For a broader perspective on the conference, search for Twitter hashtag #CIL2010.

TTC: Make it better, Mayor X

Kimberly Silk.

I’ve been a TTC customer since I moved to Toronto in the early ’90s. For the most part, I am satisfied with my daily commute, enjoy weekend streetcar trips with my family to different neighbourhoods, and find it to be the “better way” in comparison to car travel. My 4-yr-old son likes riding the buses, streetcars and especially the subway when we can get the front seat. I can’t blame him – it is thrilling to be at the head of a train as we enter or exit a tunnel.

I’m also a fan and willing participant in social media, and, along with hundreds of my fellow TTC riders, follow Twitter to get updates on TTC status. Social media has made transit easier to use, in many ways, since I find out ahead of time if trains are delayed or buses are re-routed.

For instance, just last week College station was temporarily closed do to a “security investigation” (not unusual, given the proximity of the provincial courts); this news was broadcast on Twitter, and as a result I walked to Queen’s Park station to avoid being late to pick up my son from daycare.

However, while social media has been good for the TTC, it’s a double-edged sword that also exposes the system’s weaknesses. Due to the prolific tweets provided by TTC riders like myself (@ttcupdates) and TTC’s communications director (@bradttc) most delays and service interruptions are reported within seconds of happening.

Read the entire post at http://thestar.blogs.com/yourcitymycity/2010/03/ttc-make-it-better-mayor-x.html

We give a lot of talks and presentations about the ways and places companies and their employees learn the fastest. We call these learning environments creation spaces — places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates.

During these discussions, it’s inevitable that somebody raises their hand. “Wait a minute,” they say, “isn’t this just knowledge management all over again?”

It’s an understandable concern. Knowledge management, after all, was probably the hottest topic in management in the 1990s. “If only our company knew what our company knows” was the mantra in those days. With knowledge becoming the most important factor of production, surely competitive success awaited those companies that could effectively manage what their employees knew.

But we all know by now that despite massive investments and a lot of highly motivated people knowledge management in some instances didn’t yield all the benefits it could have. The best KM systems succeeded at capturing and institutionalizing the knowledge of the firm. But for the most part the repositories and directories remained fragmentary and the resources didn’t get used. The folks with the knowledge were often reluctant to put what they knew into the database. The folks seeking the knowledge often had trouble finding what they needed.

Moreover, in their quest to capture what the firm already knows, most knowledge managers lost sight of the fact that the real value is in creating new knowledge, rather than simply “managing” existing knowledge. In this fast moving world, what we know — our “stocks” of knowledge — depreciate faster than they used to. So we’ve got to keep creating new knowledge in order to keep pace.

Most of us, as individuals, know this. That’s why we’re not keen to spend time entering our latest document into a knowledge management system. We know we’re better off engaging in the interactions and collaborations that create new knowledge about how to get things done.

In these circumstances, the last thing the world needs is another knowledge management scheme focusing on capturing knowledge that already exists. What we need are new approaches to creating knowledge, ones that take advantage of the new digital infrastructure’s ability to lower the interaction costs among us all — ones that mobilize big, diverse groups of participants to innovate and create new value.

We’ve found in our research into environments like World of Warcraft (WoW) that new knowledge comes into being when people who share passions for a given endeavor interact and collaborate around difficult performance challenges. Most long-time gamers, for instance, figured it would be months before anybody made it all the way through the many difficult performance “levels” involved in The Burning Crusade, the World of Warcraft extension released in 2007. But a French player named Gullerbone did so little more than 28 hours after the extension was released. His accomplishment made headlines in the gamer world.

Gullerbone succeeded by taking advantage of the tools and resources available to him (and his “guild” of teammates) in the vast creation space that has emerged within and around World of Warcraft. Creation spaces emerge from a careful recipe of participants, interactions, and environments blended by insightful designers. And they succeed where knowledge management fails.

Why? Because these creation spaces, heavily relying on shared network platforms, provide tools and forums for knowledge creation while at the same time capturing the discussion, analysis, and actions in ways that make it easier to share across a broader range of participants. Soon after Gullerbone and his guild figured out how to get through the new performance levels of the Burning Crusade, the details about how they did it soon became widely available in the social media “knowledge economy” surrounding the game — videos, blogs, wikis, etc.

This focus on knowledge creation shifts the motivations of participants. Knowledge management systems desperately try to persuade participants to invest time and effort to contribute existing knowledge with the vague and long-term promise that they themselves might eventually derive value from the contributions of others. In contrast, creation spaces focus on providing immediate value to participants in terms of helping them tackle difficult performance challenges while at the same time reducing the effort required to capture and disseminate the knowledge created.

Creation spaces have the potential to generate increasing returns — the more participants that join, the faster new knowledge gets created and the more rapidly performance improves. They bring into play network effects in the generation of new knowledge. In contrast, traditional knowledge management systems are inherently diminishing returns propositions. Since existing knowledge is by definition limited, it requires more and more effort to squeeze the next increment of performance improvement as existing knowledge gets more broadly distributed.

