College Professor uses Tried-and-True method for Encouraging Knowledge Sharing

via Slashdot a few weeks ago, and Ars Technica; at the University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom recently assigned her students to work on Wikipedia entries, and add to the knowledge base. An interesting approach; I found the reaction of the Wikipedia community most interesting, in that the entries were aggressively edited and commented upon - sometimes "rudely". It's a common theme in many KM discussions, as early adopters enter their first Trough of Disillusionment, and see these wonderful tools languish…

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Communication is the responsibility of …

Corporate Knowledge Management (KM) is hard. Hard to introduce, hard to teach/coach, hard to require, hard to create. Which, added all up together, often make it hard to use. It may sound like unfounded pessimism, as the Internet is loaded with examples of successful collaborative sites that aggregate and repackage knowledge - it's been doing that for years, ever since there were Compuserve forums and bulletin boards. Unfortunately (for the corporate environment), the Law of Large Numbers takes care of…

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The Law of Large Numbers – or, why Enterprise Wikis are Fundamentally Challenged

Some will be taken a bit by surprise to read the title of this post; we have implemented a wiki in our group at work, and I have the evangelist role in promoting the tool. Still, a recent "event" brought home the fact that wikis are not the silver bullets that some breathless articles may make them out to be. To be fair, Hickins' article does call out the "law of large numbers", although the idea is buried in the…

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