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This 2002 follow-up of Wengers work Communities of Practice provides a guide to setting up CoPs inside organisations.
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Etienne Wenger puts communities of practice in the center of learning in this book. Wenger calls it a social theory of learning. It fits well with both my notions of knowledge (as capacity to act, and as a social construct) and the networks of meaning that are central to George Siemens' Connectivism. Needless to say I see lots of connections to social media as well (even though they were hardly conceived when this book appeared)]]>
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Steven Pinker convincingly discusses the myths Blank Slate, Noble Savage, and Ghost in the Machine, in order to then propose new perspectives based on the current insights into how human nature works and doesn't.
Read it during a stay in the Austrian Alps. Great read, even if you have to take it in small pieces at a time. Balancing it with mountainhikes and enjoying the sun in front of our tent helped a lot.
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Keith Devlin is the director of Stanford University's Center for Language and Information. In this book he made me see again that math is about patterns before going on a tour of places where those patterns can be found in nature.
It triggered me to write a blogposting about Mathematics and Social Software.
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I picked this one up in a local used books store, where I usually browse the attic for SF books.During the six years of my architectural education the subject of comfort was mentioned only once. [..] One would have thought that comfort was a crucial issue in preparing for the architectural profession, like justice in law, and health in medicine. [..] I write then from ignorance.
The author explores the notion of 'home' and what a comfortable home means in history. It is a useful source for ideas of how web-sites and tools can be made to feel comfortable, if you work from a 'portal like a home' metaphor e.g.
Kruimeltje, my favourite local place for used books
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John Irving is a man that always gets mixed reviews for his books. Same with this one. In all those reviews to me it seems like people not able to see past the absurdity, getting hung up about some taboo being shattered, and generally not getting that irony and humour can be mighty weapons in dealing with the most hurtful.
Until I Find You is a good book, all 800 pages of it. The absurd characters, the twisted tour of Europe, the weirdness of the sexual development of all involved, and the sudden reversal of perspective on the relationship between the main character and his parents, are all just plain funny because of their twistedness. The end is moving, and shows once again how loveable imperfection can be. In all its absurdity Irving again writes a story that is utterly human. At least to my eyes.
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Philip Roth is certainly one of my favourite US writers. He and Gore Vidal have done a good job of analysing recent US history in literary form. This book is not a novel however but more an eulogy for his father. Sharp (self) observation and the love of a son for his father are well balanced, in this book-long farewell. I read it in Dutch, as I couldn't find an english original in the local bookstore.]]>
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We picked this one up in the english section of a bookstore in Copenhagen, Denmark, during a summer holiday in 2003. Next to enjoying the yearly Jazz Festival, we spend our evenings reading our newly acquired loot. In this story about a psychiatric hospital it seems the doctors and staff are even more screwed up than their patients. Dripping with irony you follow a group of people more concerned with keeping up the flow of insurance money and their own petty and not so petty problems than healing people.
Jazz sessions in Kongens Have (King's Park) in central Copenhagen, July 2003
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I have been following George Siemens through his blog in the past years. Last fall his book Knowing Knowledge was published and I was asked by a Dutch association for e-learning, to review the book, shortly before it went to the presses. This review has been published in Dutch as well as English, so you can have a read overthere. In the book he explains what he calls Connectivism as a learning strategy.
Suffice to say here that what Siemens identifies as the list of skills one needs to deal with the massive abundance of information and knowledge fits completely with my own thinking on dealing with information overload and the shifting nature of knowledge work. A worthwile book. And while you're at it, have a look a these videoclips as well.
Summing up Connectivism: Knowledge now means to be connected, learning now is connecting and building networks.
The book can also be downloaded for free. The illustrations are available through Flickr. But I find that owning it helps, as the format invites consulting it often, browsing and jumping back and forth. Not so easily done on screen. Discussion is invited on the Knowing Knowledge website.
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The account of Johnson and Boswell of their trip through Scotland, is of course two books. One more a tale of the actual trip, sights seen, places visited. The other an account of their social interactions along the way, people met, hosts stayed with. This 18th century account, or two as I said, served me as a travel guide when I visited Scotland in '95 or '96. I stayed with a good friend in Aberdeen, where she was working for an oil firm. My stay was short, and I merely visited a little part of Scotland, but I enjoyed reading this book while the train from Edinburgh to Aberdeen followed the route Johnson and Boswell took 200 years before. As they did, I merely saw one tree.
I picked this book up before flying to Aberdeen and visiting Edinburgh. But I could as well have bought it in one of the great little bookshops in the crooked streets below the south wall of Edinburgh Castle. They were well worth a visit.
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If the cell phone rings you just have to answer the call, don't you? When something happens, you just have to grab your cell phone and tell somebody about it, don't you? Well, maybe you should rethink that strategy.
As a young teenager I devoured all the Stephen King books. Stephen King is not the page turner anymore he was over 20 years ago. Cell nevertheless is a good read, in the train e.g., and I still just needed to find out what happens next.
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Norwegian Professor of Social Anthropology Thomas Hylland Eriksen does a good job of analyzing the effects of the information age on our lifestyle, i.e. the increased speed and huge abundance of information. He does not want to do away with the positive aspects of digital technology but wonders aloud about how to mitigate the unwanted and unintende side effects of increasing speed.
Good stuff, that has a lot to do with what I talk about in my presentations on how to deal with information and knowledge abundance. It helps to clarify some points, that I usually move through pretty quickly, but some audiences need more examples or evidence for to make it sink in. This 2001 book contains a number of examples that sound out-dated (WAP anyone?) but they are easily replaced with new ones (Blackberry), and do not invalidate the notionsin the book, in fact they only help to proof the case in point.
At the end Eriksen suggests a number of possible things to do to combat the negative side effects of increased speed, but I find the section unconvincing. Might be a good subject for a blogposting on Interdependent Thoughts though.
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Slaughterhouse V, the absurdistic novel by Vonnegut around the bombing of Dresden, was high on the readinglist for our English class at school. That is the reason I never read it then, but only opened it years later, after picking it up at a second hand book market. Interestingly enough the cover of this 1970 paperback uses the word holocaust not in its current singular use for the genocide of 6 million Jews, but as a general word meaning 'total destruction'. 
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This was the first book by Rifkin I've read, following a tv interview that I saw on Dutch television somewhere in the summer of 2004 when I had just started a (still mostly silent) blog about a possible energy regime change to hydrogen.
As I blogged back in 2004 the interesting part of Rifkins book is where he discusses the potential of having a distributed production network of energy, replacing the big central production facilities that are commonplace in our oil based system. Thus creating a energy regime that is truly equalizing.
His system approach to this is what I took away from the book as the eye opener. Our energy regime is a system, not a law of nature as some people seem to think. This means that with an approaching energy regime change (as we have had a couple of times before, from wood, coal, to oil. You can even see ancient and more recent slavery systems as energy regimes) we can start tinkering with ALL parameters of the system again.
Of course this will pit you against a number of people that have high stakes in maintaining certain parameters of the system because they derive their power and wealth from it.
As this book is all about vision, it does not say much about the current technological practicality of his ideas. In the end figuring out how to do that cannot be left to the trusting notion that the technology will be there when we need it. We are talking about redesigning systems here, and technology design predetermines a lot of what the system can be. Better not left to chance therefore.
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Jeremy Rifkin is no stranger to hyperbole, but he did manage to plant a few ideas in my head while reading the European Dream. An 'outsiders perspective' can be helpful. It helped me see diversity as a European strength, and also the uniqueness of the EU as a political entity without geographic claims. Good read.]]>