Can blogs re-introduce KM to eLearning?

Since the beginning of KM, advocates have talked about the connection between KM and eLearning. However, this seems to be a dream largely unrealized as the connections have been more at the commentary level than the implementation level. One reason is political, as many knowledge management activities come from IT organizations, while most individual learning initiatives come from the HR organizations. In practice, these two functions are often as “siloed” as the business units they support. Another reason is technical, as past tools have not always made the true integration of eLearning with the core knowledge repositories an easy task. Courses are more likely to have knowledge repositories within the course system than linkages to the actual KM system used within the organization. Most existing connections are simple links between KM and learning within portals.

Several years back, during my Accenture tenure, we designed an internal eLearning course on knowledge management that tried to go beyond simple linkage and illustrate the desired connection between KM and learning. As part of this course we connected the eLearning modules with a treaded discussion in the firm’s Notes-based central knowledge management system. Participants were required to post their assignments in this treaded discussion forum that was open to the rest of the firm. For example, participants had to describe possible value propositions for KM within their existing clients. This could begin to generate a database of KM value propositions by industry and function that consultants could use back on the job. Participants were also required to comment on the assignments of at least two of their colleagues to encourage dialog. However, it took some significant heavy lifting by our technology experts to get this integration between the eLearning course and the KM system to work. This connection had some modest success but the approach was not re-used in other courses. However, many other courses, both workshops and eLearning, required participants to use the KM system to complete course requirements but they did not have any technical integration. This latter approach was much easier to implement and certainly provided value to the course and promoted subsequent use of KM.

Now, a new generation of collaboration tools opens up the possibility of greater true integration of KM and eLearning beyond simple linkage. For example, the LRN tool set built on the OpenACS architecture has both web log and RSS capabilities. This provides the platform for many creative instructional design options and has the potential to facilitate a stronger connection between KM and eLearning.

Comments

[Kathleen Gilroy]

We have been using weblogs as the "course management" system for our elearning programs this year and have had considerable success with them. We are getting much more discussion on the weblog than we had on our course discussions system (based on the ACS). I think the reason for this is that people get exposure on the weblog that they did not get on the email discussion list; therefore they are much more motivated to participate. We also have found that the weblog is better at capturing what is going on the leve of peer-to-peer than other tools we have used. In fact I think the distinction between elearning and km disappears when you re-frame them both as peer-to-peer learning and knowledge tools.

[Bill Ives]

Thanks for your comment and you raise excellent points. I am new to blogs and started this one as an experiment, along with another one of a very different topic. They appear to hold great promise for a number of functions and are certainly easy to use. It seems that blogs, with their extensive search functions, are designed for more exposure and distribution than dialog. While dialog is also enabled, the more public the web blog, the less likely that dialog will occur within the blog. In the case of my experiment, an unscientific sample of two by the same author, dialog has been generated but so far it has occurred more outside the blog than within it. Chat sessions, were dialog is the first priority and broad exposure, an available, but secondary function, because of the more limited search, still seems to get better dialog going within it. But then I could easily be wrong here and it may just be that people are more used to chat than blogs for dialog or I am not yet fully using the medium to its advantage in my blogs. In your examples, it seems using web blog technology for a very focused target audience around a specific task, completing a course, combines the best of both. You are driving up usage because of the exposure features of the blog yet doing it in a traditional discussion group setting which is designed to encourage dialog between group members on a common task. I also support the notion that KM and learning should be considered the same thing on many levels. I just apply the overly simple distinction that learning is what you do to prepare yourself for a task and KM is what you access while doing the task but both direct instruction and knowledge discovery should be able in both situations.