Deb Coates, IT Specialist
Continuing Education and
Working Paper#1
Weblogs as Trusted Sources and Knowledge Filters
Part One
Part Two: Setting
up and Using Weblogs for Knowledge Sharing
We live in a society where the amount of information is constantly and rapidly expanding. People find it difficult to make decisions not because they don't have enough information but because there's so much that it's hard to sort out what's important and to feel as if one ever has enough information to make a final decision. (ref. Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, David Shenk, June 1998; The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, February, 2000) This proliferation of information creates several additional problems:
Accordingly, I have begun to look at the potential for exchanging knowledge via web logging tools, such as Blogger, Grey Matter, and Movable Type. In particular, these tools can provide a way to filter available content, interpret advanced information, and preserve individual voice, important in establishing trusted source credibility.
Encouraging Extension and other subject matter specialists to create and maintain their own weblogs, would provide:
What is a weblog?
According to Guardian Unlimited, a weblog is an individual’s log of the web or a diary of web pages to recommend to others.
David Winer says weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with accompanying comments, and links to on-site articles. A weblog is a kind of continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also camaraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.
Weblogs are occasionally separated into information weblogs, which are generally a collection of web links with individual comments, or personal weblogs, a chronological collection of personal narrative, opinion, and comments.
Weblogs can be mostly personal (http://www.panix.com/~pnh/makinglight.html), concentrated on a specific topic (http://www.mediaprivacy.com/, http://www.elearningpost.com/), or comprehensive and eclectic (http://www.boingboing.net).
What does it allow people to do?
Knowledge can be divided easily into two different types: explicit and tacit. Explicit is the kind of thing that can be written down easily, a set of rules or a document outlining the steps to setup a printer on a network. Tacit knowledge encompasses the things people know that they don’t necessarily know that they know, that they don’t know how to describe, and that is an intricate mix of facts and experience and physical skill. Explicit knowledge can be captured and committed to database or paper fairly easily. Tacit knowledge is intimately tied to the source and the place and the context.
Tacit knowledge is usually passed to others through social interaction, through conversation and storytelling. Tacit knowledge by its nature is very difficult to exchange without clear links to personality and culture and people.
Storytelling, the process of sharing meaning, individual experience and cultural information through anecdotes, myths, metaphors, fables, and narrated experience, is one means that people in organizations can use to share knowledge that doesn’t fit easily into databases, reports or other information capturing media. Stories are deeper and richer than non-narrative text, use shared understandings, appeal to both emotion and intellect, and are easier to understand and remember than non-narrative text.
At Xerox in the 80s, it was believed that the process of fixing copy machines was well-known. Copy reps were given a carefully written, well-researched book designed to walk them through each problem and provide a step-by-step solution. Copy reps worked alone because it was efficient and because they had all the information they needed to service copiers as independent workers.
Julian Orr, an anthropologist and organizational consultant, spent time in the field observing service reps and discovered that what the reps actually do in order to get their work done differs considerably from the sterile process-centered ideal. In the field problems arose because while documentation may tell what, it doesn’t tell why, because machines often don’t fail predictably and because it’s often necessary to make sense of the machine in order to fix it. So when the process (refer to the manual) didn’t work, the workers went to breakfast. What Orr found was that the service reps had developed their own system for exchanging knowledge and it occurred every time they met for breakfast or lunch or coffee. Though it might look from the outside like a bunch of people shooting the breeze, these sessions exchanged huge amounts of information through storytelling and narrative. They posed questions, raised problems, offered solutions, discussed changes, and constructed answers (The Social Life of Information; John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, February, 2000).
In an environment of too much information, it becomes important to develop ways to identify useful information without searching through the entire web. This is particularly important when one of the objectives is to stay in tune with the new information as it’s generated. In addition, some knowledge requires experts to interpret. We don’t expect everyone, for example, to be able to look at an angiogram or a seismic reading and understand what it means and what decisions might be made based on the information it contains. We rely on doctors and geologists and other specialists to use their more specialized knowledge to interpret and explain. It’s essential in trying to learn from and ‘mine’ the content on the web to have access to sites that both filter knowledge and interpret specialized knowledge.
One of the ways that it’s possible to decide what sites are worth visiting often, for example, what sites provide a broad, filtered range of new content and what sites provide an interpretation of content on the web based on specialized expertise, is to develop a set of trusted sources. Trusted sources may be people who share the same interests you do and who link to and recommend sites that you find generally interesting and useful. A trusted source may also be an expert in a particular field. One way to locate trusted experts is to find someone that you personally know or that you have located through a personal chain of experts, peers or colleagues.
