Transforming Research, Knowledge Networks, and Scholarship

Note that this essay is one of twenty (20) New Directions in Planning essays, which are an online part of and a companion to the SCUP book, A Guide to Planning for Change (Norris and Poulton, 2008). The essays will eventually be available in their own Web home, but we are sharing them here, now, because we want you to have access to them sooner and because this blog environment will let you post comments, if you wish. Please do!

Transforming Research, Knowledge Networks, and Scholarship is written by Paul Lefrere, of Strategic Initiatives.

A Guide to Planning for Change can be ordered in SCUP's online bookstore or via the order form you can download here (PDF). Why don't you purchase a copy (for yourself or a colleague) and spend the down time over the holidays refreshing your perspective on higher education planning?

Copyright SCUP, 2008, all rights reserved.

Transforming Research, Knowledge Networks, and Scholarship

How can planners best take account of, and align with, recent and prospective changes in the patterns, cadences, and pace of the processes through which new knowledge is created, shared, experienced, and valued by faculty, researchers, and other scholars? Thanks to those changes, planners have significant opportunities not only to help their faculty exploit the benefits of new academic advances, but also to introduce complementary advances in planning that make it easier to monitor the competition and external environment, focus administrative efforts accordingly, and identify relevant and affordable research opportunities to improve their planning processes and decision making. What has made this possible? Technically, globally-recognized standards have emerged for accelerating and facilitating knowledge sharing, digital rights management, and knowledge repositories. Professionally, building on pioneering work by the sciences and other information-centric disciplines, leading-edge practitioners are using a potent combination of personal productivity tools, simulation and gaming, distributed communities of practice, and physical facilities designed around the immersive experiencing and interpretation of data, information, and knowledge.

Technology-enabled tools, techniques, practices, and communities have already transformed the work of the bench scientist and researcher in most academic disciplines. They are also changing the manner in which undergraduates and graduate students prepare for hyperkinetic lives of perpetual scholarship. The challenges and opportunities for planners are legion. To realize the benefits of technology, planners must track how their faculty are affected by changes in the epistemology of learning and scholarship as it moves toward a Web 2.0 model in which all learning and knowledge are cocreated through collaboration. In addition, knowledge networks and automated tools now play a prominent role in research and scholarship. This dramatically affects both the microeconomics and macroeconomics of facilities and campus design and the nature of academic programs and innovation. Thoughtful planners will stay close to those changes.

I. What Forces Are Shaping Research, Knowledge Networks, and Scholarship?

As recently as the year 2000, understanding and mapping knowledge domains were the province of professional librarians, knowledge managers, and other information intermediaries, as well as researchers interested in how to map knowledge of different kinds and in different locations. Since that time, tools suitable for mass knowledge use have emerged. These tools have changed the nature of the power relationships for creating, sharing, and using knowledge. They have also empowered people who, in 2000, were typically not “power users” of knowledge tools (academics, students, researchers, and employees in commercial enterprises) so that today they are able to use mass-market tools to identify, map, exploit, and contribute to their own sources of knowledge, in ways that suit their preferences, resources, and needs.

To illustrate, today those groups would use radically different, social-computing tools, such as CiteULike, to find out who recommends an article, what terms they use to describe it, what else they see as relevant, and other characteristics. The change from 2000 to now can best be appreciated by comparing a 2000-style citation of an article—Wayne G. Lutters, Mark S. Ackerman, James Boster, and David W. McDonald, “Mapping Knowledge Networks in Organizations: Creating a Knowledge Mapping Instrument,” Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) (Atlanta, Ga.: Association for Information Systems, 2000), pp. 2014–18—with its Flickr-influenced citation today.

End-users now have a widening range of no-cost/low-cost Web-based tools for mapping and creating knowledge. These tools enable users to identify and link to their peers and identify and validate sources of expertise and insights that they can share. Of course, the emergence of such tools does not signify that breakthroughs have been made in the philosophy of knowledge, in hermeneutics, in cross-cultural understandings, or even in the development of ontologies. Those and other issues dealing with the nature of knowledge and wisdom remain unresolved and will not be discussed further here. The purpose of this article is much narrower: to provide a primer on the terms used by the developers and early adopters of the knowledge tools that are now emerging for the mass of users.

II. New Directions in Research, Knowledge Networks, and Scholarship

Research, knowledge networks, and scholarship depend on two issues relating to knowledge mapping: (1) the tools for mapping knowledge domains; and (2) the co-creation of knowledge through knowledge networks.

