Week 6 : Knowledge Acquisition and Application

On 12^th July, we moved on to our new lecture, which is Knowledge Acquisition and Application. The lecturer explained to us about the learning outcomes as usual. So, basically the learning outcomes consist of:

·         Understand how user and task modeling approaches can help promote effective knowledge use at the individual, group, and organizational level.

·         Describe how organizational knowledge management architecture is designed.

·         Define organizational learning and describe the links between individual and organizational learning.

·         Compare and contrast learning and understanding with internalization of knowledge.

Basically, knowledge acquisition means reuse the existing knowledge to promote efficiency and lead to innovation in an effective way. In other hand, we can say that knowledge application is an application of knowledge which is filtered through human brain and applied to job tasks.

Besides that, we also learnt about Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which is located in individual level of knowledge application. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an example of a widely used tool to assess cognitive styles. There are four dimensions of personality type, which are consisting of:

·         Interest: How we interact with the world and where we direct our energy (Extraversion-Introversion).

·         Perception: The kind of information we naturally notice (sensing-intuition).

·         Judgment: How we make decisions (thinking-feeling).

·         Environment: Whether we prefer to live in a more structured way or a more spontaneous way (judgment-perception).

 

 

Figure 1: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

A part from that, we studied about Bloom’s Taxonomy. Basically, Bloom divided knowledge into a hierarchical scheme that distinguishes between:

·         psychomotor skills – perception, set, guided response, mechanism, complex overt response, adaptation, origination.

·         affective domain (e.g., attitudes) – receiving phenomena, responding to phenomena, valuing, organizing value, internalizing value.

·         cognitive domain (e.g., knowledge)- knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation; a.k.a hierarchy of learning.

 

Figure 2: Cognitive Learning Objectives

 

We then moved on to Organizational Level which is part of Knowledge Application. Normally, small organizations focus on knowledge acquisition easily. With few people and limited dispersal of knowledge, they seem to face relatively few obstacles sharing or reusing knowledge. However, large organizations, in contrast, have difficulty finding and reusing knowledge. Even determining whether the knowledge exists within the organization can be difficult sometimes.

In other hand, we studied about knowledge repository. It is all about:

·         contain valuable content that is a mix of tacit and explicit knowledge.

·         based on the unique experiences of the individuals who are or were a part of that company.

·         contain the know-how that has been tried, tested, and found to work in work situations.

Knowledge Repository Content:

·         Factual – terminology, specific details and elements or organizational practice.

·         Conceptual – theories, models, principles and generalizations.

·         Procedural – skills, algorithms, techniques and methods.

·         Meta-cognitive – knowledge about knowledge: learning, thinking, problem-solving.

 

Figure 3: Repository Development

 

Lastly, we can conclude that a knowledge repository should be a one-stop shop for knowledge application. The employees should be able to find out what they need in order to access, understand, and apply the cumulative experience and expertise of the organization. They also need to understand the knowledge requirements of both the users and their tasks are the key to understanding, identifying, and using the correct knowledge from the various sources. Moreover, we can say that:

·         Knowledge repositories are most effective if they are structured in a systematic manner.

·         A range of strategies can be considered: development of ontologies, thesauruses, use of metatags, strong quality control.

·         The ongoing currency and integrity of the system need to be rigorously preserved and protected.