An enormous website on networked learning based on an even bigger research that started in 2002 that included 134 schools, 35.000 staff and 675.000 (!) pupils. Sounds incredible? Check the website, including papers, research findings, tools and much, much more. For instance, the paper on 20 questions on networked learning for teachers is very interesting. It provides clear insight on network structures, leadership, communication and network activities.

Get connected through this link!

The 2009 OLKC conference is the fourth in an annual series which unites the OLK and OKLC communities. In building on the achievements of these previous events, OLKC is the leading international conference for researchers in the fields of organizational knowledge and learning. The conference is international in scope and inclusive of the wide range of intellectual perspectives, which have helped to make the field of organizational knowledge and learning one of the most vibrant areas for contemporary research and debate. The 2009 OLKC conference therefore welcomes theoretical, empirical and combined theoretical & empirical contributions.

The proposed International Conference on Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital will aim at providing an overview of the current trends in these fields through conference papers, research findings, case studies and innovative practices shared by academicians, industry professionals, knowledge management professionals in development agencies and research scholars. The Conference is being organized by the Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghaziabad, India in collaboration with The Centre for Knowledge Systems, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico and the World Capital Institute, the leading international think tank in Knowledge Based Development. The conference venue will be IMT, Ghaziabad and the dates are February 26 & 27, 2009.

Today, a collegue of mine, Paul Keursten, gave me a link to the website Ted.com. A very cool website with al sorts of links to presentations concerning creativity, learning and education. The video I saw really is provoking (and very funny!) and made me reflect to the way we organize our educational system. Creativity is an essential ingredient of knowledge productivity. It is worhwile to investigate creativity, how does it work? This video gives a very interesting perspective and at the same time it worries me. Is Ken Robinson right, do schools kill creativity? Have a look via this link!

For a long time, higher levels of R&D and greater patenting activity were considered as reliable indicators to differentiate Knowledge Intensive Sector (KISs) from more traditional industries. Today, however, contributors increasingly advocate that these criteria tend to provide a partial vision, essentially static, of what innovative industries really are. These recent contributions also stress that the dynamics of evolution of KISs is specific, namely that the profile of evolution of a KISs is distinct from the usual pattern of development observed in traditional industries. On the basis of a production of models, econometric analysis, and empirical observations that integrate the evolution of industries, the purpose of this workshop package is the investigation of the characteristics of KISs, their evolution over time and their effects on economic performances.

Here, you direct yourself to the webpage of the organizing parties.

This summer, Arne Gillert and I were the guest-editors of the HRD magazine Develop. We are fascinated by play or more broadly, playfulness. Play as form, as method, but also as a way of thinking and as a perspective. Our starting point is that play and playfulness form a powerful ingredient voor learning and innovation, but that this power is undervalued at best in the field of HRD. Our journey led us past four major questions. Firstly, what is the importance of thinking playfully? Why would you want to do it, what is in it for you? Douglas Rushkoff is making a strong case for the creation of space in which people can play at work, if you want to excel as an organisation. We need more playfulness, (economic) success is the consequence. Our second question links to this: if playing and playfulness is so important, what then is play? Third question we tried to tackle is: how do adults play? and finally, what does playfulness mean for the design of learning and development? On the website playfulness.eu you can find a lot more information!

Mark Turpin, a colleague with Kessels & Smit South Africa recently started a new blog on learning and social capital. Very interesting blogs, well written, funny and insightful. He writes about day-to-day things in South Africa and relates them to his interest in building social capital to promote learning. Here, you can click on the link!

This month the Dutch magazine Intellecteel Kapitaal released a second article that Simon van der Veer and I wrote based on the case studies in my phd study. This year, we are following five organisations who have networks that are working on specific knowledge productive questions related to organizational development. Questions that demands several professionals throughout the organisation to cooperate. In this article we wrote about the research principles and objectives in our research. If academic research wishes to be closely linked to practice and the field it operates in, we strongly promote action-research. We use six research principes that I would like to mention:

We use an appreciative research approach
Research starts at those places were there is movement towards the desired outcome of the group of professionals. The research starts with identifying small successes. This approach is strongly related to appreciative inquiry.