The Tools for Mapping Knowledge Domains

The explosion of knowledge domains and of the means of comprehending them has led to energetic initiatives in scientific, academic, healthcare, and commercial settings. In May 2003, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences convened the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on Mapping Knowledge Domains, which resulted in a special issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America). This symposium was guided by the following framework: “The term ‘mapping knowledge domains’ was chosen to describe a newly evolving interdisciplinary area of science aimed at the process of charting, mining, analyzing, sorting, enabling navigation of, and displaying knowledge. This field is aimed at easing information access, making evident the structure of knowledge, and allowing seekers of knowledge to succeed in their endeavors. Although thousands of years old, this area has undergone a sea change in the last 15 years, a change fostered by an explosion of the amount of information available, the accessibility of that information due to electronic storage, and the new techniques of analysis, retrieval, and visualization that are made possible by vast increases in computational storage capacity and processing speed and power.”

Richard Shiffrin and Katy Börner point out that the value of mapping knowledge domains can redound not just to information scientists but also to scientists, researchers, governmental institutions, industry, and members of society generally. However, this value will not be realized unless the user can understand and interact with the mapping systems. The thousands of dimensions of knowledge must be simplified and engaged through visualization, viewed from multiple perspectives. “For example, maps might depict major researchers, most cited articles and books, articles too new to receive many citations but with contents that point to emerging trends, articles organized into topic trees (by content, citations, and authors), and grants awarded by topic. Other maps might depict changes over time. Such techniques hold out the promise that the user will be able not only to visualize a few nearby trees in the forest of knowledge, but also to understand the entire landscape. If these techniques can be made to operate effectively, they may well change the way that science is conducted and the way the business of the world is carried out.”

Knowledge domain visualization is a powerful tool, as reflected by the work of Chaomei Chen. An interesting example of a knowledge organization tool is ClaiMaker (http://claimaker.open.ac.uk/), a Web-based “system for individuals or distributed communities to publish and contest ideas and arguments as is required in contested domains such as research literatures, intelligence analysis, or public debate. It provides tools for constructing argument maps, and a server on which they can then be published, navigated, filtered and visualized using the ClaimFinder semantic search+navigation tools.” Over time, such tools will become standard equipment for the rigorous analysis and debate that accompanies the gestation of new ideas in communities of practice.

Knowledge-mapping capabilities integrated into global search tools will become progressively more capable of searching for major aspects of knowledge—who, what, when, where, why, how, and if—and of helping users develop practical, visual maps of these resources. Out of necessity, these tools will upgrade their capacity to measure and grade the “value” of particular elements of knowledge. Value ratings will be essential to culling through the vast tracts of knowledge available to practitioners. Such value ratings for established topics and knowledge resources can be handled by next generations of global search tools. Even today, a user can employ surrogate value ratings by iteratively applying existing search tools to find out what topics and issues are being studied by key researchers and practitioners who have been identified through citation analysis.

Today, special-purpose knowledge-indexing tools based on Web crawlers can identify and classify all of the people in the world having particular expertise and/or demonstrated interest in specified knowledge subjects and/or topics. Or they can report on what people are saying about particular topics, products, or services. First-generation versions of these tools are supporting marketing efforts in commercial, health care, and educational settings.

The Co-creation of Knowledge through Knowledge Networks

Although the development of knowledge-mapping tools will enable progressively more powerful searching and visualization of knowledge domains, a countervailing trend is at work. The churn of knowledge is accelerating. Given the high velocity of knowledge flux and flow, knowledge networks of practitioners and experts and emerging communities of practice are growing. Many practitioners feel that completely current, fully contextualized knowledge is achieved only through their engaging in the give-and-take of conversations with other practitioners in communities of practice. For these users, the only authentic knowledge is that which is co-created by them.

Social networks have grown in almost all knowledge domains, industries, and enterprises. They seem especially useful in new, hybridized fields, in practice areas that span the boundaries between existing knowledge domains, and in knowledge collaborations and innovative ventures that cross organizational boundaries.

Henry Chesbrough’s book Open Innovation emphasizes the importance of innovations that are enabled by knowledge sharing and knowledge creation that spans enterprise boundaries. Similarly, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown have discussed the emergence of creation nets, global practice and process nets that enable open innovation: “Now, the game becomes using our knowledge as a way to connect more rapidly and effectively with others to create new knowledge.”

