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These proposals are all related to knowledge management—should they be merged?

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3 Answers

up vote 8 down vote

I don't think that education and knowledge management are necessarily the same thing. Knowledge management is a tiny-to-the-point-of-insignificance part of teaching, and most teaching topics would be offtopic on a knowledge management site, for example:

  • How should I modify reading instruction for a child with Childhood Apraxia of Speech?

  • How can I motivate my 3rd grade class to love learning despite the school's focus on rote learning and standardized testing?

  • What techniques can help me more effectively manage a very large (34 students) 4th grade classroom?

  • My school is currently standardized on Zane-Bloser -- a form of looped cursive which is very difficult for most students to master in the small amount of time we are allowed to spend on penmanship. How can I convince the administration to transition to a more practical cursive italic such as Getty-Dubay?

  • My district does not have any programs available for gifted education; how can I help a student who is way above the norm to learn without taking needed attention and resources away from children who is struggling?

  • Is there any evidence that "zero tolerance" policies that punish students who physically defend themselves the same as their aggressors really reduce violence in schools?

Reducing education to knowledge management is a lot like reducing computer science to word processor usage. As such, merging the various knowledge management sites with one another makes perfect sense, but we really need a proposal that is specifically for educators honing their craft.

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Yeah, well that's all very interesting but not in line with my question. I didn't ask about education proposals in general. I asked about the eLearning and Instructional Design proposal in particular, which doesn't seem to include topics on school systems or classroom management. – Huperniketes Jun 8 '11 at 2:54
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@Huberniketes I was responding to your inclusion of Pedagogy in that list. Pedagogy isn't about knowledge management, it's about teaching. I'm sorry that I was unclear. – HedgeMage Jun 8 '11 at 6:13
Thank you for the clarification and my sincerest apologies for the tone of my reply. No disrespect is meant. Pedagogy (teaching) in general is part of knowledge management in that the purpose of KM is retention and transference of knowledge. But in response to your points I read the questions voted as "on-topic" for the proposal and not just the proposal text, and I see you're correct that merging the Pedagogy with the other proposal isn't likely to be in the best interests of their respective communities. I've edited my question to remove Pedagogy and I thank you for pointing it out to me. – Huperniketes Jun 18 '11 at 1:26
@Huperniketes Thanks -- I changed my -1 to a +1 thanks to that change! – HedgeMage Jun 18 '11 at 4:11
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up vote 0 down vote

Merged as to serve what purpose? Standardise this infantile field? Maybe but at what cost? If we standardise (which is not necessarily a bad thing) then we agree to commit to certain protocols when managing (transmission, creation, modification, etc) knowledge which at this stage is still to young a field for that to happen. Perhaps we should compromise and merge aspects related to KM, like storage, search and extraction, which I believe has already started but I don't know a great deal about efforts on these so far.

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up vote 0 down vote

Wikis and wikipedia, CMS and/or libraries are in no way a complete KM/ KM system. They are just a part of it. Content management systems or e-learning systems or mailing lists are just another tool for KM. KM is in fact a broad umbrella term which certainly includes the given three 'terms'.

And it should be clearly understood that these three proposals are really valid proposals since they in themselves are broad subjects to be dealt with and require separate attentions to their way-of-work. For example, one needs to have a good amount of adept when dealing with Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress or any other CMS, and he/or she may not be a person of 'library & information science'.

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