Talk:Looking for Case Studies on KM

See the original thread of this E-Discussion on D-Groups

Pat Hall, 2009/10/09

Hi everybody,

in a couple of weeks I start teaching a masters level course on Knowledge Management in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Kathmandu University in Nepal. I am following the book by Awad and Ghaziri which is available in a cheap South Asian Edition, but want to enrich this material in several ways, with further reading of papers in KM, with reflections upon education, but also with real examples, case studies. I have a number of case studies and examples from Software Engineering, but would also like to give my students some cases in KM4Dev.

I have looked at the KM4dev website and could not find anything suitable. Could anybody recommend to me case studies that I could download and use?

Jaap Pels, 2009/10/09

Pat,

KM in education is wide. Can jou be more desriptive. There is a KM4Dev journal.

Daan Boom, 2009/10/10

Dear Pat, you may consider stopping by at icimod library in Kathmandu . We have some background on KM for your use.

Reza Salim, 2009/10/10

Dear Pat

Can see our cases in Bangladesh available at- http://www.amadergramonline.net????????????

Noha Abed, 2009/10/10

I think you can try: if only we knew what we know, this book is full with a number of case studies very organized I use it in my KM workshops

IDSC Egypt

Pat Hall, 2009/10/10

Studying KM as part of cs discipline will be less focused on social scienes. May suggest you to consult knowledge management issue of the journal information research as well as information management part of joint acm/ieee recommendation on cs courses.

Sarah Cummings, 2009/10/10

Hi Pat and everyone

I would like to point you in the direction of the inventory that Ewen Le Borgne and I have been building as part of a record of KM in organisations

We have posted the link to the inventory to KM4Dev before now but have made a change since we first did this. We have now put a Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa) licence on it, not to protect it - it is there to be used - but to try to get some attribution which I think is fair enough. (If anyone disagrees with this, just let me know because I'm not sure if this is the right approach either...)

In addition to this, if you can get access to the *KM4D Journal* - and as a member of this community are eligible for a free subscription - the first issue (May 2009) was on km in development organisations.

Pat Hall, 2009/10/10

Thanks to Manuel Rincon, Sarah Cummings, Atanu Garai, Noha Abed, Reza Salim, Daan Boom, Jaap Pels (in reverse date order) for some fantastically helpful guidance.

It is clear that I should have looked at the KM4Dev Journal as suggested by Jaap, and when I followed up an article in Sarah's list by Daan I was forced to register with KM4Dev Journal since the article had moved. A happy ending, for KM4Dev is well worth having registered with, and the article by Daan will be good to use. Reza has pointed me to the Amader Gram project in Bangladesh which is itslf a large case study, Noha has pointed me to a book that I had heard of but not read (must buy it), while Manuel has sent me details about two useful books crammed with case studies. So now I have more than enough! Thanks everybody.

Jaap and Atuna,teaching KM in a CS department is going to be a challenge, but fun. I will have to persuade students that software is developed by people for people, so understanding something about social phenomena is important. KM will force the students to confront what knowledge is, from the explicit representations they are familiar with to tacit knowledge they may never have heard of. I expect (hope) that they will feel challenged by the impossibility of externalising all of tacit knowledge, and hence the need for skill inventories and similar. Looking at types of knowledge and Bloom's taxonomy will, I hope, lead them to reflect upon the educational systems they have learnt through. And so on.

Pat Hall, 2009/10/10

Dear Daan,

I am looking for stories of organisations who have undertaken the creation of a knowledge management system, and I guess one could look at ICIMOD in that light. I know Beatrice Murray well, Beatrice's son Sathrun and my son Rowan are good friends, so will stop by your library and seek help from her if I need it.

Would you consider doing a guest lecture on the course if I arranged for all the students to turn up at ICIMOD one Monday morning? That would be much better than them reading a case study.

Pat Hall, 2009/10/10

sorry, that last one was really only meant for Daan, changing mailers always fools me by changing what "reply" means.

