Dove Lane

What was marvelous about Active Worlds in the early days was it was the wild West. Anything could happen, anything could be built, anyone could go there…a participant’s imagination was the only limit . They were on the leading edge of social worlds, holding virtual exhibitions in a giant exhibition hall, creating a virtual school and college, where real world students and teachers conducted classes. They even sponsored supervised summer camps where kids built 3-D worlds in teams to win a prize. AW was way ahead of its time.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past two years, you have no doubt read an article or seen an interview with someone talking about some sociological phenomena or other that occurs in virtual worlds. The line between games and real life is blurring. Research on the Internet raises a host of novel ethical challenges, and only Linden Lab’s Second Life seems to have addressed the ethics of research using virtual world avatars. I find this interesting.

Here I go again. The fact that so many capable people cannot seem to define…and agree on a definition of…knowledge management bothers me. How can we solve problems if we can’t even define what’s in scope or out of scope? How can we use a tool we don’t understand? Here’s what I mean…

For a while now, I have observed the ways in which KM practitioners and consultants conceptualize KM, its components and their relationships. The most popular ways to represent KM are “four-blockers” and Venn diagrams with three interlocking circles. I’ve wondered why. Perhaps the language of numbers can help us finally to define what KM is and what the model really looks like.