Steve Denning

Today I was reading Steve Denning's newsletter when all of a sudden I was taken aback from what I read here.

What's wrong with it?

Aside from the various logical gaps in the case he builds, you wouldn't find anything particularly bad, unless you were a member of com-prac....

...in which case you would remember how the so-called reflections of Mr Denning did not happen in a vacuum: the link to the article he refers to was posted on that group and his several reflections were generated by an interaction among him and other persons (namely, me who originally posted the link, Roy Greenhalgh, Randall Kindley, Benoit Couture, and Miguel Cornejo Castro, in temporal order of contribution).

Mr Denning (may I say conveniently) does not say he wasn't the one who found such link to the article he is referring to and he does not say that his reflections were originated through interactions with members of the com-prac group. Isn't learning a social activity, Mr Steve? Aren't you a fan of Vygotsky? How come you don't acknowledge it?

Oh, no, wait a moment, you do cite "participants" without putting down names and places... participants to what, one of your workshops? I wonder if you asked them before including their contributions to your pamphlet!

However, the only participants you end up referring to are the ones you do have rebuttals about, because the objections you weren't able to overcome aren't even cited. Aren't you the one citing Popper and his falsification theory? How come it doesn't apply to what you write? Is it about winning an argument and demonstrate how good you are, or is it about understanding more of the environment around us?

So.... how do you generate trust? *grin*

Incidentally, Steve, in case you haven't realized it, you have just proven with your behaviour that such experiment, though conducted in a lab, is valid... just look at what you did!

In a group with no rules and especially no punishments, such as com-prac, free-riders (like you) exploit the good faith of members that freely share knowledge, therefore leading straight to knowledge hoarding.

This is not storytelling, Steve. This is telling stories.

Blind Review???

Yesterday I had a fat laughter at some people... establishment conservation is stronger than any meritocracy whatsoever *grin*

An association I won't name (but hey it ain't that difficult to find out) has a conference and a listserv. Just recently they "upgraded" (and widely circulated) how they changed the way they choose papers for the conference, introducting blind peer-review.

Their concept of blind, however, is pretty disconcerting.

Since I saw people posting stuff like "hey who wants to do a panel on [such and such] with me?", I wrote to the ED pointing out how that behaviour (and allowing it) may compromise the blindness of their peer-review method.

To which I am replied:

"It may be that a potential reviewer will occasionally see that, but s/he can also try to be objective (still) about a proposal, even if they think they know who is behind it. Certainly I have reviewed proposal where I was pretty sure I knew who the author was, but have tried nonetheless to be objective about the content."

Still, gentleman, this is NOT blind peer-review. Let me assure you, I come from science and I know when it was invented, why, and how it has to be done. The Academy of Management knows how to do it, perfectly.

More and more often, I find people from humanities mingling with terms in the attempt to make one thing appear something else. We might discuss on whether the peer-review should be blind or not, we can't name this way of reviewing "blind".

I guess that's why the impact factor of the association's publication is low, low, low.