Research is a collective process
We conduct research activities together with the participants. This means that we use an approach that is social and design to create interaction. We support the learning process of the network in order to develop methods and instruments that are helpful for the desire result.

Doing research is a form of learning
We see research as a process of learning. Research is meant to get smarter as an organization! Learning has to do with finding an interesting organizational question and then designing a well fit research approach.

We try to find the core of the question
In the vast majority of data and information research produces, it is important to find the essence of the question. To use the participants to validate and further analyse results it is possible to cut to chase and find what is all about.

Be transparant about the research approach
Transparancy about the chosen research approach strengthens the network ability to be curious and investigative. This means that the research is clear about the usage of data, guidelines and deadlines.

Find a clear approach and methodology
Method and approach needs to be clearly defined aforehand. For instance validation, reflection of the results need to be clearly chosen and alligned with the respondents. It also means that the initial research question of the organization needs a specific, tailor-made approach, designed together with the participants.

Here you can download the paper, its in Dutch: enjoy! IK 2008 II

While I was surfing on the website of Assist Social Capital I found an interesting paper of Michael Woolcock. The title is the place of social capital in understanding social and economic performance. The paper reviews empirical evidence in support of key hypotheses of economic development and especially the relationship between informal and formal institutions and their collective capacity to manage both opportunity and risk. Examples are issues such as corruption, bureaucratic delays or civil liberties. The paper adresses three specific questions:

1. how are social capital, human capital and social capability related to one another?
2. how can social capital be measured?
3. how might existing economic growth models give more adequate attention to social capital?

Michael Woolcock is with the development research group of the world bank and the researcher at the Kennedy School of Management at Harvard University. He has published regurarly on the topic of social capital and economic development.

Together with my colleagues Joseph Kessels and Suzanne Verdonschot we will present a refereed paper for the 9th International Conference on Human Resource Development and Practice in Lille, France. The paper we are presenting is based on a study we did at seventeen supermarkets in the Netherlands. We used an interesting research approach. For one whole day, we would visit the supermarket and participate in the day-to-day work activities. During the work we would ask questions, interview the manager or attend meetings. Besides this we would write down all the quotes and insights we obtained on large flip-overs and lay them at the central meeting point for the personnel. They would then validate them, two steps in one! When we did this, we would analyse the qualitative data and put it on a large poster for the employees of the supermarket. We did this seventeen times, and based on all the posters we tried to answer the following research question:

How can the talents and successes of the employees – seen as knowledge workers – contribute to the change of their work environment?

And

What interventions encourage knowledge workers to contribute to this process?

Besides the methodology we used appreciative inquiry, this simply means that we collected the successes and uniqueness of the store in order to better understand how you can use talents of employees to work on continues improvement and innovation. From the analysis of the data three types of successful supermarkets emerged. We found supermarkets organised as a family, supermarkets organised as a student house, and supermarkets organised as a firm. It seems to be important to allow for this kind of diversity in culture. In each of the three types of supermarket ownership and entrepreneurship could be observed. However, in each of the three types organises this takes a different form. It also appeared that the supermarket manager’s personal preferences and capabilities are crucial for the success of a supermarket.

Secondly our research in the 17 supermarkets revealed that it is necessary to allow for diversity; that ownership and entrepreneurship contribute more to change than discipline and obedience; and that the specific role and capability of the manager seems to be crucial. Employees need to develop competencies that match their own ability and interests in order to successfully innovate in the supermarket. In order to become innovative shop employees should be granted the authority to engage in knowledge work. In the supermarkets that we visited during the research, we found various interventions that could support the development of ownership and entrepreneurship of the supermarket staff.

Here you can download the paper! Enjoy the read. Knowledge work in succesful supermarkets