Knowledge Management and Higher Education: A Critical Analysis

Citation

Barker, P. (2006), "Knowledge Management and Higher Education: A Critical Analysis", The Electronic Library, Vol. 24 No. 6, pp. 868-870. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470610714314

As human societies have developed, the importance of knowledge as a “value commodity” has increased significantly. Knowledge has always been a valuable asset – but no more so than in today's knowledge‐based societies. Its acquisition, control and management is therefore an extremely important issue – from both a personal and an organisational perspective. This book deals with knowledge management (KM) from the organisational perspective within higher education (HE). It uses various social science approaches in order to provide a critical analysis of KM in the area of HE – with an emphasis on both “unintended” consequences and future implications. There are 15 contributions to the book; these originate from a range of (mainly North American) authors. The material in the book is organised into five basic sections which deal with: the application of knowledge management in higher education; administrative issues; knowledge management in teaching and learning; case studies; and resources.

The first section of the book contains three chapters. The first of these discusses the economic and political implications of KM in HE and provides several useful theoretical constructs to enable readers to understand the use of knowledge management techniques and information technology (IT) within educational contexts. The following chapter goes on to describe some of the ways in which knowledge management techniques need to be adapted from a business orientation in order to best suit an academic implementation. In the third chapter, two important approaches to KM are presented; these involve the use of ontologies and taxonomies. In many ways, the contributions to this first part of the book provide an introduction to what follows in the remainder of the volume.

The three chapters that make up the second part of the book deal with the socio‐technical concerns of information management within HE. The main topics covered in this section relate to “technological bloat”, “fatigue syndrome” (the consequences of a project “stalling” mid‐stream) and the application of KM in support of institutional research. The opening chapter asserts that the use of knowledge management technology in academic organisations can lead to an increase in technocratic leadership (bloat). This view is supported by the findings of the following chapter which presents a case study that shows how technological bloat and academic technocracy can arise as a consequence of KM fatigue syndrome. The final chapter in this section illustrates how the incomplete use of KM (in the development of an “Integrated Information Warehouse”) can lead to a failure to create knowledge assets to support advanced organisational decision making.

In the third part of the book (Chapters VII and VIII), there is a change of focus. The two chapters that make up this section each deal with knowledge management issues related to teaching and learning. The first contribution outlines the nature of MIT's course management system – the Open Knowledge Initiative and its associated Open Courseware project (see: http://web.mit.edu/oki/index.html). It then describes a study framework for analysing higher education technologies and applies this to MIT's emerging courseware management system. The other contribution in this section discusses distributed learning objects and the use of an open knowledge management model in relation to an emerging market‐driven economy. This chapter presents a useful discussion of how learning objects are stored and classified for retrieval.

Undoubtedly, by far the largest section of the book is the fourth. This contains seven chapters. Each of the first six of these presents a case study (dealing with information management in higher education) while the seventh provides a series of discussion questions for these cases. The topics covered in the various case studies include: policy processes for technological change; enterprise system development in HE; the diffusion of technology in classroom instruction; the “wiring” of a university in response to competitive pressures; the challenges of complex IT projects within a university setting; and IT‐enabled organisational change interventions. This particular set of case studies was chosen both for their ability to fit within a KM framework and for their utility in describing the multitude of social forces at work within educational environments.

The final section of the book consists of a collection of three appendices. These provide details of various KM information sources, a selected bibliography and a glossary.

This is quite an interesting book that provides some valuable insights into the use of knowledge management in higher‐education organisations. However, as is reflected by the backgrounds of the various contributors, the focus of this book is primarily North American educational institutions. Nevertheless, having said this, it does not imply that the findings reported in the book are not applicable to other HE institutions elsewhere in the world.