My first encounters with KM

Previously to my PhD, I used to work with Collaborative Learning, emphasizing the constructive nature of knowledge and aiming at supporting learners on broadening their mental models while interacting. It wasn't something very far from these ideas that lead to my becoming interest in the KM field. If you think about it, KM is basically aimed at making people learn while doing their work, in an almost unintentional and, as Lave & Wenger put it, situated way.

My first readings about KM processes and theories comprehend the 2001 article of Gerhard Fischer and Jonathan Ostwald for the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal (Vol. 16, No. 1, January/February 2001), entitled "Knowledge Management - Problems, Promises, Realities, and Challenges". Such paper was for me very inspiring! Here is an interesting quote that mentions some of the connections between KM and the educational system:

Our KM perspective requires a cultural transformation in which all stakeholders must learn new relationships between practices and attitudes. (...) the traditional education paradigm is inappropriate for studying the types of open-ended and multidisciplinary problems that are most pressing to our society. These problems, which typically involve a combination of social and technological issues, requires a new paradigm of education and learning skills, including self-directed learning, active collaboration, and consideration of multiple perspectives. Problems of this nature do not have “right” answers, and the knowledge to understand and resolve them is changing rapidly, requiring an ongoing and evolutionary approach to learning.

From this as well as from related readings, I came up, with the help of my supervisors, to a system proposal for KM in learning settings. The system is called Help&Learn (H&L) and is based on a peer-to-peer network where students and teachers can interact, asking and answering questions, in extra-class activities. Here are some preliminary ideas on the system annotated in my personal summaries of the paper above:

• Companies, as well as schools, are becoming less hierarchic structured and more open to workers opinions and participation on decision-making processes. They require people who have developed certain abilities, such as collaboration and self-directed learning. There is an increasing need for professionals that can flexibly use knowledge and who are also capable of working cooperatively. The traditional educational model is not appropriate for this new challenge, but the use of information technology, supported by cognitive pedagogical theories, seems to be leading to better results.
• KM can be highly beneficial for education. In KM systems, it is necessary that the users create artifacts, externalizing their knowledge, in order to make it available for other users. This process of externalization is an important step for learning. Constructionist theories emphasize the importance for the learner to produce something concrete, which he can share with his peers. Sometimes, teaching others is the best way of learning something. In other words, externalizing the knowledge by means of a sharable artifact, the learner will perform a synthesis and will learn.
• H&L proposes a dynamic and open KM system in which knowledge is created in an ongoing collaborative process, integration happens at use time (instead of at design time) and the users are not organized in a hierarchical structure. Instead, all users are peers who collaborate in knowledge creation, integration and dissemination.
  In H&L, knowledge is constructed through a process of collaboration among the peers. This system provides an informal way of KM in which the users do not have to get busy with knowledge creation and representation.
• H&L has great potential for project-based courses. In these courses, students are gathered in groups and each group needs to work on a project, usually picked by the group itself. The learning process happens in the context of these projects. Each group has a tutor who guides them in the development of the project, which is inherently a collaborative process. In such context, a KM system is highly recommended to store the group’s knowledge and to help them in developing a sharing vocabulary and, ultimately, a shared understanding of the domain.