The criteria for judging trusted sources on the web are the same as those for selecting friends and trusted experts face to face. Who is this person? What do I know about them? What kind of information are they presenting? How does the information fit with other things I know? How reliable has past information been? Key factors for evaluating trusted sources include: credentials, references, usefulness of the information they filter, recommendations from others, strong, clear writing, and personal glimpses of the person behind the information. This last factor is increasingly critical.
Corporate voice helps to add to the information that’s available, but it doesn’t help us evaluate what information we should use to make decisions. We need to know the people behind the web site, we need to know who they are and how they think in order to help us evaluate the specific usefulness of the information they’re presenting us. We need particularly to hear their individual voice before we can give them trusted source status. And we need sites that are built by ‘this-expert-we-trust’ as well as sites that contain a range of published resources from a large organization.
We can’t disconnect ‘people’ from tacit knowledge. Individual voice is one of the ways that we maintain the ‘people’ connection on line. We need to exchange tacit knowledge in order to help us make decisions, to gain new knowledge ourselves and to sift through the dizzying array of information that’s available on the web.
Web logging isn’t the ultimate answer to the issue of information overload. It doesn’t stop the rapid expansion of knowledge (in fact it adds to it although not as much as brand-new information); doesn’t give people the knowledge they need to evaluate trusted sources or interpret high-level expertise and may induce discomfort in the organization because it encourages individual voice and circumvents traditional pathways to publication.
However, information doubles every three or four years There’s more information available to the average person today whole centuries past. In addition, information is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge integrates information with understanding and consequently is more difficult to evaluate and obtain than the bits of data that constitute information. Constant streams of information affect our decision making and recall ability (Shenk, 1998). We can’t figure out how to sift through all the available information, when to stop, how to locate expertise, know who to trust and, ultimately, make important decisions in our lives.
Therefore, several questions need to be answered:
How can we help people to sift through information and keep up with new developments?
Are there means by which trusted sources can be developed, providing quick reference points on particular topics?
What tools do people need that they don’t have available now to help them make decisions?
Web logging tools which will allow subject matter experts to filter available content, establish trusted sources, and help site visitors interpret and act on available information and, themselves, gain new knowledge. They can be set up for knowledge filtering on specific subjects, knowledge exchange between experienced individuals and/or the general public, and a way to identify and evaluate available sources for trustworthiness and usefulness. In addition, web logs extend the ability of the organization to provide useful, practical expertise so that people can make better decisions about their own lives.
Blogger, Grey Matter, Conversant, and Movable Type are some of the major web log tools readily available today. Blogger processing is housed on a central server, but pages can be posted to your own server or to a free site (Blog*Spot) provided by Blogger that includes advertising. There is also a Blogger Pro version which is not free and comes with support, additional features, and more reliable access. The cost for Blogger Pro is currently thirty-five dollars. Conversant can be set up for free at the Free-Conversant site. Conversant sites are hosted at Conversant. Server licenses cost $750 initially, plus $350 per month. Movable Type and Grey Matter are open source software that can be downloaded for free. They are supported by donations, optional setup fees and other pricing structures.
Web log software features that are useful for collecting, disseminating and exchanging knowledge include:
Characteristics of a web log used for knowledge exchange include: entries arranged chronologically, easy data entry and updating, and links to additional information at other sites. It is necessary to know, at minimum, enough HTML to create links, lists, blockquotes, and emphasis. With Movable Type, entries are archived by category, individually and by month. The web log can also include permanent links to reference sites.
I’ve set up a couple of experimental sites at:
Deb's Main Blog
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/mt/dcoates/
and
Deb's Reference Blog
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/mt/dcoates2/
Go on to Part Two: Setting up and Using Weblogs for Knowledge Sharing
References
Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, David Shenk, June 1998
The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, February, 2000
A List Apart How to Write a Better Weblog
All the News That's Fit to Blog
elearningpost - June 2001 Grassroots KM through blogging
kulesh.org - Weblogging Lessons learned
Life On The Internet Could Blogging Assist KM
NUblog Weblogs for public relations
Open Directory - Computers Internet On the Web Web Logs Tools
Slashdot Here Come The Weblogs
weblogs a history and perspective