Harold Jarche blogged about the knowledge sharing paradox today. He defined this paradox as one where:
“….enterprise social tools can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it because knowledge is a very personal thing. Knowledge workers care about what they need to get work done, but do they care about the organizational knowledge base?”
He went on to suggest that the more someone in leadership attempts to control knowledge-sharing, the less knowledge gets shared.
“The only way to build useful organizational knowledge is by connecting it to individual knowledge-sharing…The responsibility for knowledge-sharing must remain with the individual, but the organization can collect, collate and redistribute what is shared…The organization’s role in knowledge-sharing then moves from being directive to facilitative.”
I think there are interesting parallels to classrooms…and educational organizations. My 30-Day Challenge question:
Day 28 – Can I create more sharing of student-generated knowledge or faculty-generated knowledge by working less at controlling it?
The Educause Learning Initiative released this month “7 Things You Should Know About Web Syndication.” It noted that:
“Web syndication applies the principles of discovery and distribution to the online environment, offering content producers and readers a flexible, powerful, and largely automated means of accessing and distributing content…Information coming from a wide variety of sources may broaden student learning horizons as it inspires discovery, curation, and sharing.”
Six years ago, I led a brown-bag discussion here at the Center for Teaching Excellence on Personal Learning Environments. Interesting to go back and see that this slide deck has been viewed over 3,600 times. In a micro way, it suggests how distributed learning has progressed…and how knowledge has been shared My point in this slidedeck was to use RSS to build an automated way to access and distribute content. Fast forward six years, and one can now build customized class websites with WordPress that allow for this automated means of accessing and distributing content. Last week in GRAD-602, we discussed content creation and curation…and we sometimes have a hard time separating the two. As Jeff Nugent noted in a conversation this morning, we have gone from “personal” learning environments to group learning environments.
The technology is easy…it is the practice that may be the harder nut to crack. As my colleague Enoch Hale noted in “We are all mutants,” we need to help “…faculty (like our students) imagine new possibilities.”
Part of that hard nut is developing a digital community for faculty that thrives and grows. We have attempted that in the past with Blackboard, Ning, Canvas, and blogs. All took off initially and then died within a few months. The time commitment and return on investment just was not there for most faculty… and perhaps we were trying to control it too hard. For some, though, a loosely formed community did grow – but ebbed in and out – within Twitter.
In our Office of Innovation, we are trying a new space – A Third Space – as a place to aggregate digital exhaust from any of us in the office. It is a form of web syndication…but is it community? Would a similar space within a “class” help students take ownership of their digital work…and would it have legs to last beyond the single semester?
I would be interested in your thoughts….
{Graphic: New Wave Docks … but “pair of docks” stolen directly from Harold…) 🙂 }
