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Over the past two decades the labour market has changed dramatically. There are far more jobs but fewer of them are full-time. Many full-time, blue-collar jobs traditionally filled by men have disappeared while women generally fill the new, part-time and usually casual positions that have been created.

In recent years online and blended communities have become a popular topic among educationalists. In this paper we present a framework that supports the analysis, development and maintenance of online and blended communities. This is applied to two community case studies that differ along several key dimensions such as type of membership, the purpose of the communities, their policies and size. The analysis draws attention to the differences between the two types of communities. It also highlights the advantages and weaknesses of the framework with respect to these two case studies and suggests areas for future development. In the discussion that follows we highlight some key differences between this framework and Wenger’s work on Communities of Practice (COPs).

Much of today's organizational knowledge still exists outside of formal information repositories and often only in people's heads. While organizations are eager to capture this knowledge, existing acquisition methods are not up to the task. Neither traditional artificial intelligence based approaches nor more recent, less-structured knowledge management techniques have overcome the knowledge acquisition challenges. This article investigates knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and proposes the use of collaborative, conversational knowledge management to remove them. The article demonstrates the opportunity for more effective knowledge acquisition through the application of the principles of Bazaar style, open-source development. The article introduces wikis as software that enables this type of knowledge acquisition. It empirically analyzes the Wikipedia to produce evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

George has been designing, facilitating and hosting online communities for 20 years. Out from that experience, he developed his Community Design Architecture (CDA), that he refined and tested during his work at INSEAD. He provides consulting and virtual community architecting services to organizations in the private and public sectors. George is also known for his first-of-its-kind, virtual or hybrid (online/off-line) events he designed and facilitated, which were attended by from 30 to 6,000 participants. George designed and leads an innovative, highly interactive, executive workshops on “Collective Intelligence 2.0,” in which participants are learn to upgrade the collective IQ of their organization, by applying the principles of CDA.

"Individuals are forced to consider more information and opportunities than they can effectively process. This information overload is made worse by ‘data smog’, the proliferation of low quality information allowed by easy publication. It leads to anxiety, stress, alienation, and potentially dangerous errors of judgment." Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control by Francis Heylighen. Even when we’ll have much better summarizing and other meaning-making tools than we have today, no amount of technology will give us peace of mind when we will need it most - in the midst of rapid technological changes which affect how we live, work, learn, and play. To rightfully trust our capacity to learn as fast as necessitated by the pace of changes which affect us--individuals, communities and organizations--, we need to learn how to learn faster together. Recommendations and pointers to resources, emailed by friends and colleagues in our social and knowledge networks, are some of the signposts that many professionals and managers use for navigating in today’s fast-moving landscapes. If none of us is as smart as all of us, then creating shared resources, shared social and knowledge capital, is one of the smartest things we can do. The intent and core idea of Collaboration Campus™ is to provide a space for mastering the arts of collaborative learning, and building valuable social capital just by participating in the life of the campus community.

Examining what people do online as they look for information, communicate with others, make transactions, and entertain themselves.

Young people's views on work and careers Future Innovators commissioned DEMOS to undertake a short study examining young people's attitudes to the future of work. It is based on a survey of 15 and 16 year olds, who are about to make decisions regarding their future, such as the careers and qualifications they are going to pursue. The study The study explores young people's attitudes towards work and skills and argues that a wider set of skills and personal attributes are likely to be required from them when they reach the workplace. The study paints a picture of a generation that understands the value of hard work: 90 per cent believe if you work hard you'll usually succeed. However, with more employers identifying skills like creativity as key to the workforce of the future, it warns of a disconnect between employers' demands and young people's skills and perceptions. It suggests that they may be entering the workforce lacking the full range of skills, which will allow them to contribute to the expansion of the economy. The study also examines some of the key influences on young people, to understand how their world views are shaped and where successful interventions might be targeted in the future. 'Parents and family' were identified ahead of school, showing the importance of both formal and informal learning. 'Ready for the future?' Full report 'Ready for the future?' Executive summary

Web 2.0 - Understanding the substance behind the buzzwords. As part of a panel debate at Webstock.org.nz. Created by Philip Fierlinger. philip@turntable.com http://turntable.com/blog

The scenarios referred to in this workshop transcript can be found at: http://www.knowledgeboard.com/item/53115Helen Baxter Welcome to the KnowledgeBoard online workshop. Today we are talking about Scenarios for the Knowledge Economy with our guest speaker Jeroen Kemp of the EKMF. Jeroen is senior researcher and consultant at the competence centre R&D management of the German Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering and is one of the founders and co-ordinators of the European Knowledge Management Forum.

Jeroen Kemp Lauri, the way we see it is: single trends, integrated scenarios, visions, implications, ACT & PREPARE...

This project task represents the 'think tank'of the European KM Forum as it defines on one hand the project's direction form the very beginning and on the other hand develops strategic visions for KM in Europe. Baseline for all this is the European Council's objective for Europe to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge - based economy in the world by 2002.The document presents five scenarios for future work in the knowledge economy that have been developed on the basis of a formal scenario planning technique. The scenarios are used as a means for identifying directions for future research in KM in Europe. This work is still in progress and thus no conclusions of direct recommendations for future research are given here yet. However, the knowledge economy scenarios provide stimulating means for baseline of discussion and moreover describe diverse potential future European KM environments.The first document contains an extract from deliverable D1.2 of the IST project European KM Forum - European Knowledge Management Forum. The second is the full version.

"I remember going into a room to meet a group and at the sight of the uniform they shrank away and clammed up," he says. "I thought: no, that isn't how we do policing here."Within the week, he was on the internet, checking out Teach Yourself Lithuanian courses. By the end of the month, he took delivery of a set of CDs.

We can increase productivity and profit, and save money. We can decrease congestion, and reduce environmental pollution, without spending millions on new infrastructure. We can achieve economic and community development, and improve national productivity. We can do more and better work, and spend more time enjoying life.

What does Citizendium offer that you can't get with Wikipedia? > The world needs something in addition to Wikipedia. The world needs a better, more reliable free encyclopedia. There is little chance that Wikipedia is going to change the policies that I think are responsible for its lack of authoritativeness. A lot of people - and I don't mean just experts - have contributed to Wikipedia and come away with a bad taste in their mouth. The problem is that their work tends to be dismissed, and they are often treated disrespectfully. There really needs to be a place that is more inclusive. Wikipedia, by being open to all sorts of abusive and anonymous people, actually makes itself closed to people who don't want to work in that kind of atmosphere. >

Do you know the age profile of your staff and their retirement plans? Can you identify those staff members whose knowledge would be most keenly lost by your organisation should they leave? Who’s responsibility is the retention of knowledge? David DeLong’s book begins with a discussion of current developments and provides examples of the types of impact experienced by companies when senior employees retire. DeLong’s studies appear solely within the USA, but nevertheless they offer examples that are deeply worrying should they be replicated elsewhere.

The demand for IT professionals has grown rapidly since 2001. The number of employed IT professionals has increased from approximately 8,400 in June 2001 to over 28,000 in June 2006. Employment growth of IT professionals of 27.3% per annum was well above 2.8% growth for all occupations. On average, about 4,000 new IT jobs were created each year between June 2001 and June 2006. About 1,300 degrees and postgraduate diplomas with an IT major were awarded in 2005. This was 24% lower than in 2003, when qualification achievements peaked. A comparison of the number of degree and postgraduate diplomas awarded, with the number of employed IT professionals yields a training rate of 5.1% in 2005. This has declined from 12.4% in 2000. The number of students enrolled for IT degrees declined by 44% between 2001 and 2005. This indicates that the number of IT graduates is likely to continue declining in the next few years. Since 2002 permanent and long-term migratory flows of IT professionals have made a small but positive contribution to the supply of IT professionals in New Zealand.

Working via networking Dear Helen, thank you! Yes, it's actually amazing! Currently our company is in some projects and we are responsible for a lot of things. I'm practically alone in my office for days on end, at the same time virtually I'm extremely busy networking with project partners and my employees constantly. We interact via Skype, email, wiki and phone, and sometimes it amuse me with how much people from different countries I contact at once. But what's become clear to me after all - an idea that virtual collaboration could be effective only when it is supported by periodical face-to-face (or at least, vocal via phone/Skype) conversation. Otherwise, a level of trust and mutual responsibilities is reduced even you were a good partner earlier. Helen Baxter, 10-Oct-06 @ 03:41AM Networking = Happiness & Higher Productivity I now run two networked companies, a record label and 3D/TV production house. We have studios interconnected with a combination of free Google Tools and the wonderful Basecamp PM system. Innovators & Creatives don't keep office hours and tend to work on a results not time basis. Overall I think my crew are much happier and far more productive than if we all tried to work out of the same office. This way I never feel like I'm herding cats ;)

Much of the current web 2.0 vibe was born by the folks who started the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL (first online community), and Wired magazine. Well, here in this panel interview are the founders of all three: Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, and Howard Rheingold, talking about how it started, why they did what they did, and what they think of where we are today. 80 minutes long in Realvideo format. Skip to ~15 minutes in to bypass the various intros.

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.)