Weblogs as "conversational technologies" to support CoP I happened on the following article while looking for something else in ABI/Inform (I love ABI/Inform and can't wait until they have search alert feeds -- I'm already sub'd to some of the general feeds)

Wagner, Christian and Narasimha Bolloju. "Supporting Knowledge Management in Organizations With Conversational Technologies: Discussion Forums, Weblogs, and Wikis." Journal of Database Management 16, no. 2 (2005): i-viii. (permalink for ABI via PQ subscribers)

This article discusses the various flavors of communities of practice (CoP) and how different "conversational technologies" are required to support each type of CoP. Conversational technologies are fora or other media that support knowledge exchange and extraction for knowledge transfer (p. ii). This goes along with Efimova's distributed apprenticeship model. The authors quickly mention cognitive constructivism and social constructivism as benefits of the conversational technologies. (I recently saw something about meta-cognition used in the same sense in one of the currently-not-loading pages about SSAW). The authors go on to say that a successful conversational system will "capture and represent conversations and has to accommodate contextualization, search, and community" (p. ii).

The authors also emphasize the storytelling aspect of blogs and explain why they work better for innovation CoP while fora work for help and wikis work for best practice. So, if you need to make a business case for internal blogs for (P)KM (when you already have a SharePoint site or internal listservs) -- here you go!  ¶ 12:16 PM| |cites (technorati) |