Knowledge Work Types

Several people have asked for some clarification on my definition of Concept Work and Concept Workers. To help clarify this and to begin thinking through implications for Work Literacy Skills, I went back through a couple of different sources.

Thomas Davenport classifies Knowledge Work Types in Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances And Results from Knowledge Workers using a variety of classifications. One was based on the complexity of the work. Work that requires greater interpretation/judgment vs. work that is relatively routine. He also classified these according to the level of dependence on others. Within that he then defined the following types of knowledge workers:

• Transaction Worker - Routine, individual, ex. call center.
• Integration Worker - Routine, collaborative, ex. systems development
• Expert Worker - Interpretation/judgment, individual, ex. family physician
• Collaboration Worker - Interpretation/judgment, collaborative, ex. investment banker

Concept workers work on things that are higher on the interpretation/judgment side. Developers and call center employees for the most part are not concept workers. However, they will shift into concept work for some kinds of problems. It's generally when new situations arise that are outside the norm. A new technology is encountered. A particularly hard customer situation. Etc. These require the worker to shift into a mode of judgment and interpretation.

When you look around many organizations, I believe you find a lot of workers spending greater portions of their days as concept workers. Think about the following areas:

• Marketing
• Sales
  
• Product Design
• Engineering

Yes, some portion of the work is routine, but most of the value provided is handling the non-routine. It's the marketing person who can figure out how to understand customer needs and position the product and reach the customer in changing media channels. It's the sales person trying to figure out an entry point, how to handle an objection, how to translate product features to a customer's needs. And the list goes on.

In the world of learning, it's determining how to handle particular performance needs, learning needs. Where do authoring tools, LMS fit? What about eLearning 2.0? There are no right answers, and a lot of interpretation and judgment required.

In Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott discusses exactly the change towards concept work:

At the same time, the nature of work itself is changing. Work has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile, and less dependent on geography. Many employees are already given far more autonomy to decide how and where they want to work. A growing number of firms are decentralizing their decision-making function, communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion, and embracing new technologies that empower employees to communicate easily and openly with people inside and outside the firm.

I just saw that there was a Wikipedia article on the Conceptual Economy talking about Pink, Friedman and other perspectives on the move towards greater cognitive oriented work - more judgment and interpretation - more conceptual. Interestingly, the article did not refer to Concept Work or Concept Workers.

Hope this helps clarify.

How to Download YouTube Videos

I needed to figure out how to download YouTube videos for an upcoming conference presentation where I wasn't confident that I would be able to have a good enough connection to play the video.

I found that there was a very nice bookmarklet to Download as MP4 Files:

One way is to save the following link as a bookmarklet by dragging it to your Links bar (in Firefox, Safari) or right-clicking and adding it to your favorites (in Internet Explorer, Opera):

Get YouTube video

When you want to download a YouTube video, just click on the bookmarklet.

KeepVid offered both (save as FLV and save as MP4) and a nice bookmarklet as well. I've not tried it, but it appears to work for Google Video, MySpace video and more.

Both of these options give you a very nice MP4 file that works great for my presentation.

Other ways to download YouTube Videos and/or convert them...

To get it in Flash Video Format / FLV - you can use the little tool provided by TechCrunch.

Zamzar appears to offer a lot of options to convert from various sites to various formats. The free version had a limit of 100MB which unfortunately excluded the video I was doing 131MB.

Vixy allows conversion to other formats (AVI, WMV, Quicktime). But I've had more issues with getting it to work.

There are lots of other options out there. I just wanted to capture what worked for me.

Kids Search

It's surprising how much I learn by watching my kids (now 13, 11 and 8) go through school today. I've mentioned before the experience of the Ten Year Old Wikipedia Update and also my questioning of Cursive Writing. The most recent aha is the learning associated with kids search behavior.

My recent experience was my son's write-up of his science assignment around oobleck. I didn't know it at the time, but upon consulting the define: operator (based on my son's suggestion) in Google:

Oobleck is a popular name used to refer to a stiff mixture of corn starch and water (1 part water to 1.5-2 parts corn starch) often used as a ...
www.education.vic.gov.au/studentlearning/teachingresources/science/scicontinuum/sciglossarylz.htm

First learning for me was that my son has transitioned away from any use of a paper dictionary to using the define: operator. Various teachers have banned the use of this approach (along with banning any citation of Wikipedia). But, they've not banned citing qualified sources found through those sources. So, for my kids search has become the starting point for a lot and they know that define: and Wikipedia provide starting points. And, please don't try to convince them of the value of the various dictionaries that are within arms reach of the computer. After all, then they can't copy-and-paste both the definition and the citation.

Back to his write-up. As I tried to help him, one of the questions was basically why did oobleck turn into a solid under pressure. I really didn't know the answer. After some Google searching we found that it was caused by basically squeezing the water out leaving a solid.

Along the way, he also found this great video that he provide to his teacher showing people running on oobleck and that they sink if they stop. Since, their experiments were with small amounts, this was really cool to see.