Here’s another important contrast between creation spaces and conventional knowledge management systems. Knowledge management traditionally has focused on capturing knowledge that already exists within the firm — its systems rarely extend beyond the boundaries of the enterprise. Creation spaces instead focus on mobilizing and focusing participants across all institutional boundaries. Sure, there are lots of smart people within your enterprise, but imagine the power of connecting with and engaging a more diverse collection of smart people beyond your enterprise. That is another source of the increasing returns in creation spaces — participation is not limited by the boundaries of the enterprise.

What is your assessment of the limitations of traditional knowledge management systems? What are the major barriers that prevent them from delivering even more value to the firm? What issues need to be overcome to gain wider adoption of creation spaces as an alternative means of creating and capturing knowledge?

Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn’t always very easy to find in one simple place. That’s why today we’re rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. It should be available for everyone to try by the end of the day, so be sure to check back.

A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend’s New York blog probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I’ll find are some well-known and official sites. We’ve taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today’s launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.”

The Access 2009 conference in Charlottetown PEI was a huge success (I think some people should be fully recovered by now) and as
promised we recorded all the sessions.

Most of the Access2009pei (also a Twitter and Flickr tag) live video streams are available on the UPEI ePresence site at UPEI – ePresence Presentation Portal.

Video streams are also embedded on the session pages at http://vre2.upei.ca/access2009/taxonomy/term/41.

Thanks to everyone for coming to PEI and sharing stories with your colleagues. We hope it was worth your while and enjoyed making it happen.

BTW – ePresence is a great open source app for streaming live and archiving: get more info at epresence.tv.

Cheers,

Access2009 Organizing Committee

Lisa participated in Ingnite Toronto in August. Here is the video of her presentation on Social Innovation.

Ignite T.O. Lisa Torjman – Social Innovation from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

Over the past year we have solidified the journal as a space for scholarly conversation, and we invite you to contribute your voice to this burgeoning publication.

F/IQ seeks to create an environment for discourse on emerging issues and topics in the Information field. It aims to create an intellectual space for the Information community to analyse and critically assess the divergent topics that comprise our field of study and practice. F/IQ strives to define and direct the iSchool Movement through scholarly and professional communications, as a means to fostering collective identity among students, faculty and practitioners of the field.

We are seeking an array of types of written work:

• Feature articles are full-length papers of no more than 5,000 words, which take the form of an academic paper and including a thesis and supporting arguments, full citations to academic resources, and a scholarly tone.
• Thought and Opinion Pieces are shorter, less scholarly items that exhibit reflective, thought-provoking insights about a particular phenomenon or observation that pertains to the Information field. These pieces are shorter and may not have extensive citations, but illustrate an opinion or conclusion that is original and well-informed.
• Reviews – of a book, a software program, or some other medium of a scholarly nature – are 175-200 words long, and include a brief statement of the thesis or description of the contents, a critical appraisal of both substance and execution, and an indication of the item’s value for the Information community.

F/IQ encourages submissions of a broad constellation of works on the study of Information in all of its forms, including but not limited to: archival science, accessibility studies, book history and print culture, critical theory, cultural informatics, health informatics, information studies, information systems, library science, museum studies, media and communications studies, and technology studies. Past issues and the journal’s mission, vision, and submission guidelines can be viewed at https://fiq.ischool.utoronto.ca

The deadline for submission is October 6.

If you are interested in submitting an item to the F/IQ, please contact fiquarterly@gmail.com for more details regarding the submission process.

On behalf of the editorial team, thanks for reading, and we look forward to your submission!

Erin Kent
Marketing and Communications Officer
The Faculty of Information Quarterly
The iSchool at the University of Toronto

• Web cast (begins Thursday at noon). There is also a number of public spaces where you can view the web cast.
• Follow @TEDxTO on Twitter
• Attend the TEDxTO afterparty

Enjoy!

Cushing Academy has all the hallmarks of a New England prep school, with one exception.

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

And to replace those old pulpy devices that have transmitted information since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1400s, they have spent $10,000 to buy 18 electronic readers made by Amazon.com and Sony. Administrators plan to distribute the readers, which they’re stocking with digital material, to students looking to spend more time with literature.

Those who don’t have access to the electronic readers will be expected to do their research and peruse many assigned texts on their computers.

“Instead of a traditional library with 20,000 books, we’re building a virtual library where students will have access to millions of books,’’ said Tracy, whose office shelves remain lined with books. “We see this as a model for the 21st-century school.’’

Not everyone on campus is sold on Tracy’s vision.

They worry about an environment where students can no longer browse rows of voluptuous books, replete with glossy photographs, intricate maps, and pages dog-eared by generations of students. They worry students will be less likely to focus on long works when their devices are constantly interrupting them with e-mail and instant messages. They also worry about a world where sweat-stained literature is deemed as perishable as all the glib posts on Facebook or Twitter.

Continued…