2018: Knowledge & research, agility and neuroscience

Already in 2016 I reviewed my digital year that passed and now I am expanding this review beyond digital resources to my most valuable resources 2018 which helped me advance professionally and personally. Don’t have much time? These are the essentials of what I write about in this blog post:

• Knowledge & Resarch
  • Aså Wikforss’ work, especially her book “Alternativa fakta”
  • Research Digest by the British Psychological Society
  • German journal Personal Quarterly
• Agility
  • Personal Quarterly 03/2018 
• Neuroscience
  • “Brain & Behavior” by Bob Garrett and Gerald Hough
  • “In your own image” by George Zarkadakis
  • Documentary “My Love Affair with the Brain”
  • Episode 13 of the Psych Crunch podcast

Digitalization is not about changing employees’ behaviours

Does technology determine how we work or should we determine how we want to work with technology? Maybe it’s a combination of both, a symbiotic relationship? Recently, digital behaviour change has been in focus of human resource professional discussions. HR is supposed to drive and support this behaviour change to fully embrace a company’s digitalization journey. “[…] Implementing a digital solution is one thing, to change people’s behaviour to use and like the solution is another.”, wrote an HR professional in a social media feed.

Here’s a balancing perspective.

Updating my UX & HCI skill set

During my Master studies I particularly enjoyed learning about digital tools for learning and communication. This was tighlty connected to research methods, and how to investigate digital learning environments with respect to their effectiveness. Now, some years later, I lead and consult projects about exactly this: developing tools which support employees in their learning and development process. I felt that it was time to update my user experience and human-computer interface knowledge and skills to become even better in my role and to have a stronger impact on the project results. That’s why I enrolled in Human-Computer Interaction as a freestanding course at Uppsala University. It was a project-based distance course, where I was able to work on my own desgin project throughout the course. I admit that I am not a born designer, but it was a valuable learning experience which inspired me both from a content and a methodical perspective.

EdTech Sweden – en konferens i tweets

Idag var det dags för en av Sveriges mest intressanta konferenser om lärande och teknologi. EdTech Sweden i Stockholm.

Jag jobbar med att definiera en genomtänkt utbildingsstrategi på ett företag. Så det här har varit ett bra tillfälle att ta in lite inspiration, knyta kontakter och få konkreta rådslag. Läs mer nedan där jag även har sammanfattat mina key takeaways med hjälp av mina och andras kloka Twitter tweets.

Using learning myths to dig into research

This sally has a double-function. Firstly, I want to bring your attention to common learning myths and secondly, how you can use these myths to start diving into the world of research. Earlier, I wrote about evidence-based and research-based HR work and how far we have come already. I still remember how hard it was for me (especially in the beginning) to embrace research papers. They were boring and I did not understand the lengthy parts about statistics which some of them entailed. Today, I am happy that I gave it a try. Because academia contributes a lot to the field of HR. There are great reviews on all kinds of areas within HR and also researcher challenges common beliefs and reveal myths. Learning more about how to read academic research give you the critical competence to be part of the discussion when other HR professionals call their practices research-based. Learning and development is an area where many professionals claim this. Unfortunately a lot of learning myths have nourished a questionable way of learning practice at school and in the workplace. It’s time to dig deeper into this.

The tool you use might be of minor importance for flourishing online collaboration and knowledge sharing

Researches found that group members who identify with a group and believe that knowledge acquisition is important, might compensate for technical flaws in the tool used for knowledge management and social collaborations. What are the implications at work from a study which brings back the social context to online collaboration and moves beyond the importance of good user experience for technology supporting it?

Digital Storytelling

A reflection on a course review

I found this draft when writing my latest post about E-Learning development with Adobe Captivate. It must be roughly three years old. For the published version, I kept it the way it was. All my original thoughts are highlighted as quotes, wheras my reflections are written in the usual paragraph style.

Two weeks ago I signed in for the Coursera course “Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Digital Storytelling” (University of Houston System). Usually, that would not be worth a blog post. I have signed up for so many courses, started with the first week, thought that it did not really covered the topic I wanted to know more about and then just followed the course irregularly or came back to the course pages after it has ended already.

