Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

Lilia Efimova provides a good summary of the benefits of blogging for knowledge workers (knowledge workers: if the physical artifacts of your day's labor are documents, or if you don't produce any physical documents at work, that's you). If you're trying to explain to your co-workers or your boss why blogging would be good for your organization, Efimova's explanation is a good place to start.

I presented a brief overview of social knowledge management for our online seminar course here at Dakota State University last Friday. Here are the slides, courtesy of SlideShare:

I read Ellis (1997), a brilliant example of "dialogic, multivocal narrative," and my antennae go all criss-cross haywire and pick up three channels at once. "Dialogic, multivocal narrative" is central to scholarly personal narrative, social knowledge management, and the online dissertation.

We can see an example of social knowledge management in The Budget, the weekly national newspaper of America's Amish communities. With volunteer scribes, The Budget has followed a very bloggy publishing model for decades: