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Raiders of the Lost Tapes
Last week, we heard a surprising story that makes for a good cautionary tale of Knowledge Management. It has to do with time, history and the impermanence of memory, and at the center there's an inarguable milestone in human history: the first Apollo moon landing in July 1969.
If you're old enough, there's a good chance you remember it -- most of the TV-watching planet was tuned in. However, what we saw was pretty poor in terms of video quality. It was distorted and
ghostly, and hard to make out. Still exciting, but maybe a little disappointing compared to Star Trek. The problem was that the video frequency of the lunar camera was incompatible with broadcast
television. So the signal that went to the world was actually coming from a conventional TV camera, which was pointed at a monitor at the telemetry station.
The real video would have had much
higher quality, so it’s too bad no one got to see it. It was recorded, though, and by 1970 the original 14-inch tapes had been transferred to a "permanent retention" facility at the Goddard
Space Flight Center. In 2002, NASA engineers decided to transfer the original video to something more permanent, but ran into a small problem. They couldn't find the tapes. There's no evidence they were
destroyed or moved, but nobody can remember what became of them. They're just lost.
Honeysuckle Creek, Australia, was one of three stations tracking Apollo 11, and they've put up a web page to support the search. Take a look, and keep your eyes open. The tapes are out there.
Balancing the Cognitive Load
This is a big, book-worthy topic, but on the nuts and bolts level the idea is simple: whatever you're trying to communicate has to be delivered in a size and shape that's suitable for human consumption. You can't force feed information.
We first heard the phrase from a former colleague, speaking of the challenge he faced in adjusting to a new (or even just a different) interface. One aspect of this is the rule of seven, which some web designers feel represents the ideal number of links for an average page. Edward Tufte has a paper that describes a model he co-developed for the graphic display of patient information. He knew it was a success in the field trials because the doctors started talking about treatment plans. They were able to decode the graphic very quickly, so it became only a window through which they could look at the patient's data. The patient and the treatment were a lot more interesting to them than the window.
That's an important thing to remember, whether designing interfaces or writing newsletters. Every bit of energy that's used to decode the content is energy that won't be available to receive,
understand or remember it. It's a matter of balance.
Squidoo Follow-Up
In June, we ran an item on Squidoo, the web-based tool for knowledge capture. It's a site at which anyone can collect, organize and publish information on any topic -- a place for experts to strut their stuff and be compensated in return. Squidoo derives revenue from Google Ad-Clicks, and shares the money with its authors, based on the popularity of the authors’ content. Each batch of focused material is called a "lens" in Squidoo parlance, and authors are encouraged to create as many lenses as they like.
We've also written many times about the importance of storytelling as a tool for transferring knowledge, starting with the very first issue of Directions. We were inspired by David Weinberger's essay called Knowledge Narratives, suggesting that if you can tell the story of something, you can reasonably say you
understand it. If you can't wrap the idea in some kind of narrative structure, you may not really know what you're talking about.
These two threads have just come together in an interesting way.
We participate in a virtual community sponsored by Stan Garfield, the KM lead at HP; one of the other members is Shawn Callahan, who's the founding Director of an Australian consulting company called Anecdote. Shawn has set up a Squidoo lens called Business Narrative,
which puts storytelling in a KM context. If you're interested in that topic, pay him a visit! Lots of good links and other information.
Dealing with Feature Creep
While technology continues to bring at least the promise of a new and better world, it's
troubling how difficult it can be to stay on top of it. It's not so much a matter of getting your arms around basic ideas, but it can be devilish hard trying to make things work. Consider digital cameras
and cell phones. We use them both at Knowledge Street, personally and professionally, and they’re now so packed with features that it's impossible to master them before they become obsolete. Or are we
just getting old?
In Imperial Earth, written in 1976, Arthur C. Clarke described the world of the late 23rd Century, in which computer terminals looked pretty much like they do today. He
felt there'd be a functional limit set by the number of keys on a keyboard, since human fingers couldn't manipulate things below a certain size. He didn't anticipate the development of soft keys.
It's that cognitive load thing, in which the interface becomes the issue. We now need to cope with devices that may never live up to their potential, because so few of us want to put in the time required
to master them. Consider that the ubiquitous Microsoft Office uses a menu logic that actually hides choices from you, so you won't be overwhelmed. Ah, the modern age...
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