Personal KM Tools Do Enhance Innovative Capabilities

With the many channels of personal knowledge management tools in existence, we have come to realize that most of these tools will not only enhance our personal growth but also our innovative capabilities. Such tools, if used effectively, will help us in various aspects of our lives, including school and work lives. We would be exploring some examples below.

One concrete example will be the Google Reader. It will automatically alert and feed us with updates on all the websites that we have subscribed to. With Google Reader, the hassle of having to visit multiple websites that we have an interest in is eliminated as all the updates can be viewed on a single platform. As such, knowledge sharing via such a channel will allow us to gain more knowledge from various fields efficiently and effectively. In doing so, it will also enable us to gather new ideas and perspectives from others and generate new ideas of our own.

Within the context of a project team the use of wikis can help in enhancing our personal innovative capabilities. By setting up a personal wiki for our project members, anyone on the team can access it to share, contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. A key benefit of a wiki is that it is free-of-charge and user-friendly. Furthermore, it can eliminate problems such as having to sieve through tonnes of emails just to locate a particular piece of information and having multiple copies of work being edited simultaneously. Such problems have on many occasions led to confusion amongst team members and delays in project schedules.

Another tool would be Video Sharing channels such as YouTube. Other than allowing us to watch our favourite MTVs, YouTube is also a channel in which a lot of other information can be shared. For instance, if we need to produce a video to explain Web 2.0 tools, many videos are already available on YouTube to explain these concepts. By viewing a few of these videos, we can draw ideas from what others have already done and make use of what we feel is the most effective way to bring across the message to come up with a new idea for our own video.

As seen in the above examples, it is evident that knowledge sharing and creation can certainly enhance our personal innovative capabilities, be it in school or at the workplace.

Birth of the blogspace

The birth of this blog spot arises from the advent chant of our eccentric KM prof who is pro-Web 2.0 and in his desperate measure to attempt to encourage his students to embrace this new technology, this becomes an assignment. Not that we disagree since we have over an hour away from usual mundane class time. ;-)

So the next few posts will be based on our thoughts and reflections on how Web 2.0 tools can enhance personal knowledge and innovative capabilities.