Infinite Possibilities: Amy Gahran’s
Contentious and the power of blogging
In a wonderful blog entry from July 15, 2004, Amy insists that the term “knowledge management” has become corrupted by consultants eager to solve every business’s knowledge problems. She suggests that knowledge management “boils down to arranging ideas.” Simple, yet profound, and leading us in new directions.
She views arranging ideas as the key task for writers, editors, content professionals, and instructors. This process of arranging ideas consists of three core tasks:
• Recording your thoughts
• Organizing and storing your thoughts
• Sharing your ideas and observations to enable mixing, matching, insights and creativity.
Phase two of this idea, pushing it a bit farther, Amy writes on July 27, 2004 about how arranging ideas can spawn new ideas. She notes: “It seems to me that there may be infinite possibilities for creative thinking (not mere cleverness, but truly creating new ideas) because, in my opinion, context creates meaning.”
Where’s the creativity?
Having opened the door for new visions of creativity emerging from thoughtful and productive bloggers as well as those whose professions fall under the large encompassing umbrella of the term “knowledge worker,” she notes the limitation: weblogs and wikis do an efficient job of “storing and labeling info-chunks so they can be easily retrieved and shared.” However, this storage-and-retrieval strategy doesn’t enhance creativity. “At least most of these systems are not designed specifically to enhance and leverage creativity.”
She’s absolutely right. They don’t. but having tried numerous strategies over the years (file folders, mind maps, whiteboards, sticky notes, colored pens, etc) for increasing the richness of my thinking by keeping ideas in some kind of fertile juxtaposition, I find the blog a wonderful tool for storage-retrieval and serendipitous juxtaposition!!
When I began to blog, I knew that I would be using the tool in the service of my research work with the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative
(NLII). So I set out to capture ideas, both great and small. I try not to “muse” and ponder in a stream of consciousness fashion, leaping from idea to idea, but rather to structure the idea and fill it out. This self-imposed discipline stops me from the jotting habit: jotting down an embryonic idea and praising myself for my insight, without developing the idea. And developing ideas, pushing them, detailing them, synthesizing insights, in short: ARRANGING IDEAS, is, for me, the only way to deepen thinking and improve the quality and usefulness of the results.
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf introduced twentieth century novel readers to the power of stream of consciousness writing. But in both cases, that magnificent flow had been carefully crafted to produce a work of art. To leap from famous novelists to ECAR Research Bulletin authors, I’d like to quote Karin Steinbrenner’s excellent bulletin,
The Information Architecture Imperative (January 2003). In her overview she notes that one of the challenges for information-intensive organizations is the laissez-faire manner in which information is handled. “Ninety percent of all information is unstructured, maintained in documents or other formats.” That’s a staggering figure.
90% of all information is unstructured
I want my blog to begin acting as a digital repository for my research, writing, and presentations. I want key insights from my reading to be captured and processed and archived, so that when I decide to move deeper into a topic or link two topics to see what the conjoining might suggest, I want that knowledge to have already been synthesized and structured in a stage one process.
