Knowledge management refers to people, processes and technology within an organisation (Awad & Ghaziri, 2004).
The goal is to create the knowledge that drives the organisation forward and results in a more successful management.
Educational institutions, as other organisations, need to be able to manage the corporate knowledge, and technology, e.g. in form of knowledge systems, can be a support in this management.
In educational organisations the main task is to facilitate the student’s learning. This can be enhanced by providing support for individuals and, moreover, by facilitating the need for individuals to work together so they can develop an understanding of a collective vision (McNeill et al, 2003). According to Bloom (1956) student-centered methods for teaching, e.g. discussions, are thought to be more effective in developing higher-order intellectual skills, such as creating and problem-solving. We mean that educators with a democratic leadership style can take a student-centered approach and thereby improve student’s learning capacity.
Our goal is to supply a knowledge system, Mentor, as a tool for teachers to get insight into their tutoring and thereby explore the opportunities of adopting student-centered teaching strategies. We have chosen the revised Bloom’s taxonomy in Mentor of two main reasons: on the first hand to map teachers’ answers to the taxonomy and on the other hand to give the teachers different kind of feedback based on the educational objectives in the taxonomy. Through the taxonomy Mentor highlights where in the taxonomy the teachers´ strategies are placed and will give feedback about how the current strategies can be improved.
It is worth to note that in this paper we have only introduced a prototype, with both technical and pedagogical constraints, as the first step toward building the system. Our plan is to further develop it to a complete and working system and test it in a number of schools. Two master students in Computer Science have decided to develop Mentor further in their master thesis during spring semester 2007. For the moment, the user’s interaction with Mentor is text based. In the future we will utilise knowledge-based hypermedia. With a knowledge-based hypermedia technique it is possible to reason about the current user’s needs and to generate presentations according to this (Edman, 2001) thereby support the users with different learning styles (Edman & Mayiwar, 2003). It is possible to utilise knowledge-based models of the learner (Gobet & Wood, 1999; Wood & Wood, 1999) to be able to tailor the feedback to the current user’s need.
To summarize, in order to improve the learning capacity and help students to achieve deep knowledge, the teaching process should be focused on students’ involvement in their learning, which is in accordance to the constructivist approach. For this reason, a student-centered learning environment, where the teachers are democratic leaders, is considered as an important prerequisite. Thus, we have in this paper offered a support system for teachers to check their current teaching style and to hopefully move toward a more democratic leadership style in order to assist the students in their efforts in accomplishing a holistic comprehension of the studied subjects.
leadership is mainly focused on developing high quality learning and teaching in schools. Several studies, from different countries and school contexts, show the powerful impact of leadership in securing development and change in schools (see e.g. Harris & Chapman, 2002).
There are mainly three categories of leadership; autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire (Lewin et al, 1939). Autocratic leaders are focused on their own ideas and will do what they consider right without accepting other members’ suggestions and ideas. They don’t consider other team members as equally important and sometimes they will enforce members to obey their decisions by rewarding or by punishing them. In contrast, democratic leaders have a close relationship with other group members and they will encourage all the members to participate in planning and at the same time value their ideas and suggestions when making a decision. Finally, laissez-faire leaders have too much confidence to other group members and do not try to control the group members. They do not put any concrete goals to be achieved, therefore the members are free to decide for themselves what to do. This kind of leadership style will work if the group members are extremely competent in their field.
Successful leadership is a key constituent in achieving school improvement (Offsted, 2000, in Harris & Chapman, 2002). Therefore, a task for knowledge management in educational organisations is to influence the teachers so they change their leadership style from, a more or less, autocratic to a democratic style. A knowledge system, such as Mentor, may support such a change. A spin-off is that the teachers’ leadership style applied in the classroom may have impact on students’ view of democracy. Few schools operate democratically but when teachers take on leadership roles beyond the classroom their schools can become more democratic than dictatorial, and everyone benefits (Usdan et al, 2001). The more democratic school culture, “the more students come to believe in, practice, and sustain our democratic form of governance” (ibid).
As stated earlier, knowledge management comprises capturing, sharing, and applying knowledge, and then creating new knowledge. In Mentor we have captured pedagogical knowledge that can be shared by the teachers, they can apply it in the classroom and, hopefully, through the application create new knowledge, such as how to deal with their own subject in relation to new teaching strategies. The knowledge they create may be captured and stored in Mentor, shared by the other teachers and so on in a spiral. It is obvious that a knowledge system like Mentor can be an integral part in a knowledge management system for educational organisations.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Henrik Samils and Anders Spengler, master students in Computer Science Uppsala University, who have participated in making the design of the system. Thanks also to Fredrik Bengtsson, Lars Oestreicher and Christofer Waldenström for valuable comments.
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