Giving Voice to Searching Out Loud

Searching Out Loud is a digital information literacy text book for independent investigators, researchers, consultants, educators, and any lifelong learner whose curiosity is matched only by their rejection of unquestioning assumptions. Searching Out Loud is a bolt of inspiration for tireless and independently-inclined researchers who want to move beyond literacy to action, wherever the evidence may lead.

First the book instructs readers on how to locate, evaluate, and use online information in their evidence-based investigations. Then the reader is invited to apply their source knowledge and fact-finding to the perspective-taking needed to understand how that same information is created, shaped, and presented by the web-based tools and resources we’re routinely asked to believe at face value.

1. 1.    The Problem: Searching as Usual
   2.    The Solution: Ten Reasons Why Searching Out Loud May Be For You
   3.    The Approach: Digital Literacy Curriculum and Book Structure

The book shows readers how to place their own assumptions, intuitions, and curiosities above the commercial and often veiled interests of big search and social media. This distinction is key towards ensuring the integrity of the researcher and the independence of the investigator.

So too, the nature of virtual investigations poses challenges to the collection and sense-making of an evidence trail formed through Internet-based research. There’s nothing easy in about composing and presenting research narratives gathered through the non-linear web: An interwoven and dynamic scattering of directories, news feeds, catalogs, videos, academic archives, and specialty collections, many that escape search engine detection.

Searching Out Loud is a digital information literacy text book for independent investigators, researchers, consultants, educators, and any lifelong learner whose curiosity is matched only by their rejection of unquestioning assumptions. It is a bolt of inspiration for tireless and independently-inclined researchers who want to move beyond literacy to action.

---

Knowledge-ABLED: Taking Action Through Learning

The Value of Knowledge: The Economics of Enterprise Knowledge and Intelligence by Timothy W Powell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Value of Knowledge remains very much a practitioner book with its emphasis on the translation of knowledge as an ideal into the world of tangible aspirations and practical accounting. If Powell is attempting to personify knowledge here, it is not as passionate truth-seeker, fearless discoverer, or meticulous detective but steadfast, even-handed, and reliable un-locker of value otherwise undetected by more conventional business functions and professional disciplines.

Transitioning from knowledge to intelligence and from knowledge producer to client/decision-maker is key for Powell. It’s the quality of the transfer that determines project success. Powell argues for shared understandings reached in the planning phase. This avoids the fumbles of standalone research delivered without direct presentation. It also prepares the client for the fuller benefit of the findings. Chiefly, the implications for applying them across the priorities that give direction and urgency to knowledge products.

And who would sing the praises of these knowledge victories? Again, the testimonial proof rests with providers and sponsors. That may be a limited pool to draw from in a climate where the self-taught are reluctant to give away the expense of their hard-won experiences. There is the entrenched knowledge reinforced by a conquering acquirer. Revealing each new shred of evidence marginalizes the worth of the knowledge provider: A reliable knowledge transfer between transparent truth tellers and their inscrutable recipients? How do knowledge providers stay aligned with the business outcomes they’re informing without disclosing the secret sauce of sources, methods, and the many knowledge-refining practices contained in the author’s toolkit? A question for Mr. Powell’s next book?

No mind, he’s asking all the right questions in the winnable battles he resolutely lays out for knowledge producers. A cadre of the pattern-matching, perspective-taking, and context-enabling analysts who would have it no other way.


View all my reviews