Do you factcheck news stories that confirm your beliefs?

Environmental Graffiti posted an interesting story about a hoax written by Mark Twain in 1862 about the discovery of a petrified man. The story was widely copied and reprinted even though basic facts were evidently wrong. Why am I sharing this? Besides being amusing, I think it teaches a valuable lesson about our predisposition to [...]

Three lessons from a year of teaching 2.0 to researchers

The purpose of this post is to share with you three lessons we wish someone had told us a year ago. But then again, what’s the point of teaching if you don’t learn something for yourself? Last summer, some colleagues at IFPRI and I decided to begin offering a series of weekly trainings aimed at [...]

Crafting an Intranet 2.0: If you build it, will they come?

First, a disclaimer: we haven’t built anything yet. Unlike other posts, I can’t share any examples of what we’ve done so far toward building a collaborative intranet since we still are very much in the planning phase. That being said, however, I think it’s still an opportune moment to reflect on some lessons learned and [...]

Does the social web enable me to find more unique information or just more of the same?

The video Information R/Evolution and the post From The Information Age To The Connected Age are describing two trends of the social web. The social web can enable users to more easily find the exact information they were searching. But if the scarce resource of the connected age is attention, then we are likely to [...]

Are we already practicing web 3.0?

I just finished reading an article about web 3.0 on ReadWrite Web where web 3.0 is defined as being “about feeding you the information that you want, when you want it (in the proper context).” Web 2.0 made it much easier to share and search information, but it also led to information overload for many [...]

Measuring impact on the web

Like many development research organizations, IFPRI staff often debate the question of how to best measure the impact of our work. As opposed to some of our partner CG Centers, IFPRI’s work focuses on policy-level interventions, which are rather different from producing new crop varieties for the purpose of increasing agricultural yields, household incomes, etc. [...]

GTZ Bulletin on KM

The latest issue of the GTZ AGRISERVICE Bulletin looks at knowledge management. In particular: 1) linking knowledge management to the strategy of the institution (serving targets), 2) developing a culture of knowledge sharing (trust, reward, procedures), 3) involvement and participation of stakeholders (ownership, user logic), 4) capacity development (training, technology, organisational development), 5) contextualisation of information (content, quality, retrieval, communication), [...]

Blogs on Rural Institutions and NRM

I just posted a question on the CAPRi blog asking what blogs people regularly read. While there is a lot of good individual articles out there, there seem to be very few blogs dedicated to rural institutions and natural resource management, not to talk about collective action and property rights. So far I have been [...]

Justifying the Value of the Social Web

Last week I read two (German) articles on the social web taking very different positions: Christian at crisscrossed.net published an article about “Das Netz der Ideen” (The Net of Ideas) in Internationale Politik, in which he talks about the positive learning effects the social web can have for development cooperation. The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung published [...]