The Invisible College: Insights about KM from Academic Blogs

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The Invisible College Insights about KM from
Academic Blogs

• Susan Dobscha, Ph.D.
• Associate Professor of Marketing
• Bentley College

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Outline

• Brief Discussion of Blogs
• The Life of the Academic Scholar
• The Invisible College
• How Invisible Colleges Can Benefit from Blogs
• Possible Uses
• Why havent they been adopted more quickly?

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Why are blogs so popular?

• Ease of upstart and usage
• No need for html (at first)
• Interface is provided free by server provide
• Provides opportunity for commentaries through
  comments sections
• Means to archive and track knowledge
• Way for disconnected colleagues to create
  connected communities
• Dont need to be a blogger to read and
  communicate with colleagues

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Blog Communities

• Communities created around a central purpose or
  responsibility
• MediaMatters
• Treonauts
• Smaller spheres within the blogosphere

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The Life of the Academic Scholar

• to talk in public, to think in solitude, to read
  and to hear, to inquire and to answer inquiries,
  that is the business of a scholar. (Samuel
  Johnson)
• Research Teaching Service
• Focus here is on Research Activities

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What Scholars Do

• Gather together existing knowledge
• Analyze this knowledge
• Create new knowledge
• Requires a deep understanding of a particular
  sub-topic of a field

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How We Do Research

• Formal Training
• Conference Attendance
• Read works of peers
• Informally
• Formally
• Create informal groups with people of similar
  interests
• Invisible College

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The Origins of the Invisible College

• Robert Boyle
• Colleagues at Oxford attempting to refute
  Aristotles element indivisibility hypothesis
  (1640s)
• Pre-dated important associations such as Royal
  Academy of London in 1662
• Underground society because of radical nature of
  such ideas
• Belief that the Freemasons emerged from this
  invisible college

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The Invisible College

• Price (1963)
• co-opted term to describe the forty or fifty
  people in the entire world who can understand
  what is being said or written in any given
  specialty
• Means to facilitate knowledge
• Creation
• Transfer
• Communication
• Community

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How Academic Blogs Could Facilitate Internal
Knowledge Management

• Create a virtual community around a particular
  topic or research stream
• Archive knowledge created
• Allow for (mostly) open access to
  information/data
• Provide forums for informal conversations around
  idea
• Exchange practitioner information related to
  topic
• Avoid space issues associated with user groups
• (i.e. Yahoo!Groups)

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Why Arent Invisible College Blogs More Prevalent?

• Fear of idea stealing?
• Blogs are still maintained by one or a few people
  so there is still a gatekeeping issue
• Linear thinking
• And reversed chronologically
• Communities shaped like a wagonwheel not a network

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Wikis

• A website that can be edited without knowing HTML
• Controversial because anyone can edit the content
• Wikipedia
• Academic Wikis
• Students co-constructing meaning in a
  democratized digital space has a certain social
  constructivist elegance (Higdon 2005)

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Examples of Academic Wikis

• How Stuff is Made
• Romance Audience Project (2)
• Social Marketing Wiki
• Bentley College Honors Students

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Ways to Apply Wikis in an Academic Setting

• Approach 1 Student Journaling
• Approach 2 Personal Portfolios
• Approach 3 Collaborative Knowledge Base
• Approach 4 Research Coordination and
  Collaboration
• Approach 5 Curricular and Cross-Disciplinary
  Coordination
• Approach 6 Conference and Colloquia Web
  Site/Coordination (Jude Higdon, Project
  Manager, Center for Scholarly Technology,
  University of Southern California)

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The Biggest Hurdle

• In an academic setting
• Stigma of social software
• Facebook/MySpace
• Blogging employees writing negative things about
  their employers
• The fear of ever changing content
• Reflects values reminiscient of a different time
• The fear of everyone being able to change content
• One truth vs. multiple truths
• Within reason (login/password access)