TALE: Start Your Journey of Knowledge Engagement with A Possible Theme

Published in

TALE500

6 min readJan 13, 2023

Try something new

TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. TALE was launched as a new knowledge center for the Thematic Engagement project.

Thematic Engagement refers to the “Person — Theme” relationship and interaction.

I define two types of themes for the Thematic Engagement project and TALE. See the diagram below.

While Knowledge Engagement is about the interaction between a person and a knowledge theme, Cultural Engagement is about the interaction between a person and a cultural theme.

While Knowledge Engagement aims to produce Knowledge Innovation, Cultural Engagement aims to produce Cultural Innovation.

You can find more details about TALE from the following articles:

TALE: A New Knowledge Center — Jan 1, 2023
TALE: Find 100 Thematic Curation Projects — Jan 3, 2023
TALE: Find 100 People’s Life Stories and Creative Themes — Jan 6, 2023
TALE: Find 100 Novel Themes and their Communities — Jan 11, 2023
TALE: Discover 100 Possible Themes Together — Jan 12, 2023

TALE is your community. We want to encourage you to start your journey of knowledge engagement.

The journey starts with a knowledge theme.

What’s your favorite knowledge theme?

In order to accelerate knowledge innovation and cultural innovation, TALE will offer open-source service of thematic discovery.

You can find more details about “Possible Themes” in Discover 100 Possible Themes Together.

8 Possible Themes for You

Today we are going to share 8 possible themes with you. You can pick one and start your journey of knowledge engagement with it.

Or, you can discover your own possible themes.

#001 Horizontal Platform Strategy

Name: Horizontal Platform Strategy
Clue: How to grow a horizontal product successfully?
Type: knowledge theme

Contributor: Anthony Pierri

The theme of “Horizontal Platform Strategy” was born from a micro “collaborative project” (a conversation) between Oliver Ding and Anthony Pierri. You can find the story here. Or, you can find Anthony Pierri’s original post about horizontal products on Linkedin.

#002 Value Circle

Name: Value Circle
Clue: The Activity Circle and Professional Knowledge Economy
Type: knowledge theme

Contributor: Jessie Chuang

The theme of “Value Circle” was born from a micro “collaborative project” (a conversation) between Oliver Ding and Jessie Chuang. You can find the original conversation in Oliver Ding’s original post on Linkedin.

Later, Oliver Ding adopts the Activity Circle framework to reflect on the theme and “professional knowledge economy”.

#003 Guiding Questions

Name: Guiding Questions
Clue: A Best Practice for the Journey of Knowledge Engagement
Type: knowledge theme

Contributor: Bülent Duagi and Offbeat

The theme of “Guiding Questions” was inspired by Offbeat’s post about Learning and Development (L&D). : Bülent Duagi uses 6 guiding questions to discuss L&D strategy.

#004 Mindset, Good and Bad

Name: Mindset, Good and Bad
Clue: Why is it dangerous to maintain some mental tendencies?
Type: knowledge theme

Contributor: Stephen Beller

The theme of “Mindset, Good or Bad” was born from a collaborative project between Oliver Ding and Stephen Beller. They run a private creative thematic dialogue about the theme in Dec 2022.

#005 Collective Mindware

Name: Collective Mindware
Clue: The Curated Mind and Knowledge for Collaborative Projects
Type: knowledge theme

Contributor: KP Frahm

The theme of “Collective Mindware” was born from a conversation between Oliver Ding and KP Frahm on Twitter.

The term Mindware was initially coined by the Harvard cognitive development psychologist David Perkins in the 1995 book Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence. Later, the cognitive scientist Keith E. Stanovich adopted the term for his books and his model of cognitive architecture. According to Stanovich, “The knowledge, rules, procedures, and strategies that can be retrieved and used to transform decoupled representations have been referred to as ‘mindware’…The mindware available for use during cognitive simulation is, in part, the product of past learning experiences.” (2016, p.34)

KP Frahm used “Collective Mindware” to describe Product Field which is a tool for team collaboration.

Later, Oliver Ding connected his idea of “The Curated Mind” with “Collective Mindware”.

#006 Applied Knowledge Curation

Name: Applied Knowledge Curation
Clue: Turning physical books into digital newsletters and beyond
Type: knowledge theme

Contributor: Emanuel Martonca and Bülent Duagi

The term “Applied Knowledge Curation” was coined by Oliver Ding on July 13, 2022.

On Jan 13, 2023, Oliver saw Bülent Duagi’s comment on Emanuel Martonca’s post on Linkedin. He designed the above picture to highlight the theme of “Applied Knowledge Curation”.

#007 To Learn, or To Buy

Name: To Learn, or To Buy
Clue: The Future of Consulting
Type: knowledge theme

Contributor: Simone Cicero

The theme of “To Learn, or To Buy” was born from a micro conversation about the future of consulting between Simone Cicero and Oliver Ding on Jan 11, 2023.

It inspired Oliver Ding to apply the Anticipatory Activity System (AAS) framework to study the practice of Consulting.

#008 Taking Opportunity

Name: Taking Opportunity
Clue: Perceiving Environmental Changes for Personal Innovation
Type: knowledge theme

Contributor:Ulyana Ermolova

On Dec 11, 2022, Oliver Ding wrote a post titled Life Strategy: Taking Opportunities and Long-term Response.

On Jan 13, 2023, Ulyana Ermolova retweeted Oliver’s tweet about the post. It inspired Oliver to design the above picture in order to highlight the theme.

What should you do with these possible themes?

You can pick one theme from the above possible themes and work on something about it.

You can talk about it with your friends. You can write short posts about it on Linkedin. You can collect links about it and share them on Twitter.

You can write a book about it too.

Moreover, you can pick one tool from the Thematic Engagement toolkit and try it. For example:

Run a knowledge curation project about the theme. For example, I worked on a project about “Activity Theory” in 2020. You can pick a tool from the knowledge curation toolkit.
Reflect on your tacit knowledge about the theme with the Knowledge Discovery Canvas and write a reflection report.
Use the Career Theme Canvas to conduct a case study.
Pick four projects and use the Thematic Journey Map to reflect on the journey.

Some of the above themes are related to my research. I’d like to offer help and advice.

What is your primary knowledge theme?