an ardent love of online archives…

…impresses upon me to share this new online archive: The Australian Museum of Squatting. I’ve only had a quick review, but it looks like a good one to watch – starting out with summary histories of squatting in Australia through the ages, and of course, this is radical / anarchist variety of squatting, which is an ironic kind of antidote to the lauded colonial squat-ocracy which was popular in Australian school syllabuses. Remember when Australian history was all about villianous bushrangers, boring squatters and doomed explorers? There are promises for much more content to be added in the future – I’m looking forward to it!

Keeping it all up to date

So it’s week 2 of cpd 23 things. I’m in the middle of madly finishing my very final assessment for my Information Management qualification, and packing to venture forth to the UK on a long ago planned holiday which has come up rather quickly! Onto the plane tomorrow!*

Let it be known right now that over the next few weeks my participation will be sporadic, but enthusiastic when it does happen! With plenty of exclamation marks.

A couple of things of note that have crossed my path this week:

1. that tedxlibrarian shebang in Toronto – looking forward to seeing the presentations online from that!
2. a great paper by Seely Brown and Adler: “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0″ http://webpages.csus.edu/~sac43949/PDFs/minds_on_fire.pdf
3. an interesting paper on blogging in a higher educational context http://eprints.qut.edu.au/13066/1/13066.pdf which should beef up my resources on the whys and wherefores of blogging.
4. a very nicely worded lit review on blogging from a masters coursework perspective http://www.elearningmag.info/?tag=etienne-wenger

*Why on earth am I posting this now? Because in the spirit of never enough time for professional development, and carpe diem, and some sharing is better than nothing, I feel I must do something!

joining in the cpd23 shenanigans!

Just quickly now, because it’s just past lunchtime and I’ve got a ton of work to do…

I found out about the cpd23 event through twitter, probably about a couple of weeks ago. I’d been thinking that I’d really like to get back into blogging – I used to keep a personal blog when I was an undergraduate creative type, and loved the opportunity to wax lyrical about new things I’d find on the internet, and explore the wonderful world of fanfiction.

I started this blog about 3 years ago, when I first began this epic journey towards information & knowledge management – which I like to describe as  “Libraries of the Future” (complete with a visionary type  pose not unlike Buzz Lightyear with knuckls on hips, a firm elevated gaze towards distant galaxies).  If you care to browse the archives, you’ll see that my persistence has been sporadic. Here now, however, is a distributed collaborative event which I hope to get right back onto the horse.

Stay tuned, because as Horatio is often reminded, “There are more things between heaven and earth…”

a word about web stats

Heheh! Reviewing this oft neglected blog, I had a quick look at my web stats. ftw! A weird spike in the last couple of days to the most recent post – and all because I’d posted a picture of danger mouse as a visual association I had while reviewing KM literature, to the DM logo, which got picked up by 5,000 searches for DM. That’s more traffic than I’ve ever ever dreamed of! No wonder cultural studies invests so heavily in pop culture – it’s got currency!

So. webstats in context. Always consider this. It may change my social media strategy.

That is all.

If this wasn’t such a quick post, I’d include a picture of michael jackson.

Reflecting on my essay writing process for knowledge management

“Analyse and discuss KM implementation case studies across two different industry sectors”.

It seems that the more I learn about knowledge management, the more I am finding out about my own knowledge practices. I can view this current essay task as an example of tranferring tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge in the form of an essay. The valuation of knowledge in an organisational context is troubled by this, because although the more explicit knowledge is, the more like information and less likely to be valued. However, as a manifestation of a completed assessment item, the essay becomes a valuable part of a) getting the marks I want to succeed in this unit, and b) demonstrating what I have “learnt”.

This is somewhat paradoxical, since it is better for me to obtain a high mark, which shows I can successfully communicate what I’ve learnt. So if I can’t communicate it, the correlation is that I haven’t learnt it. (And oh! the anguish and consternation.)

