Computer Mediated Communications and Communities of Practice

Within the Knowledge Management context, there is growing interest in computer support for group knowledge sharing and the role that Communities of Practice play in this. Communities of Practice are groups of individuals with a common purpose and who share some background, language or experience. The community is regenerated as newcomers join the group and old-timers leave. The newcomers have access to the old- timers and learn from them. This generally takes place through situated learning. New group knowledge is also created as members of the community have a problem to solve and swap experiences and anecdotes to solve the problem, possibly arriving at a novel solution. This may then be further shared through anecdotes so that it eventually becomes part of the group's store of collective knowledge. Communities of Practice provide an excellent forum for knowledge sharing and a vital question is whether the new communications media, which provide new possibilities for collaboration and distributed working, could support the existence of such groups in a distributed environment. This question takes on an added relevance with the rapid internationalization of business that can spread the distribution over national boundaries posing problems of cultural and temporal as well as physical distance. This paper reports on a case study which was the first stage in exploring whether Computer Mediated Communications technologies (CMCs) can support distributed international Communities of Practice. The aim of the case study was to explore the possible existence of Communities of Practice in an international organization, to identify such groups and to ascertain the media used.Computer Mediated Communications technologies, CMC, Communities of Practice, CoP, Knowledge Management, KM

Knowledge Management: Are We Missing Something?

As commercial organisations face up to modern pressures to downsize and outsource they have begun to realise that they have lost knowledge as people leave and take with them what they know. This knowledge is increasingly being recognised as an important resource and organisations are now taking steps to manage it. In addition, as the pressures for globalisation increase, collaboration and co-operation is becoming more distributed and international. Knowledge sharing in a distributed international environment is becoming an essential part of Knowledge Management (KM), although this area does not yet appear to be given much attention. In this paper we make a distinction between hard and soft knowledge within an organisation and argue that much of what is called KM deals with hard knowledge and emphasises capture-codify-store. This is a major weakness of the current approach to KM, equating more with Information Management than Knowledge Management. Soft knowledge is concerned more with the social and cultural aspects of knowledge, its construction and the processes through which it is sustained and shared. This paper addresses this weakness by exploring the sharing of 'soft' knowledge using the concept of communities of practice.Knowledge Management, Lost Knowledge, Distributed Working, Communities of Practice

An analysis of migration patterns of radiography undergraduates and return on investment

This report is supplementary to the SCoR 'Analysis of Students and Recent Graduates Survey 2012'. An identical population was invited to supply additional information via a similar 'Survey Monkey' questionnaire. 82 completed responses were received. All Universities offering undergraduate training for Radiographers were represented

RadBench : Benchmarking Image Interpretation Performance

RadBench provides a reliable objective measure of image interpretation performance. A key contribution to knowledge is recognising variation in performance by image bank and the importance of benchmarking linked to a prescribed development pathway through CPD. RadBench has implications for practice at all stages of professional development. The results are of value to the individual, to organisations, governments, and to professional bodies. With increasing adoption, a life-long profile can be generated which will help inform clinical training and practice on a global scale. Partnering with other institutions enables the rich data source to generate and support further research. The on-line product enables wide reach to all imaging professions regardless of geography. A multi-lingual version is in development

Popular Radicalism in the 1930s: The History of the Workers\u27 Unemployment Insurance Bill

Historiography on the Great Depression in the U.S. evinces a lacuna. Despite all the scholarship on political radicalism in this period, one of the most remarkable manifestations of such radicalism has tended to be ignored: namely, the mass popular movement behind the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill. This bill, which the Communist Party wrote in 1930, was introduced in Congress three times, in 1934, ’35, and ’36, as an alternative to the far more conservative Social Security Act. Its socialistic nature ensured that it never had any chance of becoming law, but it also enabled it to become enormously popular among Americans across the country, who were more enthusiastic about radical social democracy than has often been appreciated. Millions of people belonging to labor unions, unemployment organizations, left-wing political parties, church groups, women’s groups, and immigrant societies participated in the movement to get the bill enacted as law. In this article I tell the story of the momentum that accumulated behind the Workers’ Bill, a story that challenges any interpretation of the Great Depression emphasizing the relative conservatism of the U.S. population

Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of Revolution

In the twenty-first century, it is time that Marxists updated the conception of socialist revolution they have inherited from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Slogans about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” “smashing the capitalist state” and carrying out a social revolution from the commanding heights of a reconstituted state are completely obsolete. In this article I propose a reconceptualization that accomplishes several purposes: first, it explains the logical and empirical problems with Marx’s classical theory of revolution; second, it revises the classical theory to make it, for the first time, logically consistent with the premises of historical materialism; third, it provides a (Marxist) theoretical grounding for activism in the solidarity economy, and thus partially reconciles Marxism with anarchism; fourth, it accounts for the long-term failure of all attempts at socialist revolution so far. In serving these functions, the revision I propose finally “modernizes” and corrects Marx’s conception of revolution

The New Art of Ethnographic Filmmaking

Chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video

The Life and Times of Jimmy Hoffa

In light of Martin Scorsese\u27s popular movie The Irishman, it is a good time to reassess Jimmy Hoffa. He\u27s probably the most famous union leader in American history, but the only thing most people know of him is that he ran the Teamsters and was closely connected to the Mafia. He is often seen as nothing but a corrupt, evil, greedy sellout. The reality is a little different. In this article I discuss his record as a labor leader, the attacks on him by the McClellan Committee and Bobby Kennedy, and his ties to organized crime. I try to contextualize the Teamsters union of Hoffa\u27s era, while at the same time providing a corrective to the public\u27s overwhelmingly negative views of him

Eleven Theses on Socialist Revolution

It is an open question whether socialism will ever exist on a national or international scale. But if it will, it will come about in ways different from what both Marxists and anarchists have traditionally thought. In this article I present eleven theses regarding how it might be possible for the world to achieve an economically democratic civilization in an era of unprecedented crisis. In the process, I try to explain what has gone wrong with attempted socialist revolutions in the past. This is reprinted with permission. The article originally appeared in Counterpunch, August 27, 2021