Knowledge2Go

The Search, John Battelle’s eagerly-awaited book on “How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” has just hit the shelves. Apart from its intrinsic interest, the process of writing the book is also interesting in that John relied heavily on his blog to start a conversation with his readers.

As he describes it in this interview with Philipp Lenssen:

“I started it [the blog] as a way to catalyze a conversation between myself and what I hoped would be a small but robust community of folks in the search industry, mainly to help me research and ponder the book i am writing. I was stunned when I realized that it got to more than 50K readers.”

This helped him to test ideas for the book, check facts, and of course to build a large readership in advance of the book’s publication. I think Dan Gillmor did something similar with his book We the Media.

One thing to bear in mind of course is that blogging is not a sure-fire way of writing a best-seller. For starters, both Battelle and Gillmor were already big names before they started (I think) and both wrote for a tech-savvy audience, who were already part of the online conversation. Many of the people who will hopefully read knowledge2go do not regularly read blogs and most probably don’t know about RSS.

So I’m not expecting anything on the scale that Gillmore or Batelle experienced, but am nevertheless hopeful that this blog can help a little towords building momentum for the book.

Today I got an e-mail from DP Dash of the Xavier Institute of Management in India. He is editor, together with Héctor Ponce of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, of the new Journal for Research Practice. The journal has all the usual trappings such as peer review and an international editorial advisory board (including, I notice, action research guru Bob Dick). It is also strongly transdisciplinary and committed to free, open access. Articles are published online (no sign-in required) in html as well as pdf (but unfortunately no rss feed as yet), and there is a discussion forum.

There are of course scores of “methodology” and “philosophy of science” journals out there – the one more insular and naval-gazing than the next. But this one seems more open-ended to me, more willing to explore a variety of angles on research and its connections to other knowledge-making practices. The first issue includes, amongst others, articles on “the acquisition of high quality experience”, “digital video as research practice” and “playful collaborative exploration”.

I particularly enjoyed the introductory editorial, Journey of Research Practice, which nicely sets out three different threads in the ongoing discussion about research and researchers: a philosophical thread, a sociological thread, and an institutional or political-economic thread – together with various other ways of thinking about research, such as as a space of struggle and resistance, and as a practice of freedom and self-transcendence.

It would have been nice, though, if they had included a bit more of the “back story” of how the journal came into being. I really like it that this is an initiative coming from India and South America, with strong participation from just about everywhere else (except, unfortunately, Africa), and wonder how the idea came about and how they managed to turn it into reality.

Stephen Downes links to the Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit (pdf document) held in 2004. Lots of interesting material on new media literacy – precisely the sort of stuff we want to include in the Knowledge2Go book.

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine points to various interesting new approaches to writing and publishing books, including open-source-edit and self-publish and (in the comments at the bottom) soliciting donations in advance and then making the book available for free. (Photo credit: David Bleasdale)

Thought I’d put a link here to the manifesto I wrote last year about research in (and against) the knowledge economy, as it conveys much of what we’re hoping to do with the upcoming book.

I have just had a nice chat to Fiona Wakelin of Juta, who will be publishing Knowledge2Go. Fiona is currently visiting Gauteng from her home base in Cape Town. She is not only clued up about traditional publishing stuff, but also has creative ideas about the process of writing and publishing the book.

Two upcoming book fairs to keep an eye on: The Frankfurt Book Fair this year (19 to 23 October 2005) and the Cape Town Book Fair next year (17 to 20 June 2006).

We (Martin Terre Blanche and Kevin Durrheim) will be using this blog as part of the process of writing a new student textbook on doing research in (and against) the knowledge economy.