Stephen Downes addresses a question I keep asking myself: So What is Knowledge Management Anyway? Regular readers of Downes won’t find too many surprises here, but the piece serves up a concise, non-technical and pointed overview.
A number of his arguments echo thoughts bouncing around in my multi-tasked-to-the-point-of-delirium brain as UBC plods forward with implementing our learning object network:
…a knowledge management system is not merely a content management system, it is also a communication system. That is to say, it allows people (employees, say, or students, or experts in a discipline) to exchange information, to comment on or otherwise evaluate this information, and to place this information into some context where it would be useful.
… When corporations, governments or educational enterprises think of knowledge management, they usually think of large, expensive and richly featured centralized storage systems. Such systems, though, are the antithesis of knowledge management. The true locus of knowledge management is not in the organization. It is in the person.
Quite right. But even if we shift the question from “how do we organize information?” to “how do we foster knowledge exchange?” we still have a problem to solve. Believe me, I’m positively cuckoo for the power of weblogs and decentralized networks of exchange — but practically I doubt it’s any easier to get a bunch of professors up and running with blogs and aggregators than it is to get them interfacing with an LO repository.
I know the tools will get better, and easier. And I know there are other technologies (wikis?) besides weblogs that might support these processes. But establishing any new approach involves new thinking, practises and skills for a lot of people across the institution, and that gets complicated very quickly.
