Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

I’m back from another workshop and I have enough. I’m through with it. Seriously. When did we reach this point where our fancy facilitation techniques turned adult learning into kindergarten settings and our obsession with participation, combined with a wild proliferation of Web 2.0 tools, made workshops the most stressful things ever? When did we lose sight of the simple, yet wonderful purpose of learning: Learning something useful that I didn’t know before? Instead, I’m finding myself again sitting with scissors and pens around the table with people I don’t know, cutting shapes out of colorful sheets of paper and pinning them onto flipcharts. A facilitator is soaring around with a Tibetan singing bowl in his hand encouraging people to be creative and have fun. But it’s not fun. It’s a noisy room full of strangers with whom I have to share thoughts and ideas and interact as if they were long-year colleagues, even though I just met them 30 min ago. I am told to work on some artificial ...

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an interesting article on Web 2.0: Why Email No Longer Rules… And what that means for the way we communicate . After nicely outlining different implications of the new communication tools, it ends with a critical remark regarding the potentially time consuming aspect of Web 2.0: "We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication." I've been asked this question many times before, and I realize that it is an particularly important issue for senior management witin organisations. However, I think the question approaches the topic from the right angle. I would rather look at this from a perspective of an empowered workforce. Unlike in past times, where we had one job for a lifetime and a clearly defined top-down hirarchy would dete...

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a KM workshop in Bangkok hosted by ENRAP (Knowledge Networking for Rural Development in Asia/Pacific Region), which is a collaboration of IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) and IDRC (International Development Research Center in Canada). The workshop was facilitated by Lucie Lamoureux and Allision Hewitt which I knew from the KM4Dev network . It was very interesting to see how they managed to make the workshop very participatory and interactive (and this is said by me who actually doesn't like to be forced into group discussion on a topic which I couldn't choose myself). I particulary liked the way they consistently mainstreamed the use of Web 2.0 tool as natural mechanism for documenting workshop content in Wordpress , PBwiki , Flickr , YouTube and SlideShare (so "when the workshop's done, the documenting is done"). The good thing was that these tools were not just set up for use during the worksho...