Synapsys Blog - April 2004

eLearning is Not Knowledge Management

This is great, a four-year old piece by Verna Allee that foreshadows all of the hot thinking right now, particularly around social networks and emergent learning. Specifically, she talks about what eLearning providers need to understand in order to create real intellectual capital:

"For elearning providers to really support knowledge management, they would expand their focus to learning communities and link to the real-time knowledge object repositories that people use in their daily work. A more complete knowledge focus would mean having the capacity to:

- Connect people to people in ways that build learning communities

- Support learning communities in creating knowledge objects

- Connect to those knowledge objects in elearning modules

- Create expertise and learning profiles of the community..."

We had the pleasure of seeing Verna speak at a SmartNet event here in Christchurch recently -- great, high-level strategic thinking.

More here:
http://www.linezine.com/2.1/features/vaenkm.htm

Supporting Enterprise Knowledge Management with Weblogs

This presentation was presented at the Computers in Libraries 2004 conference as a roadmap for how to use weblogs (blogs) like this one as knowledge management tools.

"...the benefits of using weblogs for individual knowledge creation as opposed to using larger KM solutions selected from the top down, and the implications for IT of an information ecology with a diverse set of people using different technologies for publishing data in a distributed manner all over the intranet."

More at:

http://urlgreyhot.com/drupal/cil2004

Scalability and Sociability in Online Learning Environments

This is an interesting approach to learning theory, mapping different learning theories to different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (a fancy approach to categorising different types of learning, i.e. knowledge, comprehension, application, synthesis, etc.). So behaviourist approaches might work really well at certain levels, for instance, but social approaches are a must at the higher levels.

"Behaviorism, cognitivism, and social constructivism present significantly differing views of the educational universe. And though persuasive arguments are made that integrity of character requires an educator to adhere permanently to one view or another, I believe an individual's choice of a learning theoretic view of the world must always be as transient as it is pragmatic."

So, really, blended learning must also be about blending learning theories, as well.

More here:

http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/archives/000527.html

The Future of Work

Comparing the evolution of human society to the evolution of the workplace, author Tom Malone suggests that lower communication costs are changing the face of the modern workplace:

"Near the end of the 20th century, it became possible for the first time to exchange the detailed kind of information necessary to coordinate a business on a very large scale even as lots of individuals made decisions for themselves. When communications costs fall it becomes possible for vastly more people to be well-enough informed to make decisions instead of just following orders from their uniquely well-informed superiors."

More at: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,611068,00.html