AskAPhD.org

Using Twitter I found a user named AskAPhD, as a PhD (to be) that seemed interesting so I had a look at what this was all about. Turns out that the guys at this website have launched a forum where PhDs can sign up to answer questions from each other but also the general public.

I reckon this is a cool concept and although still in infancy stage now, it deserves recognition from the research community. I hereby ask all of you that are doing a PhD, or are generally academically inclined in one way or another to sign up at: askaphd.org. Thanks!

Help! Dissertation coming up!

This guide aims to help you, the Masters student, to get going properly with your Dissertation. It is aimed at students of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, but a lot of the advise can be applied generically at any level, department etc.

Lets start with a disclaimer: This guide is not perfect, last year I did my own dissertation and felt there could be more support out there which is why I made this guide. As I work as a librarian for the University of Sheffield it will contain practical pointers specifically for this Library Service, but if you are at another University I am sure your Library will be more than happy to help out! I also work as a Research Assistant at this University, which gives me a growing knowledge of Research Methods (One hopes!).

Getting Going

Your primary concern is to choose a topic that interest you, and gosh, there are many of those, or maybe there are not. You might worry tremendously about your topic, but really, all you need to worry about is whether it is something that truly interests you. After three months of hard work you will be grateful for having chosen something you wanted to do, rather than something you thought might be better for your career or because you wanted to do a dissertation with a specific lecturer. I assume you are doing a Masters because you are interested in the topic, if you came in with a certain idea about what you wanted to achieve, the dissertation is the ideal time to capitalise on that.

Talk to lecturers about it, they are researchers as well as teachers and have experience in the field you are studying. If you like Web 2.0 go talk to the lecturer that taught you about it, if you are interested in Knowledge Management go for that appropriate lecturer. Tell them about your ideas, conceptualise them and get something down on paper, even if it is only one A4.

Got the idea, what next?

Once you have the general concept it is time to start thinking about ways to move forward. This is a good moment to start reading on your topic. If you did a module on it, or are doing one on it now, go through the reading lists. At the UoS they are available through Muse (provided your lecturer put them up). Frequently you will be able to work out which authors are important in the field, based on this list. For example when you talk about the Internet, you have to read Manuel Castells “The Internet Galaxy” (1999), which is generally accepted as one of those seminal works about the impact of the Internet on our lives.

Start reading Journal Articles on the topic, ask your lecturer for advise on which articles to read, or alternatively go to the Library and ask your Subject Librarian for their advise. There is also an excellent Library Guide available for your department which contains further links to the various sources appropriate for your field.

The reason you should read Journal Articles is because they reveal potential ways of doing research. If you read Qualitative and Quantitative (more on this later) papers you will discover which type suits you best. You will also get an idea of how to structure your dissertation, this is actually very valuable. It would pay off if you sat down and analysed the structure of a (number of) previous dissertation(s) or paper(s), just so that you get a feeling for the way Academic Literature is structured.

Method: Aaaargh!

Choosing how you go about your research is difficult. Effectively there are three options, Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Method. The ethos of Qualitative and Quantitative is fundamentally different, with Qualitative research you will generally not have a pre-conceived hypothesis that you want to test, with Quantitative research you generally will want to test what you think. I say generally because that is not always the case, but I don’t want to confuse you too much so we will leave that out of the picture. Each approach has a different set of tools to achieve the end-result, in practice students choose a method based on these tools, if you want to do a questionnaire you are likely to be doing a Quantitative study where the numbers of responses have to proof your point. If you want to do interviews, you will be taking a Qualitative approach, interviews offer open endings by default (if you design them well )!

Don’t be put off by either methodology. You will have a natural inclination to one type anyway, if you are assertive and chatty you will probably prefer interviews, if you are mathematically minded, good at numbers and methodological, you will probably prefer questionnaires. There are other things you can do as well though, you could choose to do Focus Groups, a full Literature Analysis, Bibliometric analysis, Surveying and so on! The key is that you choose the methodology that suits your topic and you.

To be continued!

Knowledge and e-mail: Codification pur sang?

In the OrganiK project we have finished most of the data collection to assess criteria for the new Knowledge Management system we aim to develop. One very interesting factor kept coming up during various visits, the use of Outlook to store work-related knowledge.

Several interviewees send e-mails to themselves with working tasks, snippets of information they picked up on and links to websites they find useful, they also send these mails on to colleagues when they think this is useful.

In essence they are using e-mail as a codification tool, effectively making knowledge available in written down format with the aim of recovering it when appropriate.

This is by no means a new ‘discovery’ MS itself is aware of the potential of Outlook as KM tool, the question then of course is; why do they not exploit that potential further?  And, as a Thunderbird user, why is Mozilla not all over this weakness in Outlook and trying to improve on it?

The interesting player in this respect is Google who, with an ever expanding toolkit, are offering brilliant ways of using Gmail as a codified information repository. Time to steal ideas Mozilla!

The problem with definitions in a social context

Currently I am writing on a State of the Art review with three main parts, Knowledge Management, Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web.

Of these three there is only a solid definition of the Semantic Web. Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management are based on discussion and defined by O’Reilly as:

“Not having a hard boundary, but a gravitational core.”

A star exploding, empty core!

As the image above shows, this could indicate that there is not a real centre for the definition, a highly contested area, circled by numerous, partial, definitions, shapes and forms. This ‘paradigm’ is what needs to be caught in any document discussing the topic, in the case of O’Reilly this is a problem to describe Web 2.0, for me the problem is related to describing Knowledge Management.

