Reflection and people central to developing knowledge
A quick report from the European Commission funded Mature project. I am in Vienna this week at a meeting of the project consortium. The project is researching how knowledge matures in organisations and aims to develop and test software tools to support both individual knowledge development and organisational learning.
One of the activities undertaken over the last year was a ‘representative study’ based on interviewing individuals from 125 companies in Europe and look at how knowledge was developed and shared in their enterprise. The results of the survey will be published in the near future on the project web site.
One of the most interesting findings is what processes people perceived as important for knowledge maturing within their organisation and how ell they though these processes were important. The two processes perceived as most important were ‘reflection’ and ‘building relationships’ between people. These were also the two processes seen as amongst the least supported.
This could be seen as offering a strong steer for the development of new software tools. mature is already testing the prototype of a ‘people funding’ tool, designed to make more transparent the skills, competences and interests of employees in an organisation. The issue of ‘reflection’ is more complex. e-Portfolio researchers have always emphasised the centrality of reflection to learning, yet it is hard to see concrete examples of how this can be supported. Your comments on this would be most welcome.
I have struggled on and off with the construct of ‘reflection’ in knowledge building by elementary through secondary school students. I agree with the need for new software tools for this. Current ‘social media’ tools accommodate connecting people – but, as the name implies, for ‘social’ purposes. We, I believe, want people to connect and engage in significant cognitive reflection and collaboration. Please read more on this at http://bit.ly/deepunderstanding I would be interested in further, and more detailed, discussion on this.
You might also wish to check out Knowledge Forum at http://www.knowledgeforum.com
In addition, there is new development occurring on Junto. See http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/04/17/junto-is-born/