Knowledge as map vs knowledge mapping: translating the business of knowledge management to an educational environment

Knowledge management has become a big business in the business environment. Paper discusses the challenges of this approach in an educational environment, the necessity of achieving shared understanding of knowledge as a cognitive process, and the tensions between knowledge enabling and knowledge management. A vernacular model is offered as a potential benchmark for design of knowledge management processes suitable to teaching and learning pedagogy. Acknowledgement In Australia it is accepted practice that a speaker at a conference will, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which the meeting is being held. Although this conference is being held online it is hosted in Australia and thus the server on which the conference activities are taking place is located in Australia. I would therefore like to acknowledge the Spiritual and Traditional owners of this country. Introduction The development of knowledge management as a business strategy is a logical response to an unintended consequence of organisational change, the need to replace informal knowledge with formal methods of capturing what staff know (Barclay & Murray 1997) After the widespread downsizing late last century, inestimable losses of irreplaceable knowledge negatively impacted on the capacity of organisations to be competitive, while at the same time the managerial perception of the nature of organisationa l activities was visibly shifting from functions to activities occurring as cross-functional processes. Recognising the social (organisational) dimension of knowledge is a prerequisite for achieving a sustainable solution to managing an organisation’s knowledge (Godbout 1999) because knowledge management takes place in a structured and social context (Thomas, Kellogg & Erickson 2001). Indeed, definitions of knowledge management are largely context dependent. This results in flexibility of interpretation about what knowledge management is. How an organisation interprets knowledge management has a profound effect on how that organisation operationalises it. Another prerequisite is that the organisation has a conceptual framework within which to organise and integrate the information that the organisation feels is important, so that it becomes part of an organisational knowledge base and provides a strategy for transforming