Wish me luck, when I come up with the ‘definite’ definition I will post it here.

Apin Talisayon’s blog

Today I accidentally stumbled upon a weblog of significance. Apin Talisayon has started a feuilleton of posts on Knowledge management. http://apintalisayon.wordpress.com/ If you have some time, read it. It is a very nice contribution to the field in my opinion, especially his perspective on KM in the context of the Philipines.

Data collection in London

Last week I have visited London city-centre for the first time. The reason of the visit was to collect data for the requirements analysis with one of the SME-partners of the OrganiK project. Obviously I can’t say much about the data collection (confidential, not analysed properly yet) but I can write a bit about London.

My wife is from Northern England, born in Liverpool, raised in Manchester. If you are not English it is perhaps hard to understand how that affects the opinion on London. In one word: A LOT. Oh, that is two words, but you get my drift. I have the same with Amsterdam, which is a horrible city, but only to me it seems. London however was interesting, not in the least because of my colleagues. I went with one of the Greek partners and as he had never been before either, it was a reason to be… touristy. He even had a camera that he normally never has .

Anyway some pictures I took with my HTC 710 phone :

The fact that all these pictures were taken around the same area means two things: We didn’t have a lot of time and it was getting dark and I am not really interested in taking pictures of everything. The South Bank was nice though, and seeing Big Ben, the changing of the guard, Prince Harry and Prince William arrive at the opening of the Quantum of Solace, discovering that there are Wetherspoon pubs with decent prices, Trafalgar and Picadilly squares and the West End… was all rather eventful for a two-three hour visit.

We didn’t find Harrods, we missed Downing Street although we probably crossed it and we never really found any shopping precinct or anything so we must have missed that as well. Altogether it was fun though, as my colleague says: Work is Fun.

More on networking

In a previous post I discussed the value of LinkedIn as a networking tool. I expressed my surprise that there is no real culture of networking in the UK. In the Netherlands it is one network event after the other, here it is all more formal, networking for networking sake seems to be out of order.

No matter whether I am right or wrong about this, I think it is my duty to write about networking the Dutch way so that I can educate the English. I know I am arrogant like that…No really, I have a different interest and that is that I think Web 2.0 features are going to push forward the concept of social networking in a large way throughout the World.

Read this blog on Yahoo to get an idea about what networking is when applied to face to face situations. Where Web 2.0 is actually helping us to understand this concept better and better, as well as helping us to get better at it, it is no substitute for ‘real’ networking events. In a sense the technology gags us, as shown by this excellent picture:

thanks to noblelglobel@Flickr

At the University of Groningen network events are commonplace, lets make this part of the Sheffield culture as well!

Part of my networking affliction stems from the fact that I have a broad knowledge rather than a specific knowledge, I am always painfully aware of shortcomings in, let’s say, my programming knowledge. Knowing the people I know however I can almost always find the answer to questions (once I decided how to best formulate them!).

This is the essence of good knowledge management, knowing what you know, and knowing who knows what you don’t. There is no codification effort that can replace that basic stance, there are however codifications (of knowledge) that help find the knowledge you need. It is this area of codification I am currently investigating in the OrganiK project, on which there will be more info in later blog posts.

Knowledge management in SMEs, non-existent?

Quite a number of authors argue that knowledge management can not effectively contribute to operations in Small and Medium Enterprises. This is an odd statement related to the misunderstanding of Small and Medium Enterprises as well as the misunderstanding of knowledge management.  This is not an unusual combination, SMEs are notorious for having a diverse character (ie. it is hard to describe types of SME or even to define their precise markets) and knowledge management has to be one of the most ambiguous fields of research out there as Wilson demonstrated in 2002.  Wilson however comes from a field that was once as ambiguous and hard to define as knowledge management and considering that should perhaps have demonstrated a bit more patience for the topic.

It is easiest to state that knowledge management is joint to information management at the hip, where information management deals more with systems (Not just information technology, but the wide range of systems like P. Checkland describes.) Knowledge management is more involved with the actual interaction of people between people. Although this can be defined as a system, the specific nature of the theory of knowledge transfer differentiates knowledge management from information management, that and the understanding that knowledge is different from information, described in the now famous DIKW triangle.

Once one starts seeing knowledge management as broad as defined in the (too) brief paragraph above, it becomes feasible to see that this ‘management fad’ can potentially occur in any environment where knowledge gets transferred.

Where I draw the line is where people start considering any micro business, from coffeeshop to toilet-lady as an environment where KM is relevant, that is simply over the top, the only purpose that serves is to make the concept of KM broadly acceptable.

I am pleased to be working on a European funded project called OrganiK that is looking to assist the development of KM practices in SMEs through the use of Web 2.0 tools. Soon I will start blogging on this in some more detail, at the moment I am waiting for the project website to come online, so I can link to that.

New developments

As some of you might be aware, in the recent year I have been occupied with studying for a Masters degree in Information management, clearly I have done well as I am about to embark on further study!

I have applied for a job as Research Assistant at the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, and got accepted! I am really thrilled as it enables me to study for a PhD as well as be engaged in an interesting European project on knowledge management!

Yet again this probably means the character of this blog will slightly change and I hope that entails more posting on this blog. I invested in some CSS rights for this blog months ago, but never used it Maybe I should start!

(And make the blogs more interesting, more interactive and generally adhere to the Web 2.0 conventions a bit more, but I suppose that might mean that I would publish even less!)