Knowledge Management in Education

My main scholarly interest lies in the field of knowledge management.  Particularly in knowledge management systems and the structuring of explicit knowledge.  Yesterday I read an article about the adoption of corporate knowledge management practices to higher education.  The article was written back in 2000, so a lot has changed since then but I was also amazed by how little we have advanced in the knowledge management field.

The big change I noticed has been the emergence of a popular knowledge management application to support both tacit and explicit knowledge.  We now have software to help us support knowledge management but there is still a long ways to go for this field to mature and the software to properly facilitate the process.

While knowledge is central to higher education, it is surprising to see how poorly we practice any type of knowledge management activities to develop the faculty and academic programs within the institution.  The knowledge management field appears to be fixated on the corporate setting when there are tremendous opportunities for growth in the academic side.  Perhaps this is what we call a gap in the literature; we need more research done understanding the academic environment in the knowledge management context and applying knowledge management practices to the academic environment.