We contend that the characteristics of social networks, communities of practice, and creation nets will evolve and support the continuing development of a vibrant class of knowledge networks. The stewardship of these knowledge networks will likely devolve to associations, professional societies, emerging peer-to-peer networks, and social networks of various kinds. These social networks/communities will be the centerpieces of future knowledge domains. Expert practitioners and users will go directly to their proven sources of expert and/or emergent knowledge, without utilizing global research tools. They will likely utilize a variety of artificial intelligence tools to enhance their personal bandwidth and capacity to participate in such knowledge networks. Many expert users will not consider knowledge to be relevant and tailored to their needs unless they have actually participated in its co-creation through various P2P networks and communities of practice.

Mapping knowledge domains requires customized and contextualized individual knowledge tools that enable users to chart the nodes and networks constituting their personal knowledge domains. Existing individual knowledge tools will evolve to provide this capability. In the future, the user will have access to a full spectrum of knowledge tools, enabling global searching, knowledge mapping, and participation in individual knowledge networks. These tools will support the mapping, searching, sharing, repurposing, and leveraging of knowledge resources.

III. What Impact Will Research, Knowledge Networks, and Scholarship Have on Integrated, Strategic, Aligned Planning?

Advanced planning practices in colleges and universities will surely make use of sophisticated knowledge mapping tools and techniques. One can foresee these tools featuring prominently in planning and strategy practice.

These practices are already influencing, in a profound manner, the design of physical facilities and the embedding of knowledge visualization capabilities in leading-edge academic facilities. Case study descriptions of such facilities are provided in http://TheMobileLearner.org and are described by Mark Valenti and John Cook in their New Directions in Planning Topics chapter on “New and Enhanced Learning Environments.”

IV. Resources

Donald M. Norris, Jon Mason, Robby Robson, Paul Lefrere, and Geoff Collier, A Revolution in Knowledge Sharing, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2003, pp. 14-26.

Donald M. Norris, Jon Mason, and Paul Lefrere, Transforming e-Knowledge: A Revolution in Knowledge Sharing. Ann Arbor: Society for College and University Planning, 2003. http://www.scup.org/eknowledge.

John Seely Brown, The Social Life of Information. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
An example of knowledge as a thing is how biologists categorize types of life, using methodologies such as cladistics, which study shared traits to determine common origins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics. Moreover, the procedural and conceptual know-how that underpins cladistics are now being deployed in new areas, e.g., to determine the origin and derivation of knowledge elements. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/clad/clad2.html.

David Snowden (2002), Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol 6, No. 2, pp. 100-111. Available online: http://www.cognitive-edge.com/articles.php.

Ikujiro Nonaka, The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation, in The Knowledge Advantage: 14 Visionaries Define Marketplace Success in the new Economy. Edited by Dan Holthouse, Christopher Meyer, and Rudy Ruggles. Chico CA: Capstone Publications, 1999.

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Donald M. Norris and William Redeen, Knowledge Repositories and e-Knowledge Commerce, on-line white paper, http://www.strategicinitiatives.com/thought_leadership/knowledge.html.

John Daniel and Paul West, From Digital Divide to Digital Dividend: What Will It Take? Innovate, June 2006.

Mia Garlick, A Review of Creative Commons and Science Commons, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2005, pp. 78-79.

Daniel Rehak, Philip Dodds, Laurence Lannom, A Model and Infrastructure for Federating Learning Content Repositories. WWW 2005, May 10-14, 2005, Chiba, Japan.

Vicki Suter, Bryan Alexander, and Pascal Kaplan, Social Software and the Future of Conferences Right Now. EDUCAUSE Review, January/February 2005.

Anya Kamenetz, The Network Unbound: How Tagworld and other Next-Generation Social Networks Could Feed Your Business and Maybe Even Change the World, Fast Company, June 2006, pp. 69-74.

Examples of leveraging social networking in corporate settings can be found in Andrew P. McAffee, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006, Vol. 47 No. 3, pp. 20-29; Polly Rizova, Are You Networked for Successful Innovation, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006, Vol. 47 No. 3., pp. 49-56; and Tim Hindle, The New Organisation: A Survey of the Company, The Economist, July 21, 2006.

Bill Olivier, Tish Roberts, & Kerry Blinco (2005), The e-Framework for Education and Research: An Overview. A Paper prepared on behalf of DEST (Australia), JISC-CETIS (UK)
http://www.e-framework.org/resources/eframeworkrV1.pdf.

Charles M. Vest, Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2006, pp. 18- 30.

Jeremy Howells, Where to From Here in Services Innovation? paper presented at the Knowledge Intensive Services (KISA) Conference, Sydney, 22 March 2006.

