Education Research in the Knowledge Society: Key Trends in Europe and North America
Useful and interesting report looking at trends worldwide in the development of research strategies in online learning and related subjects worldwide. Worth noting is the author's characterization of the very different systems employed in the different countries: the establishment of a national centre in the university system (U.S.), the establishment of a government research agency (France, Germany), and a decentralized pluralist system with no focal point (U.K., Sweden, Canada). More...

Collaboration First, Then Knowledge Management
This item has been picked up by a number of writers and seems to be worth sharing. It makes me think of a common criticism of knowledge management systems, that they are a solution in search of a problem. After all, if people simply call up a friend or fire off a fax, how does a knowledge management system helps. More...

Biases and Heuristics in Judgment and Decision Making: The Dark Side of Tacit Knowledge
Knowledge management theorists are engaged in the goal of 'extracting' tacit knowledge from people's minds, making it explicit in a knowledge base. Forget about whether or not this can be done: suppose it can. More...

The Knowledge Tree
Rod sent me this link to the newsest edition of The Knowledge Tree. My flight leaves shortly, there's no neat table of contents, and so I can't really assess it. But according to the announcement it contains "voice technologies, Vygotskian learning for creativity, knowledge management for e-business improvement, employability skills, collaborative community partnerships, digital 'multiliteracies', regional health service transformation, RTO sustainability, games using mobiles - GUMS for 15-19 year olds, ROI from simulation training, change management, and stories of innovative research and good practice in corporate and public sector flexible learning." Yeah. More...

The MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab Launch the Knowledge Futures Group
MIT Press, 2018/09/26
While I'm sure the people at the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) are supportive of any initiative to get research into the public sphere, I'm sure they would be surprisaed to learn that MIT's new Knowledge Futures Group (KFG)  initiative is "a first-of-its kind collaboration between a leading publisher and a world-class academic lab to transform how research information is created and shared." Maybe MIT means "first in the US" or perhaps "first at MIT. More...

Applying diSessa’s Knowledge in Pieces Framework to Understanding the Notional Machine
Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Research Blog, 2018/09/14
A few days ago I discussed the idea that you don't know something unless you have a conceptual understanding of it. This post caught my eye because it captures in some important ways the idea of knowledge as recognition and the role of relevant similarity. More...

Creating and Capturing New Knowledge
What is it about a community that causes it to not only produce, but also transfer, knowledge? It is certain that a community produces artifacts, codifications of the knowledge it creates – look at any academic society and the first evidence of its work is the set of journal articles and other publications it produced. More...

Building a body of knowledge work
Jim McGee, McGee's Musings, 2018/09/07
This is a bit of slice-of-life I guess, but I enjoyed the account of learning by doing (case studies). This is something I've discovered over time as well: "If I was to eventually create a case study that would work in the classroom or extend our understanding of this issue, I needed to get my thinking out of my head and available for inspection, by myself first and foremost." It aids in the whole process of pattern recognition that is crucil to knowledge creation. And of course there's a whole discipline devoted to this. More...

Knowledge Communities in Japan: A Case Study
Via elearningpost comes this case study of the building of knowledge communities in Japan. The major finding seems to be that the building of nickname based informal communication systems can exist side-by-side with more formal face-to-face communities. More...

Learning to do Social Science Research in the Knowledge Economy: A Manifesto
Gosh, I love papers with the word 'manifesto' in the title. And while the topic of this tract diverges a bit from the usual e-learning fare, it is a nice counterpoint to Jay Cross's comments on edubabble and also some of the discussions I have had here about research methodology in public policy. More...