Professional Development and Team Building are activities which, when done properly, can be quite enjoyable! The staff of York’s KM Unit recently participated in their third annual KM Summit. Objectives of the Summit are: fun, exploring theoretical and operational challenges for KM, fun, acknowledging the contributions of summer student staff, did I mention fun? We’re nothing if not a work hard/play hard group. On August 19, the KM staff took a half day trip to the Toronto Islands. The professional task for the day was brainstorming a better term than ‘social innovation’ to define the range of impacts that are enabled by KM. And what better venue to get the creative juices flowing than Centre Island in Toronto, where lunch on a patio overlooking the harbourfront, a walk through the Far Enough Zoo (or is it Fair Enough Zoo?), a necessary stop for ice-cream and an addition to David’s pen collection were the activities of the afternoon. Of course, we failed to realize we would be the only group of adults who would not be pushing strollers or supervising grade school campers. Still, it beat a February Summit at the Toronto Islands!
Some lessons from the day:
– A Summit which lacks competitive physical activity (Summit I – golf; Summit II – bowling) was a welcome change
– An iPod Touch serves as an excellent dictionary/thesaurus and diversion (on occassion) from professional development tasks
– The Island Ferry may wish to consider a BYO Lifejacket policy for the peak season. Just an observation.
– What is the difference between Smoked Meat and Corned Beef?
– Social Innovation is a challenging term to deconstruct
– The KM Summit IV may launch into a formal debate on poetry and its movement into mainstream literature
– Oddly, a split rail fence can keep a 500-lb hog and a 400 lb sow, who clearly want to be together, apart
– While we have advanced our thinking and understanding of KM, we need to maintain clear messages about what is KM, who we are, what we do, and why we feel this is important, and,
– This is an amazing team of students and professionals who are passionate about their work and who enjoy working together as a team