Commercial enterprises are using knowledge tools to manage and innovate services offerings to customers. Leonard L. Berry, Venkatesh Shankar, Janet Turner Parish, Susan Cadwallader, and Thomas Dotz; Creating New Markets Through Service Innovation, MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2006, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 56-63.; Sunil Chopra and Martin A Lariviere, Managing Service Inventory to Improve Performance, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2005, pp. 56-66; Sanjay Mathrani and Dennis Viehland, Using Knowledge-based Processes to Improve Enterprise System Effectiveness, Knowledge Management in Asia-Pacific 2005, http://kmap2005.vuw.ac.nz/program-handbook/K ... AP-Handbook-Online-18nov05.pdf.

For more on latent semantic analysis, see http://www.pearsonkt.com.

Declan Butler, A New Leaf, Nature, Vol 436, 7 July 2005, pp. 20-21.

e-Notebooks have significant potential as a tool for managing and sharing personal knowledge, including work in progress. The degree of integration with personal collections depends on the sophistication of the e-notebooks. There are low-end open source tools, now being adopted by universities (e.g., http://collaboratory.emsl.pnl.gov) and high-end commercial e-notebooks, with features that meet the requirements of the United States Food and Drug Administration to introduce strict standards for record keeping for clinical trials and regulatory approvals. These include pages that can be signed, date-stamped and locked to prevent illicit modifications to results.

Erv Blythe and Vinod Chachra, The Value Proposition in Institutional Repositories, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2005, pp. 76-77.

National Center for Academic Transformation, http://www.center.rpi.edu/whoweare.html

Stephen L. Ruth, e-Learning-A Financial and Strategic Perspective, EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Number 1, 2006, pp. 22-30.

Western Cooperative for Educational Technology. http://www.wcet.info/consulting/audit.asp.

James J. Duderstadt, Wm. A. Wolf, and Robert Zemsky, Envisioning a Transformed University, Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 2005, pp. 35-42.

Donald M. Norris and Mark L. Valenti. Campus and Facilities Planning in the Wireless Age. http://www.themobilelearner.org

William Graves, Improving Institutional Performance Through IT-Enabled Innovation, EDUCAUSE Review, Nov/Dec 2005, pp. 79-98.

Robby Robson, Donald M. Norris, Paul Lefrere, Geoff Collier, and Jon Mason, Share and Share Alike: The e-Knowledge Transformation Comes to Campus, EDUCAUSE Review, 38, no. 5, September/October 2003) online version http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0351.pdf.

Brian L. Hawkins interview with Clifford A. Lynch, Advancing Scholarship and Intellectual Productivity, EDUCAUSE ReView, Part 1 March/April 2006, pp. 46-56 and Part 2 May/June 2006, pp. 44-56. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0622.pdf.

D.M. Norris, J. Mason and P. Lefrere, Mapping Knowledge Domains, Nodes, and Networks, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2006. Electronic article.

D.M. Norris, J. Mason and P. Lefrere, Making Knowledge Services Work in Higher Education, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2006.

Daniel R. Rehak, Philip Dodds, and Laurence Lannom, A Model and Infrastructure for Federated Learning Content Repositories, 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2005), Chiba, Japan, May 10–14, 2005.

Donald M. Norris, Jon Mason, Robby Robson, Paul Lefrere, and Geoff Collier, A Revolution in Knowledge Sharing, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 38, no. 5 (September/October 2003).

Vicki Suter, Bryan Alexander, and Pascal Kaplan, Social Software and the Future of Conferences—Right Now, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (January/February 2005): 46–59.

Erv Blythe and Vinod Chachra, The Value Proposition in Institutional Repositories, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 5 (September/October 2005): 76–77.

Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William S. Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

Sarah Brittain, Pietrek Glowacki, Jared Van Ittersum, and Lynn Johnson, Podcasting Lectures, EDUCAUSE Quarterly (EQ), vol. 29, no. 3 (2006): 24–31.

Richard M. Shiffrin and Katy Börner, Mapping Knowledge Domains. PNAS, 101, suppl. 1 (April 6, 2004): 5183.

Chaomei Chen, Searching for Intellectual Turning Points: Progressive Knowledge Domain Visualization, PNAS, 101, suppl. 1 (April 6, 2004): 5303–10.

Henry W. Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003); John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, Creation Nets: Harnessing the Potential of Open Innovation, April 2006, http://www.johnhagel.com/creationnets.pdf.