Nancy White points us to a beautifully simple intervention for reducing flaming in an online forum; pre-populate the text box where you write your message with the text: “Everyone needs a hug.” According to the intervention designer, Ramit Sethi, “this small step reduced flame postings by a huge number.”

Some of my favourite bloggers are talking about expertise location recently. Jack Vinson provides a good summary. Luis Suarez riffs off Dennis McDonald, who has a couple of posts on the topic (here and here). All these posts make good points about expertise location and each is written from the perspective that an organisation can […]

   Learning Retention Rates Originally uploaded by Eric Rice. Looks like we need more opportunities to help others learn to enhance our own learning retention rates.

Following on from my post about how to identify and evaluate expertise, I discovered this list today in an interesting resource called How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is […]

The relationship among data, information and knowledge is often depicted as a pyramid. With data at the base, it’s converted to information and information converted to knowledge. This metaphor of a pyramid or ladder to explain these concepts is unhelpful because you start to believe one is better than the other and there is a […]

Nature has just reported on research which found people make better decisions by going with their gut if the situation is complex. The evidence is growing. Gary Klein’s work on naturalistic decision making supports this idea and Malcolm Gladwell has certainly popularised the viewpoint in his book Blink.

I’ve just arrived home from a week at Jervis Bay—stayed with my folks. My family and I spent lots of time on the beach and reading books. I was kept entertained by Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English which, among other things, got me thinking about how to keep abreast of new developments. Rather than trawling through bit-oceans […]

Over the last 6 months I have attended a few knowledge management conferences to see if things have progressed and I’m dismayed at how many times I heard academics and practitioners still talking about capturing tacit knowledge. I thought we understood that nature of tacit knowledge is that it cannot be translated or converted in […]

On Monday and Tuesday this week I trundled off to ACKMIDS. Actually I didn’t think I would make it this year because I was scheduled to be in Adelaide but as luck would have it my client postponed our work which left me free to attend. ACKMIDS stands for the Australian Conference for Knowledge Management […]

Denham Grey’s post on just how useful annotations can be in providing context reminds me of two famous annotators, Pierre de Fermat and J Edgar Hoover. Fermat was a genius mathematician born in 1601. Apart from being a judge he delighted in his hobby of solving the most difficult mathematical problems. While studying Diophantus’ Arithmetica (published in 1621) […]