This tacit knowledge is “absorbed” from journal articles, recommended readings, reflections on what I think of the world today and how this new information fits, compares and impacts or consolidates with what I currrently know or at least think I have a grasp on. In this way, KM propels me to consider my own information behaviour:

• How do I find good resources?
• How do I organise my resources?
• How much time do I spend obtaining resources?
• how much time do I allocate to finding, ‘absorbing’ and integrating new knowledge into my head?
• How much time do I allocate to communicating:

1. useful information (for myself and others; to be processed as knowledge later)
2. my own knowledge?

I am surprised that this introduction to a new topic (KM) has turned me straight back to information research behaviour. It is good because KM provides a context / ecosystem for relating individual behaviour to a broader social context.

Anyway…time to go to work!

Back on the horse…again!

I’m about to start my first subject in Knowledge Management (KM) for this IKM Masters at UTS. This time, this time, I will be organised! And study, rather than panic-read for assignments. And ask lots of questions.

So, yesterday I mined teh shelves of Macquarie Uni to get up to date in this field. I sat down with 5 books on KM with the express intent of skimming for useful content in relation to my class and prospective assignments. And practicing my bibliographic skills.

KM has something of a reputation ofr being a kind of crackpot self-help for business field, albeit lucrative. As one lecturer put it, the difference between information science and knowledge management is about $150 an hour.

Now, I actually have a soft spot for self-help literature and new age woo-woo, but I can’t shake the allusions to Danger Mouse that leap to my mind everytime I see “KM” Let’s hope during this semester I can maintain ome kind of critical stance. If you’re lucky I’ll post a picture of DM at the end of this post.

5 books, in reading order.

1) No More Consultants, Geoff Parcell & Chris Collison,John Wiley and Sons Ltd, Chichester, UK: 2009

• A small book with large type. Clearly designed for managers who like to get stuck into a narrative in a conversational tone (almost modern powerpoint presentation.)
• Useful items: the self-assessment matrix and the River. And the Stairs. (with instructions for Excel formulas)
• Authors of Learning to Fly, an inspirational (and very successful) book on KM, rated positively by someone on the Sydney KM group.
• Good notes on facilitation and discussing organisational issues in a non-threatening environment.
• Appendixes very good to photocopy for reference.

2) The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy, Manuel Castells & Gustavo Cardoso (eds), Centre for Transatlantic Relations, Washington: 2006

• What a coup! Edit a book which acts as a roadmap for advancing a network society (comparing trends and sociological perspectives of developed and developing countries) and get your President to write the Epilogue! Not just a book about KM transition to social policy, but living proof that your government supports your work!
• Covers policy, knowledge economies, public sector, media communications (change over time) case studies and transitioning policies.
• Manuel Castells has written for the UN on the digital divide and is (I think) one of the stars of sociological perspective of IT.
• Chapter of note: 14 – William J Mitchell – considers interactive technologies in terms of distance x volume x cost coefficient. Also considers social ramifications of gentrification, to a degree.
• Chapter of note: Betty Collis: E-learning and transformation of Education for a Knowledge Economy. Know-why and Know-who matter more than Know-what. examples from Professional experience and Higher Education. Affordances and Barriers: uses table from Strijker (2004) which distinguishes the following worlds and their KM characteristics: Industrial, Domestic, Civic, Opinion, Merchant, Inspiration.

3) Rethinking Knowledge, Kim Sbarcea (ed) LexisNexis Butterworths, Chatswood, Sydney: 2002

• This report is photocopied and perfect bound! I’m a little miffed at the quality. (note to self: interrogate validation and presentation of information as knowledge)
• Skimmed Patrick Lambe’s invocation of Wittgenstein. I’ll probably borrow this book, and read it all.
• Lots of useful Australian contexts (including professional) of KM.
• At this stage of my little review, I think KM in an academic setting is interesting – we are encouraged to learn different knowledge transfer and learning systems but need to communicate our developing knowledge of this stuff in an academic language. It’s that tension between academic inquiry and professional strategy.

Just flagging the last two – will come back to later:

4) Current Issues in KM (ed) Murray Jennex, Information Science Reference, Hershey & London, 2009

5) Cultural Implications of Knowledge Management & Transfer: Identifying Competitive Advantage, Deogratias Harorimana (ed), Information Science Reference, Hershey & London, 2010.

