Knowledge Management

Today in many circles the mention of knowledge management conjures up fears of complex IT systems (often equated with failure) or a new initiative (often associated with vague requirements). How do you develop a knowledge management program that incorporates the essence of organizational learning and knowledge sharing without new tools or systems? The Johnson Space Center has embarked on such a quest to define a program that leverages the wealth of knowledge of 50 years of human space flight not only for today's workforce but also for generations to come.

Today, in many circles the mention of knowledge management conjures up fears of complex IT systems (often equated with failure) or a new initiative (often associated with vague requirements). How do you develop a knowledge management program that incorporates the essence of organizational learning and knowledge sharing without new tools or systems? The Johnson Space Center has embarked on such a quest—to define a program that leverages the wealth of knowledge of 50 years of human space flight not only for today's workforce but also for generations to come.

With limited staff and funding resources, what documentation tool could be implemented quickly, rapidly deployed to a wide audience, would require little to no training, and yet be embraced enthusiastically? At Rice University, a wiki-like application was researched, tested, and successfully implemented across the campus in less than a year.

RavenDesk is a web application through which students share conceptual connections between courses. Students thus build a view of their own and their campus’s intellectual life by exposing the interrelationships between courses. An ELI edition for conference presentations will also be available. See http://www.patrickgmj.net/project/eli-ravendesk.

Many university faculty create their own websites or use a course management system to upload course materials for online instruction. Course content and files are mostly organized and presented in a linear structure and placed in a series of folders and subfolders. An alternative approach to navigate, organize, and sequence Web-based content is to use a computer generated mind map – an E-Map. With its unique storage and organizational capacity, E-Maps not only provide a user-friendly e-learning structure, but also can effectively manage knowledge in a much more efficient manner than using a linear approach to navigate and access Web-based content.

The purpose of this article is to examine how E-Maps can be used as a graphical interface for presenting and organizing Web-based course content and files online. Explored in this article is a brief overview of mind maps , mind mapping software, how using E-Maps as a graphic organizer can facilitate learning, and some instructional application examples of using E-Maps for Web-based instruction.

This article gives an overview on folksonomies, what they are and how people use them.

This research bulletin discusses the factors that drove Roosevelt University's decision to "co-source" the information technology (IT) help desk, the unique challenges raised by the use of contracted services as part of a technical support solution, and how this solution fits within the context of outsourcing in higher education. It includes a description of how the service addresses the needs of the three principal constituencies -- users, agents, and technicians -- as well as an overview of the accommodations that institutions might need to make in order to develop this type of support solution.