Friday morning, I joined a half dozen other people at the monthly Boston KM Forum breakfast meeting in Waltham. As I understand it, the Friday meetings are set up around a KM-related topic for discussion. Ostensibly the topic today was information literacy as motivated by a study on the "learning-knowledge connection," as reported in Pioneering research shows ‘Google Generation’ is a myth, which is a discussion of the British Library study Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future. Here's the abstract:
A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation' – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.
But as commonly happens when people get together to talk, the discussion ranged all over the place. I think each of us got to talk about our favorite takes on these topics. I made the connection to personal knowledge management. The interesting thing with respect to information literacy is that there needs to be a collective agreement on the best ways manage the work of team. I'm thinking of shared standards around communication and which stuff should be archived for group access.
Related to this, we got onto the topic of culture driving behavior, and how people have the capability to influence culture, even though many don't believe they can. The fun with culture - and leadership - is that when people don't pay attention to the culture, it tends to move positions of least resistance, rather than positions of greater value to the organization.
Along with this first Friday breakfast meeting, the KM Forum also do a regular evening event on the third Thursday of the month. And they organize three or four day-long seminars during the year, including one on Wednesday the 9th, KM 2.0 - Real or Hype? at Bentley College.