Quantitative data analysis: really kinky stuff or just standard deviation?

The following notes are made from Ch11, Analysing Quantitative Data, Tim Philips, in Social Research Methods: an Australian perspective. (Ed) Maggie Walter. Oxford UP, South Melbourne, 2006 (2008).

This is a very useful chapter if you need help in establishing a way of talking about the datasets. It uses examples that are almost exactly the same as our assignment.

Primary data collection: 3 very important things.
1 Time: Spend a sustained period of time designing the survey.
2 Resources: Attain a large research grant to pay for survey administration.
3 Specialist knowledge: Get advice from different experts about the best way to undertake particular steps.

Secondary data collection
When designing your own research instrument for high quality data collection is not feasible, undertaking secondary data analysis is an alternative. this generally involves the reanalysis or additional analysis of publicly available survey data., eg within a social science data archive, like ASSDA (see links at bottom of page). Supporting such an archive contributes to the shared scientific method standards of professionalism, transparency and integrity.

Looking at a dataset from the Australian National Survey of Social attitudes 2003,the textbook introduces a research problem for a mini-anlalysis: whether the difference in among Australians in feeling about globalisation is connected with divergences in patterns of mass media usage.

I put this in bold because I had to return to it, and re-read their background briefing. The textbook reports positive perspectives in the mass media about globalisation. It then produced evidence from a 2001 study which indicated variables such as education level, internet usage and overseas travel as factors towards Australian peoples’ cool feelings about globalisation. At this stage, the textbook example suggested bringing mass media consumption into the equation, which had been left out in the 2001 study. And finally, they chose a set of particular variables in order to create a null hypothesis for the cross tab analysis.

[the rest of this post is really boring - i'm just reiterating key concepts and recording some detail about the examples used, but it may not make much sense without the textbook]

1) frequency tables – good for initial feel of where responses are located across response categories. eg, around 20% or 1 in 5 responses relied on abc/sbs, radio and newspapers for their most news and information, but 37% relied on commercial tv channels.
Using frequency tables to calculate Summary statistics:
2) measures of central tendency -
“Individual variable data is measured at different levels, building in complexity from nominal data, through to ordinal data and interval data to ratio data.” (p292)
Mean: the average of the scores. Used when variables are measured at interval or ratio level
Median: the middle in a set of ranked scores. Used for ordinal level variables.
Mode: the most frequent score in a set of scores Used for nominal level variables
3) measures of dispersion -
Standard deviation – a statistic that shows the spread of scores or variance around the mean.
Variance – a measure of the spread of scores.
Illustrating central tendency: Median response for “Large international companies are doing more and more damage to local business in Australia” was Agree.
Median response for “International organisations are taking away too much power form the Aust. govt” was “Neither agree nor disagree”.
Illustrating dispersion: Among the questions included one about total number of years of education. Although the mean for men was 13.28, slightly higher than women (12.96), the standard deviation of men was more widely spread out at 4.10 than women at 3.86.
Cross-tabular analysis
So far, we’ve looked at a subset of questions gauging pessimism towards globalisation, and (b) a single question tapping preferred source of information. But we want to be able to bring these questions in isolations together so we can bear upon the question of key concern: is media usage connected with disengagement form globalisation, and if so what is the link.
1. return to the key question of concern, ie, what is going to be your independent variable that you’ll check against a range of demographic variables? For this example:
Independent variable: A7 Which of the following sources of information would you say you rely on MOST for your news and information?
Response choices: Commercial TV, ABC/SBS, Radio, Newspapers, Internet, Talkback radio, News magazines, Friends and family.
Cross tab analysis provides us with a frequency distribution within the categories of the independent variable.

End summary:
Quantitative data analysis is at its strongest when:
• looking at complex relationships (cross-tab analysis)
• making inferences from samples to populations (chi-square test)
• examining grand claims within social theory and specifying the conditions under which they hold up
• adjudicating between competing theories. NB: It should be made clear though, that while in some cases quantitative analysis may function as an ”objective”‘ perspective to view potentially competing theories, it may not be appropriate. For example, a cost-benefit analysis of Catholicism vs paganism may produce some interesting data, but is it useful?
Quantitative data analysis is at it’s weakest when:
• variables are poor measures of concepts
• the status of vairables in causal chains is determined arbitrarily
• statistical methods are used that place too many demands on the data
• it is done in the absence of theory.