Still today, I enroll for a lot of online and distance courses. But I have become better in deciding before enrolling if I have the resouces to complete the course. A great learning and I would say my individual completion rates have increased.

Erste Schritte in Adobe Captivate

Review und Alternativen zum Iversity Kurs “Interaktive Lernmodule erstellen mit Captivate 9”

Nach langem Philosophieren über Lernen, Lernumgebungen im die dazugehörige technische Unterstützung im Unternehmensumfeld möchte ich endlich einmal selbst ausprobieren. Gedankenanstoß dazu war ein Online Kurs, den ich auf Iversity gefunden habe. “Interaktive Lernmodule erstellen mit Captivate 9” heißt der und wird vom Medienzentrum der Universität Mainz im Selbstlernmodus angeboten. Für Captivate habe ich mich entschieden, weil die Wahl auf dieses Authoring Tool in meinem Unternehmen gefallen ist. Meine anschließende eigene Recherche (zum Beispiel hier) verstärkte meinen Beschluss zusätzlich.

Startseite des Iversity Kurses “Interaktive Lernmodule erstellen mit Captivate 9”, (C) Iversity/JGU

You are invited to a video interview

Be it via Skype, Google Hangout or the like, video interviews are a great alternative for a first contact to interesting candidates. Compared to telephone interviews, video offers a more personal way to get to know each other. In addition, you don’t have to invite all candidates to personal interviews, which is more resources-efficient. But it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of applicants are still new to video interviews. Even though it’s a widely used tool for private conversations, job hunting via camera needs a different way of preparation.

Me leading a panel discussion with Google Hangouts as an assignment for the course Human Resource Management in the Digital Age – What would you do if a candidate appeared like this?

Here are some ideas on how to support video interview preparation in the recruiting process.

Looking beyond the tacit vs. explicit dichotomy to improve information technology support for knowledge management

Everybody talks knowledge sharing in corporations. I never really understood what knowledge management (KM) departments were up to. So I decided to take a course in knowledge management to learn more from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. One result was the below assignment which I modified for this blog post. It summarises my thoughts about the tacit/explicit knowledge debate and about how technology can foster knowledge and information exchange in the workplace.

The main points

• By arguing that tacit knowledge is hard to write down but most valuable, KM departments are keen to extract knowledge from individuals in an organization. To do this, a lot of tools, methods and standards force them to literally write down all they know. I argue, that this is not the best way to share knowledge. Technological support based on this tacit/explicit dichotomy does not make knowledge sharing more effective. It only reinforces the idea of writing down knowledge in a digital environment.
• From my perspective, knowledge is socially-constructed. Rather than beeing either tacit or explicit, knowledge becomes information as soon as it is seperated from the original knowledge-holder and the context. While this definition holds true for others in the field, I believe that the implications for KM technology support are often overlooked.
• IT support for knowledge exchange should focus on connecting knowledgable people, enrich information by context and offer various formats for sharing information. Concrete examples could be suggestions for colleagues who have worked on similar projects, case studies (instead of “lessons learned”) and a variety of formats such as video, blog posts or forums.

 

Tacit vs explicit knowledge?

The difficulty with the tacit vs explicit knowledge dichotomy is that it does not highlight the relevant aspects of knowledge which are crucial in an organizational context. According to this dichotomy, tacit knowledge is difficult to write down or extract. Yet, the crucial difference does not exist between tacit and explicit knowledge but rather between knowledge and information. Explicit knowledge becomes information, tacit knowledge becomes knowledge. Without comprehending the context in which knowledge has been generated in, a receiver of the information will not be able to enhance her knowledge. Instead of placing extensive efforts on how to extract every single bit and bite of knowledge, the tasks of technology in knowledge management (KM) should be to create social connections between people and build on existing sources of information in an organization to link knowledge supply and demand. This text outlines, how moving beyond tacit-explicit-knowledge can shape more precise requirements for IT tools in knowledge management.