Learning and Knowledge Management

click for full size figure

I´d like to share some thoughts about the future of learning management (LM) and knowledge management (KM). I believe that we need a fundamental shift toward a more social, personalized, open, dynamic, emergent, and knowledge-pull model for LM and KM, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all, centralized, static, top-down, and knowledge-push models of traditional LM and KM initiatives.
As illustrated in the the figure above, future LM and KM models should revolve around three core components: networking&collaboration, knowledge creation, and intelligent search.

• Networking&Collaboration: LM and KM approaches need to recognise the social aspect of learning and knowledge and as a consequence place a strong emphasis on knowledge networking and community building to leverage, create, sustain, and share knowledge in a collaborative way, through participation, dialogue, discussion, observation, and imitation. Social software (that I would rather call Networking and Collaboration Services or Social Media) can help building communities and networks.
• Knowledge creation: LM and KM systems need to provide environments that support collaborative knowledge creation and effective capturing of quality and context-rich knowledge as it gets created. The collective intelligence ensures that knowledge is up-to- date and relevant. This collective intelligence is what is making e.g. Google, EBay, Amazon, YouTube, and Flickr so successful and popular today.
• Intelligent search: We need cross-media, federated, and social search engines that build on user recommendations, reviews, filtering, and rating to locate quality resources, services, communities, and experts. The search result should be modular content than can be remixed to generate personalized learning resources, lightweight services than can be mashed up to form adapted services, personal learning environments (PLEs) that can be aggregated to build a community, and small communities that can be networked to create interdisciplinary knowledge clusters.