Blogs as Personal Knowledge Management – Learning 2.0 Podcast Series

I did my first podcast last week on Blogs as Personal Knowledge Management as part of the Otter Group’s Learning 2.0 Podcast series. The series offers weekly insights on learning in the world of Web 2.0. Speakers include Kathleen Gilroy, Glen Mohr, and now myself. Topics include the use of aggregators, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools to enhance and transform the learning process.

It was an interesting process for me. In this case, I spoke about the use of blogs for personal knowledge management, or how, as a number of people have suggested, they can serve as your back-up brain, keeping track of important ideas, documents, and meetings in a searchable archive than can be made accessible to others. Blogs can act like personal filing cabinets. When I have to speak or write about a topic that I have recorded in my blog, I can quickly do a search to find the right material. And then I can send these posts to anyone else that I want to share this knowledge with. For me, my blog is worth the effort simply for this capability even if no one else read it. It saves me an enormous amount of time.

In upcoming podcasts I will cover other business uses of blogs and other web 2.0 tools, including such applications as team workspaces and project management. This next generation of the web has transformed the opportunities that are open to the learning designer. I have long been in favor of participatory learning. Now this approach is more possible than ever. Kathleen and I have also joined to create the Learning 2.0 Boot Camp to enable you to develop work plans for using the existing and emerging Web 2.0 tools to develop innovative programs that invite participation and transparency in the learning process.

Comments

[Alex]

Bill,

Thanks for the podcast. I just finished to listen to it and I found it great.

I have one question: within the companies you have studied - and which have used blogs for internal communication - how the blogs were maintain alive (ie with sufficient fruitful content)?

I ask you this question because one key success factor for corporate blogging is, I think, to find a "champion", ie somebody who is willing to take time to put posts...and a lot of workers have no time to do so...

[Bill Ives]

Alex. You are certainly right on the leadership issue. The answer to getting people to particpate in blogs and wikis is no different than the challenges faced by knowledge management systems. The effort needs to be aligned with work processes and provide a positive work benefit to the employee. Actually, with blogs this is potentially easier since there is greater participation and ability to fit individual needs than with traditional enterprise KM. In some uses cases, such as project management, the transparency provided by blogs makes internal communication easier and less time consuming that email and applications on individual hard drives. In these cases the reduced work load that blogs provide should provide sufficient motivation. Here, also you get a archived and searchable record of the work process that can be added to a KM system with no extra work on the part of the employee.