elearnspace

The Cost of Not Knowing…an interesting piece on the effects of not knowing. Organizational and individual content management is presented as the solution. I recognize that content management is critical, but I’m beginning to wonder if the concern of knowledge management isn’t more about how people extract and assign meaning to content. In a recent post, I stated that I don’t use learning object repositories because I’m unable to find what I need. Stephen Downes questioned that statement: “I think that re-use will be harder to generate than content creation.”
On reflection, I think we are essentially saying the same thing…content in context is the real challenge. Or put another way, the extraction of meaning from an object is the real challenge. We can have access to all the content in the world, but if we are not able to find what we need, when we need it, in the format we need it, and for the task which we need it, it’s of no use. Content management takes care of organizing resources. The extraction of meaningful content is where systems fail.