Final notes:
• High quality quantitative data analysis always takes place through a process of iteration. This is where the researcher must be creative and dynamic.
• There is never simply a ‘right way’ to analyse a quantitative dataset  to derive an answer to a research question’ (Becker 1986)
• The research must figure out a persuasive and compelling analytic strategy. Try unleashing your ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills 2000)
• A lot of it is about balancing convention and innovation. [sounds like design theory!]  Perhaps established ways of doing things are appropriate.  However, sometimes conventional approaches engender a sense of doubt within you (Bauman & May 2001), so you might be better off demonstrating your own version. In this way, imagination and intuition come to the fore as vital qualities for ‘steering’ your data.  Giddens (1990)

Useful links
Australian Social Science Data Archive (ASSDA) http://assda.anu.edu.au/analysis.html
Nestar Light http://assda224-100.anu.edu.au/nesstarlight/index.jsp

References
Becker, H. (1986) Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bauman, Z. & May, T. (2001) Thinking Sociologically. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Giddens, A.  (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Mills, C.W. (2000) The Sociological Imagination. 40th Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Philips, T. (2008) ‘Ch11 Analysing Quantitative Data’. in Social Research Methods: an Australian perspective. (Ed) Maggie Walter. South Melbourne: Oxford UP.

a short lesson in qualitative research

Short, because I need to be writing notes on the quantitative textbook chapter.

This is a lesson i learned over the past weekend. In short, i got too close to my data. again. oh the pain. it was like pulling teeth with tentpegs. The lit review reared up and threatened to take over my whole life, a la that old honours crisis circa 2006. It’s horrible to see an old enemy again and just get flattened like that. My appalling time management also pitted itself against me and together, they were unstoppable.

So, how did I learn this wondrous fact? I felt the struggle. I felt responsible for the whole world, and everything that was wrong with the world could find its genesis in my research proposal. I am guilty of taking things to heart a little too much. Not that it’s a bad thing… I’m just recognising in myself the powerful attraction I have  to solving the world’s (ie mine) problems at every assessable opportunity.

And as terrifying as this was for me, I’d like to take a moment to thank each brave lecturer attempting to mark any work that had escaped the careful eye of dearest friends and lovers who’ve battled the odds and lent their proofreading and editing talents to my quest.

It doesn’t have to be this way! I can be a little less than perfect! (ok, a lot less)
If i think a little more abstractly,I can follow through many hypotheses,  rather than trying to push heavy concrete problems into some kind of tetris-shaped solution.

And in this attempt to care a little less, and think a little more, I am aiming to create some thing/s that are a bit more transparent, a bit easier to understand and engage with, for other people as well as myself. Instead of just feeling the weight of it all, and getting all mollified at the prospect.

that’s enough for now.

readings for week 4 57146

second boring post!

Hodge, G. 2000, ‘Knowledge Organization Systems: An Overview’, in Systems of
Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional Authority
Files, Digital Library Federation, viewed 14 July 2008.
<http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub91/contents.html>.
Rosenfeld, L. & Morville, P. 2002, ‘Thesauri, Controlled Vocabularies, and Metadata’,
in, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web [online], 2nd edn,
O’Reilly, Cambridge, Mass., p. Chapter 9 Sections 9.1 – 9.2.3v

Reading for week 5 57146

Warning: boring post!

Readings for Week 5

Anderson, J.D. & Pérez-Carballo, J. 2001, ‘The nature of indexing: how humans and machines analyze messages and texts for retrieval. Part I: Research, and the nature of human indexing’, Information Processing and Management, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 231-254 Particularly Sections 4 – 7

Mai, J.-E. 2005, ‘Analysis in indexing: document and domain centered approaches’, Information Processing and Management, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 599-611 .

Note to self – write a short para on Elsevier experience.  Would I add it to ‘my databases’?