George de Gooijer, 2009/10/11

Hej Pat,

Mistakes can lead to great things, among them are the Tarte Tatin and penicilin.

I read your call for a lecture, and wanted to share with you some things we've been doing in Benin.

The problem of lectures is that you may hope for 7 minutes of attention, after that you start losing the people. Fast.

We've been working since 2005 with the University of Abomey Calavi in Benin, developing 'competence based learning' : education based on know how, rather than just knowledge. We had quite a positive response from the teachers (old and young ones). We have been training them in methods that focus on various types of problem-based learning.

In this training of teachers we try to use whatever real problem we have at hand in the group to work with, thus showing the various options for teaching/education. We had for instance the question: how to evaluate the participants of this particular training? And we used that as an assignment for 'evaluating competence based learning'. Another example: we put them in small groups to do assignments for 3 days, and than ask them to analyse 'working in small groups' by looking at their own group, using a list of aspects provided by us.

And it struck me is that you may do the same thing:

Rather than trying to keep your groups attention with a lecture you could put your students to work on the knowledge management as it is taking place around them, in the system that they are part of. Design an assignment where working groups have to work on this system, analyzing it, describing it using the publications mentioned by you and others, and maybe in a further stage suggesting alterations and improvements. Put them to work and let them discover their own questions. And make them feel how KM would become exactly that: Management of Knowledge

Your job in such a situation is to carefully develop the assignment, ensure some coaching in the middle, and provide expert input to answer questions in meetings further in the process. These meetings will not be lectures but dialogues on the subjects: the students attending have been playing/struggling with the concepts, applying it on their own environment, and are now looking for detailed answers.

In a way this choice of approach is also linked to the topic itself: knowledge management, and in particular the transfer of knowledge. Is a lecture / powerpoint / case-examples the way to go, or should we seek 'experience based' transfer? Obviously I would go for the second, but maybe you have good reasons to work differently.

Sorry for brainstorming away. It's Sunday morning and raining here in Uppsala, and I could not stop myself.

Peter J. Bury, 2009/10/11

George a fab Sunday morning contribution! Out of the heart and so true! Thanks for that, KM4dev is a great community, even on Sunday morning ;-)

Helen Gillman, 2009/10/11

Dear George

I am very interested in what you are doing in Benin and what have been the results. We are about to start a process in East Africa, working with staff of rural development projects that sounds somewhat similar to your approach. The underpinning idea, as you say, is to encourage them to work with knowledge management as it happens around them - in the system they are working in. In this way, we hope to better understand KM as a process totally integrated in project management. We will also be taking a "know-how" approach, whereby we will learn by doing, supported by coaching and mentoring. The idea is to follow up with on-demand traiing in KM approaches and tools once we fully understand how they fit in with and can be usefully applied in project management and implementation. We have found that introducing the tools first only leads to confusion and the impression that KM is an add-on. We will be documenting all of this - so eventuially it will be a case study in itself.

IFAD

Laxmi Pant, 2009/10/11

Dear George and others,

Very interesting approach to teaching and learning from what is going on around.

One thing that bothers me is the conceptual difference between 'competence-based learning' and 'learning-based competence'.

I would be interested to learn more about this issue.

George de Gooijer, 2009/10/11

Hej Helen,

The interesting question that will keep coming up is: what is my role? In the case of the teachers in Benin it was the new role of 'coach' that created the shift (in addition to their existing roles of 'expert' and 'evaluator'). The new role created changes in all three roles. The 'status' of 'he who knows everything and decides over right and wrong' is replaced by something new.

And by the way: as this shift is also linked with power, there is also a link with corruption. Unfortunately that is still a major problem, also at universities.

I'm sure that in your projects similar shifts will take place.

You may know that you have published a very interesting document at IFAD not so long ago called 'Coping with Complexity' (by Walter Hupert), that in a way makes the case for shifting from 'topic-expert' to 'expert in managing complexity', and making the case for the wide communicative competence required from the agricultural students of the University in Benin. (If you didn't know, that would be very interesting too ;-) )