Synapsys Blog - Knowledge Management

Social networking tools

Social networking tools are a rapidly growing area of technological development. This growth is due mainly, in our view, to the growing realisation within both the corporate and educational sectors that:
-Managing knowledge requires more than documenting it
-The use that knowledge can be put to depends largely on the ability of people to contextualise it within their organisation, and that requires engagement and communication.

What began as software for dating sites and the like is growing into a range of applications from event organising, to academic networks to marketing applications. One that is starting to gain traction is Sossoon. This tool is gaining traction as a forum for academics to share information and ideas globally, and is also being used to network those involved in the purchasing industry , and professes to have a wider range of commercial applications. It will be interesting to see how this new type of offering shakes down over time. Solutions which can be demonstrated to have application to a wide of range of contexts are more likely to succeed, and in that regard Sossoon may be worth keeping an eye on.

Distance Instruction in Education

If you’re an academic at one institution and are thinking about setting up a course using Instructional Television, then this article by Saul Carliner may be just what you are looking for. Saul was contracted to teach a course at Crookston Minnesota while based in St Paul’s Minnesota 350km away. He discovered there were a number of issues to consider that would not have been present if he had been delivering even an online course from his own institution.

Said Saul: “To help instructors identify the types of issues they might face when teaching by instructional television, this article identifies 10 general issues in managing an instructional television course. These issues were identified by the author when preparing to teach his first instructional television course at the University of Minnesota (while based on a campus 350 miles away).“

Some of the issues he points out include the actual hardware technology: “Because of the distance between instructors and students, and because of the potential for equipment failures when transmitting information, administration always presents a challenge to distance instructors.”

Saul says that the “differences in academic cultures also result in differences in approaches to academics and in expectations among students”. There is general acceptance of the institution’s requirements about attendance and submission of assignments on time etc. However this changes when a learner is based on another campus.

“For example, students in some institutions regularly attend class without the instructor requiring attendance. In others, students rarely attend without the requirement. Similarly, in some institutions, students regularly turn in late work and professors regularly accept it. In others, professors won't accept it.

“Generally, the prevailing academic culture in the home institution guides the educator in classroom management. But the culture at the home institution might significantly vary from that in other institutions; and those other cultures guide students in their work.”

The article can be read at: Saul Carliner's Web site.

Distributed classification systems: making sense of information

One of the big dilemmas in managing access to knowledge is how to classify it in a way that is meaningful to users. Traditional approaches usually involve developing frameworks of topics or themes that are currently recognised as 'appropriate' for the group. Problems inherent in this approach include:
- A lot of information is not easily classified into a neat box.
- What seemed like a logical framework at the time of creation rapidly loses currency
- People don't necessarily understand such frameworks in the same way, they put different meanings to the same words. This blog entry explores the use of distributed classification systems (DCSs). Essentailly, users classify information in whatever way that makes sense to them using tags. The framework of links between artefacts grows out of the group of users and how they interpret those artefacts......

The merging of KM and LM

Part of Synapsys' core philosophy is that we'll see in the next 10 to 15 years a coming together of Knowledge Management and Learning/training initiatives. There are a number of pressures driving this, many stem from the need to see actual, tangible changes in behaviour as a result of either type of initiative.

It's no longer adequate to measure how many courses are run, how many eLearning pages are clicked... What matters is how people change what they are doing as a result of the learning. Similarly, developing a knowledge repository on the intranet is meaningless if people don't know how to access the information, don't trust it, or it's not perceived as relevant to their jobs.

This focus on seeing change happen leads to a focus on questions such as:
How can we make information and learning relevant to people's work?
How can we serve it up when they need?
How can we contextualise it to suit the work at hand?

The answers to these questions lie in the integration of KM and LM initiatives - Synapsys's core business. These sentiments are starting to be echoed in the broader eLearnign community. See for example this article from Brandon Hall:
http://www.brandonhall.com/public/whitepapers/lmkm/

Are You Managing Knowledge Effectively?

This is a great overview of a discipline in transition by Gartner analyst Laurie M. Orlov. It cuts through the confusion to illuminate the key questions organisations should be asking themselves about knowledge management endeavours:

"...when they peer into the knowledge management abyss, IT execs may see an initiative that is long on evangelical fervor — but short on specifics that translate into a project plan. Rather than attempting to saturate the organization with knowledge management lingo and practice, firms should ask themselves these six questions that focus their efforts on solving a specific business problem."

More here...

'Knowledge Sharing' Reality Check

This short article makes the very important point that 'knowledge sharing' as an explicit or designed activity isn't likely to be nearly as successful as simply encouraging people to talk to each other when they have problems.

Read more....

Fostering a Culture of Knowledge Sharing

This article offers a great reminder that putting tools and processes in place to manage knowledge flow is only half the battle. Fostering a culture that values knowledge and encourages sharing and resourcefulness is key:

"Sharing knowledge takes effort and skill, even between two people talking face-to-face. You don't create that by writing stuff down; you create it by creating robust relationships that give people the confidence to ask questions and learn from each other, and by encouraging the disciplines of asking questions without wasting people's time, and of answering questions with clarity and power, of telling vivid stories within a shared value system. These are the things that matter, the things businesses need to be good at."

More here...

Emergent Learning

It's always interesting when someone comes up with a new name for an existing phenomenon. In this case, the term 'emergent learning' has been coined to describe the bottoms-up, inter-connected approaches to learning that we're beginning to recognise in a lot of organisations. (Jay Cross, the author, even suggests that we replace the term 'e-learning' with emergent learning). But regardless of what we call it, the great news is that these grassroots learning activities no longer have to hide in the dark.

"Learning has become a core business process. Emergent learning enables us to push beyond the confines of e-learning to explore combinations with informal learning, storytelling, social network analysis, appreciative inquiry, workflow learning, conversation, contextual collaboration, organic KM, simulation, dynamic portals, expert location and blogs."

More at: http://www.internettime.com/blog/archives/001324.html

Project Management Blogs

This is an interesting piece about using blogs for project management in a potentially transparent way. Does it make sense to allow project teams to publish internally about how projects are going? Is this type of openness liable to make everyone more productive? It would definitely be an interesting experiment...

More at: http://www.cio.com/archive/051504/work.html

Storytelling at Work

There has been a lot of buzz lately around the idea of storytelling in the workplace. This great new resource covers not only why to use story, but how to use story, as well:

http://www.storyatwork.com

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

KM and Training Presentation

This is a presentation we gave on Thursday Feb 19, 2004 as part of our eLearning Solutions series. This presentation addressed the evolution of knowledge management and training, as well as the need for one overall strategy for the two of them.

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