I’ve read a lot of “practical” KM books (including a bunch by Laurence Prusak and whomever he happens to be collaborating with on a given week) and, frankly, most of them leave me cold. A little too theoretical to be useful, a little to mired in the details to provide a cogent theoretical framework. But [...]
It took me a while to find it on my shelves, but I finally dug out Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community, which is a book on applying Christopher Alexander’s ideas to software engineering. For a good chunk of this book, you could take out words like “software,” “code,” and “objects,” and substitute [...]
I’m insanely jealous. It turns out that Jay Cross lives in a house built by the great architect Christopher Alexander. I’m a huge fan of Alexander’s work. Furthermore, I think anyone who does instructional design should read Alexander’s book. No, I don’t mean The Nature of Order, which is the book that Jay is apparently [...]
This piece on Slate by Duncan Watts (author of the outstanding book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age) captures both the Nirvana of decentralized intelligence that everybody seeks and its frustrating elusiveness. It’s a must-read for anybody interested in “emergent learning” or social learning or communities of practice or…you know…that stuff.
Watts is a [...]
Yup. I finally broke down and got myself an iPod. Kathy has had one for about two years now but I was holding out for two more developments. First, I wanted enough disk space–at least 20 gigs–to carry a significant amount of data as well as my music, since I intended to use it as [...]
