One of the challenges of helping knowledge workers gain new skills is that so much of what they do takes place inside their heads. Taking a simple example, you could watch me write a blog post, but if I didn’t talk about what I was thinking and doing as I pulled things together, you wouldn’t really get a full picture of the decisions I’m making as I use the technology. You could see the mechanics of how I write a post, add links, format, etc. but that tells you nothing about how I actually arrive at the content or manage the rest of my processes.

Several months ago, over at The Bamboo Project I published a 5-minute screencast of how I wrote a blog post. I talked not about the technical side, but about the flow of information–how I arrived at a particular topic and how I used commenting and Google Alerts to extend the conversation and my learning. At the time it occurred to me that it would be incredibly valuable if more people who were using social media in a variety of knowledge work contexts shared some of their own processes. I never followed up on this, unfortunately, but as we explore what it means to develop new work literacies, I think that there would be a lot of value in figuring out how to capture this kind of process information. As I mentioned in a comment to Tony, the beauty of the technologies we’re working with now is that they actually make it easier for us to share processes like this. We just need to be more explicit in doing so.

Using social media to tell stories about how we do our work may be one of the best strategies we can employ in helping workers develop new literacies. This morning I checked out an article from Dave Snowden that Brett Miller shared on his blog. In it, Dave argues that using stories and anecdotes rather than structured documents is one of the best ways we can support knowledge workers’ professional development. He then suggests four strategies for doing so:

1. Capture material at the right level of abstraction, thats not too difficult.
2. Get people to record things as they do them, and then index the resulting material either at the time or at the end of the day, so the raw material is interpreted by those who created it.
3. Allow people to talk about failure by allowing them to avoid any attribution of blame.
4. Make capture continuous and a part of the job, not a post job after action review.

Blogging, podcasting, screencasting, etc. all lend themselves to these strategies. More to the point, this idea of story-telling and making those stories transparent is a big part of what I think we need in order to adequately support people in developing new literacies. They want and need to see how things work in action, in the context of their own work. Social media can facilitate the capture and sharing of this kind of knowledge. It can provide an ongoing cognitive apprenticeship framework that knowledge workers of all stripes can access.

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