****** The Gurteen Knowledge-Letter (Issue 59, 9 May 2005) ******
I have an announcement that I am really quite excited about!
For some time I have wanted to build the ability into my website to
deliver simple courses by email.
Well, I have written the code and thanks to the British National
Health Service (NHS) Clinical Governance Support Team who have given
me permission to publish their "Lesson Cards" I have my first
'course'.
The cards were developed to aid the NHS but I am sure you will find
the lessons contained in them hugely useful whether you work for
another health service or indeed any organization.
You may register to receive a lesson card by email, once a week, on a
day of your choosing.
I really love these 'lessons' - they are short, simple, to the point
and inspirational. Take a look:
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L001489/
*************************** CONTENTS ***************************
1 - Making Knowledge Work
2 - Masters of technology and innovation
3 - KnowledgeBoard Update
4 - Innovation Cafes
5 - What shapes us?
6 - Conferences in the Sun
7 - Searching for stuff you can re-use
8 - Website Goodies
9 - Global Knowledge Review
10 - KM Australia 13-15 July 2005
11 - Liberty's Poet
12 - Skype and VoIP
13 - Gurteen Event Calendar
14 - What's New?
********************* MAKING KNOWLEDGE WORK *********************
You are still in time to book a place on my "Making Knowledge Work"
conference in London on 17-18 May.
I have long hated conferences that were all chalk-and-talk or
death-by-powerpoint. So this one is different! Participants are just
going to have to engage and take part - it's a two day event of small
facilitated workshops and highly interactive sessions built around
the central question:
"How do we make knowledge work - what do we need to do to be more
creative, innovative and effective in the knowledge economy?"
I have some great speaker/facilitators including Dave Snowden, Victor
Newman, Chris Collison and Clive Holtham.
Take a look, come along, learn and have some fun doing it!
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L001182/
************* MASTERS OF TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION *************
I subscribe to Wired Magazine's Top Stories feed to keep up with much
of the fun stuff that is going on in the technology world.
One recent article takes a look at "The Wired 40" - those
organizations who Wired consider to be the global masters of
technology and innovation.
No surprise at many of the names : Google, Apple, Toyota and Nokia.
But what about Netflix, Medtronic and Li & Fung - no I had never
heard of them either :-)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/wired40.html
Wired Top Stories RSS Feed:
http://www.wired.com/news/feeds/rss2/0,2610,,00.xml
Gurteen RSS Feeds:
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/rss-feeds
********************* KNOWLEDGEBOARD UPDATE *********************
May brings our first ever election for a community representative to
sit on our strategic steering group. We are also proud that our paper
about on and offline CoPs has been accepted for the eChallenges
conference, and are looking forward to an online workshop on
semantic-based KMS on the 17th.
http://www.knowledgeboard.com
*********************** INNOVATION CAFES ***********************
I am working with Victor Newman on a workshop concept we are calling
Innovation Cafes" or iCafes. They are a synthesis of one of Victor's
many innovation workshops and my knowledge cafe.
iCafes initially focus discussion upon failure and encourage
participants to design an innovation process with every imaginable
flaw within it. Participants then move on to identify the top 3 most
powerful elements that guarantee failure and are invited to reverse
these through constructing antidote tactics.
iCafes are designed to be delivered as 2-hour facilitated sessions.
There are 2 types: open and focused. Open iCafes are designed for
mixed audiences; whilst focused iCafes are delivered to dedicated
work groups, teams or specific organizations.
If you would like to learn more see:
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/icafes
If you are interested please contact Victor Newman at
[email protected] or better still call him on +44 (0) 7976 552 883
************************ WHAT SHAPES US? ************************
I was reflecting on life and human evolution earlier this morning and
the fact that as a species our behaviour has been shaped by not only
our environment but by our tools and how increasingly technology was
shaping us.
So I googled "how our environment and our tools have shaped our
evolution" and came up with a few fascinating links. Enjoy!
History of Earth, Man, Environment and a Vision
http://xiando.org/environment/
The multi-track evolution of Mind
http://www.thymos.com/science/cadre.html
Nature, Nurture and Culture
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20492/
Is Science the Salvation to Society
http://www.pbk.org/news/views/klineberg.htm
A Future Society Must Integrate Current Contradictions
http://www.earley.org/Transformation/future_society.htm
Genes, environemt and human freedom
http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/genes_freedom.html
******************** CONFERENCES IN THE SUN ********************
Well my Barcalona conference has been cancelled which is sad as I was
so looking forward to it but hopefully I can make the "Culture and
Change" conference in Rhodes in July for their 'talking circles' - a
form of 'knowledge-cafe'
The Fifth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change
in Organizations 2005
19 - 22 Jul 2005, Common Ground Conferences
University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L001118/
Let me know if you will be at this event - it would be great to meet
you :-)
************** SEARCHING FOR STUFF YOU CAN RE-USE **************
Full copyright applies to most stuff on the web but more and more
people and organizations are licensing their content under a Creative
Commons licence so that other people can re-use it - without
necessarily having to pay or ask permission.
