ALT-C 2006

Phew! It's been a long time since I've posted, but I'm not gone yet.

Much of this month will be spent preparing for ALT-C 2006 in Edinburgh. I'll be contributing to the CARET Symposium on "Next Generation Repositories", which reports our research findings from the Knowledge Resource Network Project, funded by the Cambridge-MIT Institute.

For the past few weeks, I've been tasked with writing up management reports on findings and outcomes from the project. Looking through our list of common datasets, I'm proud to say that we've accumulated a substantial body of qualitative data,  giving in-depth insights into academics' perceptions of the main issues surrounding sharing and exchange of learning materials in HE. Thanks to the efforts of my colleagues Matt Riddle and Lee Wilson, much of this material has already been coded and analysed.

Lee's an anthropologist, so he has a distinctive and critical perception on how academics conceptualise, create, and use knowledge. His research confirms that what counts as "knowledge" in a higher education institution often has a great deal to do with power and ownership. Crucially, Cambridge University has a very liberal IP policy, granting very generous rights to academic staff over the materials, tools, and know-how they create in the course of their employment. Academic staff at Cambridge, and similar institutions, tend to resist what they perceive as "creeping corporatisation" -- notably including the introduction of Knowledge Management systems and approaches.

This has important implications for staff involved in IT management, change management, and new technologies in education, because academic staff may be very, very wary of LMSs and VLEs -- let alone institutional repositories! If a University places a premium on individual knowledge, how does it deal with collective knowledge -- and modern opportunities to capture this?

This article by James Cornford ("The Virtual University is (paradoxically) the University Made Concrete") highlights these issues. James's view is pretty pessimistic (or realistic, depending on your point of view):

At the same time, those of us who work in learning technology are becoming more sceptical of the techno-utopianism proferred by the likes of Howard Rheingold.  How can learning technologies remain in the "change agent" camp, without joining the corporate avengers? Can "enterprise" learning systems remain distinct from corporate-style knowledge management? How do we meet the needs of academic staff working in diverse disciplines with their own cultures and attitudes towards knowledge management? Controlled sharing, as exemplified by the Creative Commons approach, seems the best answer, but the existence of a potential solution does can't, in itself, guarantee conversion. In this climate, I believe we need more than ever to emphasise systems and services that empower the invididual.