Hot on the heels of a KMWorld conference that was more interactive, more Web 2.0 savvy and more open to new ideas than what I have experience ion the past, here’s a post by the ReadWriteWeb blog (one of the leading tech industry Web 2.0 blogs) reporting on the latest Pew internet research about the use of blogs in  / at the workplace:

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Dave Pollard’s up … his introduction covers his vast and deep professional background.

I’ve followed Dave’s thinking and writing for years now .. he promises to delve into the socio-dynamics of how people are sharing information and constructing and using knowledge.

His agenda covers a retrospective on where we’ve been, how Digital Natives (Dave uses an alternative term, Millenials) share and use information and work together, and then moves to a look at the ways we act in virtual worlds will evolve.

Dave is going over his KM 1.0 model (1994 – 2003), wherein the decisions taken about how to enable capturing and re-using information and knowledge just tended to confuse people and create “arguments” about who was responsible for what, and why.

As a result (he notes) the term “knowledge management” is in long-term decline .. the use of the term in Google has just recorded it’s fifth straight year of less search requests than the year before.

He introduces KM 2.0, a lot of which is about Personal Knowledge Management (Dave has written a great deal about this over the years), or the personalization of how one goes about their knowledge work (I have called this the “mass customization of knowledge work“).  He notes that communities of practice are being supplemented and / or replaced by “communities of passion” … communities which you join only if you care enough about an issue to get involved with it.

Other trends … visualisation of information, and most information put into the public (everything is there for everyone to see; unless constrained by legal or secrecy needs).

KM 2.0 – scan, publish, connect & canvas … Know-who, Connection, Context, Just -in-time

The big question – could Information professionals do this ?

Role of IP’s changing in 3 important ways

1. Improving personal productivity

- facilitiating to help people self-find, self-filter, self-publish, etc.

- teaching research skills

2. Improving Connection

- facilitation conversation 

- facilitating JIT Canvassing

3. Improving Context

- Storyteaching / recording

- Environmental scanning

- Sensemaking

Generation Millenium using IM, not email.  Dave tells the story of his conversation with Luis Suarez about reducing the use of email, resulting in Luis adopting a challenge to not use email whatsoever … which launched Luis into a “No email” policy.

Dave is now showing a screen shot of VYEW.com .. desktop videoconferencing (Simple Virtual Conferencing, Real Time Anywhere, 7 / 24 and Free).

Don’t pitch .. just show them how it works.

Generation Millennium:

Dave worked with a bunch of them in the Ontario Ministry of Health re: SARS … he worked with a group of people whose average age was 24 (and with the same restrictions on the use of “consumer” web applications.

Dave says he was shy when he started working (so was I, you COULD NOT afford to be assertive or 9 times out of 10 you’d be out of a job or on a shit list).  This generation is impatient, won’t wait for things, view search and research as the same thing, and will move on if they cannot work the way they want to, whioch is how they can be effective.

Important Limitations to Generation Millenium

1. Many of them will never “know” their employers’ business.

2. They thing research is the same as search (which Dave says is wrong).

Other Possibilities:

Blogs as courseware

The use of cultural anthropology

The use of simulations and scenarios

The use of proximity locators

The use of affinity detectors

Peer-to-Peer sharing of / in education

The use of mind-mapping

GPS / Google Mashups

Open Space Problem-solving

Virtual World Collaborations