Jim McGee: Knowledge management and weblogs
Knowledge management has been premised on the notion that the knowledge to be managed already exists and simply needs to be collected and organized to obtain the promised benefits.
One reason that so many of us find weblogs exciting in the realm of knowledge management is that weblogs reveal that the most important knowledge needs to be created before it can be collected and organized.
This is similar to the argument about the important split between tacit and explicit knowledge but much simpler. There is a category of knowledge that lies between explicit and tacit–what a colleague of mine, Jeanie Egmon, labels as “implicit.” This is knowledge that is actually fairly simple to write down once you decide that it’s worth doing so and once you have tools that make it easy to do so. It’s the knowledge of context and the whys behind the whats. It’s the knowledge that’s obvious at the time and on site, but mysterious even to its creators six months and six hundred miles later.
In the knowledge economy that we all live in, even if we keep trying to stay comfortably ensconced in the industrial economy that used to make so much sense, we need to reflect on and learn from experience on a daily basis in order to maintain any sort of edge. That reflection and learning depends on having high quality raw material to work with. That’s what weblogs provide.
It is called Praxis, which deals with the construction of knowledge in the here and now. That cyclical endeavor of making sense of our endeavors in light of new insights and information. It is lifelong learning in the concrete. If anything, this is the stuff that we need to be passing on to our students. We need to model this behavior. As a faculty, we need to practice this behavior as a group. If a faculty is not about focusing on practice and refining it, then there is no praxis on an organizational level, and most likely lacking at the classroom level. That is why I think that weblogs may be one tool to expose our practice.
A good part of the potential benefits of personal Webpublishing lies in the somewhat self-referential loop that is supported by this emerging practice.
The number one readers of my published items is me, myself, and I.
Of course, this is an exaggeration, but it points to the immediate benefit that a continued collection and publication of experiential “raw material”holds for the author. Loads of it would normally slip out of consciousness and memory in a matter of hours or days.
I wouldn’t say that the mere collection of this material already ensures reflection, elaboration, and deep, personal learning. But sifting through my self-created content becomes and increasingly important activity within my own learning projects.
For a last few days I kept thinking about another parallel – weblogs and action research. I participate in AREOL distance course on action research (actually I don’t do it properly as it is not visible in my weblog, but I hope to write about it later :)
In my interpretation action research is about regular and well-thought reflection on your practice. Looking at examples of reflective activities I that see many of them are about note-taking, diaries, debriefing, reviewing… So close to my blogging experiences…
Tags: action research, blogsArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/04/16.html#a549; comments are here.
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