listening to a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on Education (thanks to those at weknowmore for posting this great talk).

In his talk Sir Robinson made the statement "if you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything new." As I listened to this I was struck by what I had heard last week from a group of 30+/- year olds who are working on E2.0 technologies in a large, innovative technology company. "If you are not willing to fail - you will never get anything done."

The group of 30 year olds were working to get tools like Yammer behind the firewall of this large tech company - and they were being quite successful. When I asked them what advice they had, based on their experience, for those that were just embarking on implementing E2.0 they said "you need to be willing to fail. So start small...if you are going to fail, you don't want it to be a big failure. And communicate, communicate, communicate." They could not emphasis enough the importance of making the work visible - and of explaining how it was relevant to the business and to the individual.

Lesson learned....when trying something new start small but tell lots of people about it and the benefits it can have for them and the organization....

Do others have stories and lessons learned about implementation of E2.0 technologies in their organization that they would be willing to share?

Are we weakening our brains through Twitter

Last week I had the opportunity to spend 2 days with people from a variety of companies that are actively pursuing the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies both internally and externally. Internally to promote knowledge sharing, increase innovation...and to retain staff (who think that this is fun and cool). Externally they are using it for marketing, accessing ideas and recruiting. In many of these companies E2.0 tools such as Blogs, Yammer, Twitter and Wikis are having a remarkable impact in all of these areas.

BUT...one of the comments we hear about the use of these technologies is ...yeah...this stuff is interesting...but are we weakening our brains though the use of tools like Twitter? Are we putting ourselves in a position where we are less likely to remember key facts -- or where we have such short attention spans that we can never accomplish anything significant?

In a recent post in Salon.com author and English professor Dennis Baron, from the University of Illinois, talks about this phenomena and his new book "A better pencil." In the book he puts this discussion into a historical perspective.

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

In our teaching at Cal State North Ridge in the KM distance learning program we are finding that these tools increase both the connections between faculty and students as well as learning. Students not only "learn from the faculty," but equally importantly they share their experiences and knowledge with each other using these social media tools. Based on what we are seeing these tools are not handicapping our students, they are enhancing the learning experience. Just as writing did for Plato and his students, movable type did for Gutenberg and millions of readers of books and the computer has done for Job's and millions around the world these new tools are allowing us to more easily communicate and learn.

KM is alive and well at Cal State Univ Northridge

KM is alive and thriving at California State University Northridge. We have just graduated our first completely on-line cohort from our Master's in KM (MKM) program and are now in the midst of recruiting for our 3rd cohort, which will begin in January of 2010 (the 2nd cohort began in January of 2009 and will finish in December of 2010). The students in this first on-line cohort came from across the country and from a wide variety of organizations and industries ranging from pharmaceutical companies such as Amgen, to the US Military (the Marine Corps), to aerospace (Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne) the energy industry (Chevron) as well as independent consultants. These students are now applying what they learned in the MKM program within their organizations.

The program focuses on the full range of KM topics that enable students to develop and help implement a "knowledge strategy" for their organization that is aimed - not just sharing, leveraging or creating knowledge -- but at improving the performance of the organization. The students learn about the history of KM and how it has evolved, they learn about the key processes and technologies that can help leverage and create knowledge as well as stimulate innovation and finally they learn the leadership and management skills that are required to be successful in today's knowledge based organizations.

The faculty for the program includes well know KM practitioners, such as Kent Greenes (if you don't know Kent - he is considered one of the fathers of modern KM with his pioneering work at BP and his subsequent work with a wide variety of clients around the world) as well as academics steeped in the knowledge of the disciplines that underlie a successful KM program. We also draw on faculty from organizations such as the US Army and their Battlefield Knowledge System (BCKS) as well as from consulting companies such as Ernst and Young.

But why would anyone what to take an on-line program? Of course there is the obvious reason - it allows students to take the program from anywhere in the world. There is no requirement for face-to-face meetings. What this means from the students is that they are exposed to and work with other students from around country and from a wide variety of industries. It also means that we can draw our faculty from literally anywhere in the world. Ah - all well an good - but isn't a distance learning program the "poor cousin" of an on campus program. As it turns out - no. What research is showing is that from a "learning outcomes" perspective (academic speak for what the students know at the end of program) Distance Learning (DL) programs are in fact superior to face-to-face. There are a variety of reasons for this. Two of them are (1) students tend to spend more time in a DL setting than in face-to-face and (2) as a result of the extensive use of what we would now call Social media tools (ie., wikis, blogs, forums and IM) the students spend more time reflecting on what they are learning, which leads to better "learning outcomes." If you want to see more on this there is an interesting paper just published by researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) for the Department of education. I will warn you - that it is an "academic paper" so it's heavy on the methods - but the findings are very interesting not only from the perspective of education - but also for the KM implications and how we can effectively share what we know across and organization using DL techniques.

For more information on CSUN's MKM program you can go to http://tsengcollege.csun.edu/kmdl/.