KM and the group revision assignment - Alavi's two points

Knowledge management
Alavi, Maryam, and Leidner, Dorothy E. “Knowledge Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Benefits.” Communications of the Association for Information Systems. Vol 1, article 7. February 1999.

From page 6:
Two major points emerge from this [definition of knowledge]:

1. Because knowledge is personalized, in order for one person’s knowledge to be useful to another individual, it must be communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.

2. Hoards of information are of little value: only that information which is actively processed in the mind of an individual through a process of reflection, enlightenment, and learning can be useful. Knowledge management, then, refers to a systemic and organizationally specified process for acquiring, organizing and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.

Questions to address:
Point 1:
Does this mean that group revision in a classroom isn’t likely to involve the conveyance of knowledge?
Undergrads reviewing each other’s work might not be looking at information which has been “communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.” I think we can logically posit more than one reason for this assertion:
- The classroom writing assignment, whatever it is, likely has a college instructor as the stated audience. If that’s the case, then the readers are not the intended audience: they lack the education and the experience.
- My own experience with such assignments indicates that they are frequently directed toward someone other than the instructor (a local business owner, a professor within another discipline, or a fictional supervisor or future employer). Again, whether real or imagined, the intended audience is someone other than the student readers; thus, the group work might not qualify as knowledge work if they are incapable of interpreting, or providing their own intellectual framework, for the information presented by the author.
- The student author might not have sufficient experience within the discipline in order to understand the information presented within the paper as “knowledge.”

These claims are dependent upon a number of assumptions which I’ll try to lay out. For one, they assume that students are still novices concerning their chosen field. While likely to be true, it’s only fair to point out that some non-traditional students include those who have experience in their field and who are returning in order to obtain a diploma or certification. A second assumption is that there is no other communication taking place: that, in fact, the information (non-contextualized data, thus, not knowledge) contained within the writing assignment in question is the only information or data being exchanged. However, anyone who has taught such a class knows that this cannot be the case. Any group of students will naturally share knowledge simply in exchanging papers: a look, a comment, question, or statement undoubtedly means that there is transfer of knowledge. In short, the writing assignments and their subject matter are not the only possible conveyances of knowledge.

A third assumption, and this one is pretty serious with regard to TC service courses, is that groups of students within a single class are likely to be made up of different majors. A TC service course of 20 students is likely to have at least 10 or a dozen majors represented by those students, meaning that a group of two or more students will mostly likely represent more than a single field of study. Furthermore, I have course descriptions from 82 different schools offering TC service courses. Of those course descriptions, 23% contain the word “field” or “discipline” used to indicate that more than one major is serviced by this course, and that the work within the course may well be (some state it outright) tailored to each student’s field of study. Thus, we have added support for the claim that students in separate majors participating in group revision may not be engaging in the sharing of knowledge due to disparate levels of experience within those separate fields.

Point 2 –

Alavi’s second description does seem to indicate that knowledge management takes place within the context of classrooms, however stridently I may seem to object above in the specific case of group revision projects. Classrooms, and in particular writing classrooms, are indeed set up to enable “systemic and organizationally specified process[es] for acquiring, organizing, and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.”

The point of group revision exercises, and I’ll know more about what others think once I get my IRB paperwork finished, seems to be to expose writers to the feedback of others, and to expose readers to the approach used by other writers. The process of feedback, regardless of what form it takes, certainly seems to be both “systemic” and “organizationally specified” (particularly if the instructor has gone to the trouble of using assignment descriptions, prompts, peer review prompts and instructions, and assigned peer reviewers tasks to complete during the peer review process. Thus, the system of knowledge management is at least IN PLACE in the TC service course classroom, whether it’s in use or not or whether knowledge is exchanged.

So, given Alavi’s two points and given my own critique, I might wind up arguing that the system necessary to support knowledge management exists in the TC service course; however, the participants might not be capable of carrying it out. Regardless, I think knowledge management is turning out to be a convenient way of categorizing and comparing group revision in the workplace and group revision in the classroom.