About Blogging.
Monday, April 14, 2003Knowledge 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.
[McGee's Musings]
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. School districts should honor teaching professionals with time in the day or at least during the week to reflect alone and with ones co-workers so that looking at the practice and student work is a meaningful ritual.