What makes this especially useful is that you can embed meta data
tags in a webpage to indicate the Creative Commons licence in use.
This in turn, means you can search for such pages. Both Creative
Commons and Yahoo have search engines to do just this.
Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/find/
Yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/cc
As I said in my last months k-letter, I am slowly tagging pages on my
website to make clear the copyright position on each page and each
image/document. It also means the above search engines will find my
material.
If you sign up for the NHS Lesson Cards you will discover that they
have licensed the cards under a CC licence (at my suggestion) to
allow me and others to use them.
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L001489/
These to my mind are monumental developments that will help share so
much good material on the web and allow it to be adapted and re-used.
Take a look!
************************ WEBSITE GOODIES ************************
My website is a huge resource site but let me point you to some
features that you may have missed:
Quote of the Day
Receive a quotation by e-mail on a day of the week of your choosing
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/quotations
Event Alerts
Receive e-mail alerts for new conferences & workshops in your region
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/events
New Book Alerts
Receive e-mail alerts for recently published books
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/books
Email Courses
Subscribe to short e-mail courses by e-mail
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/email-courses
RSS Feeds
Five RSS feeds are available from the website
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/rss-feeds
Downloads
Several sets of materials from past conferences (& more) to download
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/gkr
******************** GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE REVIEW ********************
Each month, I publish one article from the Global Knowledge review
online. In April, the article was one on innovation: "Let's Get
Together" by Andy Burnett. This is how he starts:
"The phrase "let's get together and just hang out for a few days."
isn't often heard in a business context. However, I am beginning to
think that it should become part of the management phrase book in any
company that really wants to innovate."
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L001610/
I hope you enjoy :-)
Other past articles
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/gkr-articles
More on the Global Knowledge Review
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/gkr
***************** KM AUSTRALIA 13-15 JULY 2005 *****************
KM Australia is coming up in July.
Keynotes from :Etienne Wenger and Karl Wiig who I know well. But also
Amit Khanna who heads up KM at Tata Steel in India. and Johnny Martin
who is Operations Excellence Coordinator at BP.
Wish I could get to it. Anyone care to offer me some work down-under
to make the trip worth my while :-)
************************ LIBERTY'S POET ************************
A month or two ago, I received an e-mail from Hannia Moore to tell me
about her new book "Liberty's Poet: Emma Lazarus"
I was busy and I almost passed it over. But I am a curious creature
and just had to go to Amazon and see what the book was about.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0975480340/gurteen
There I discovered these moving words
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
I had heard them several times before - but where? Well they were
written by a young Jewish girl called Emma Lazarus in NYC in 1883.
And the reason I knew them was that they are part of a poem "The New
Colossus" that was engraved on a bronze tablet and put inside the
base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus
What a find!!! Emma was a remarkable young woman. And Hannia too has
a fascinating life story.
Emma Lazarus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Lazarus
Hannia Moore:
http://www.bookpros.com/Clients/Liberty/LibertyBio.htm
Hannia and I have exchanged several e-mails since and she has sent me
half a dozen copies of the book to give to friends. (If I get the
time, I will resurrect my 'book raffle'.)
I do love how I get to learn through the internet and how make new
friends from all backgrounds and cultures.
************************ SKYPE AND VOIP ************************
If you are a Skype user - have you discovered the Skype Journal
website yet? Its full of great stuff on Skype and VoIP in general.
If you have not taken the time to understand VoIP (using the internet
as a telephone system) then exploring Skype is a good place to start.
This technology, I feel is almost as big as the web itself in its
potential to change the way we communicate.
A few years ago, we never thought we would have a personal computer,
never mind a mobile phone. And the internet - well stuff of science
fiction. Seems to me in a few years time - most of our phone calls
whether from a fixed phone or a mobile will be over the internet and
come pretty much for free! Well maybe just a low monthly service
charge.
I have been trying to find a good introduction to what VoIP will
deliver today and tomorrow but its all techie. I may have to just
write it myself :-)
But if you can cope with the jargon try here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=introduction+to+voip
http://www.skypejournal.com/
