Knowledge Organization in Knowledge Management Systems of Global Consulting Firms

Organizing knowledge is essential for corporations to have an effective and successful knowledge management system. This study investigates how consultants in global consulting firms organize corporate knowledge. The major findings are: knowledge organization is not separate from other components of a knowledge management system, but instead holds all other knowledge management components together; metadata with attributes and facets is created when consultants submit knowledge pieces to a knowledge management system; a standard template for describing a knowledge piece exists in each firm in this study; the knowledge organization part of consultants’ work is similar to librarians’ work in organizing information.     

Our Journey from Print to Electronic Resources: An Acquisitions Perspective at a Caribbean Academic Library

This article seeks to add to the body of literature about the provision and management of electronic resources in academic libraries in developing countries. It recognizes the importance of providing increased electronic information to users and describes the efforts of an academic library in the Caribbean to address this need. The role of the Acquisitions and Serials Unit in making this transition possible is explored. Furthermore, an assessment of the progress attained in the transition process is documented, including issues encountered, many of which have not yet been resolved. Future plans for successful development of an increased electronic resources environment have also been proposed.     

Welcome to our World: Evaluation of a Workshop to Orient Students to Social Work Education

This article reports on BSW and MSW students' satisfaction with a required orientation workshop designed to socialize them to professional educational and to academic and professional standards of behavior. Students viewed video‐recorded vignettes that addressed problematic behaviors in class and field, followed by faculty‐led, small‐group discussions. BSW students rated the workshops as more helpful than MSW students did. First‐year MSW students rated the workshops as significantly more helpful than advanced standing students, suggesting that more experienced students perceive less need for an orientation. Open‐ended questions revealed that students appreciated the opportunity to meet faculty members and other students.     

Online GIS service

Online GIS services are expanding rapidly as private organizations, government agencies, and libraries are developing Web sites that deliver GIS data, graphics, and metadata. Such services are divided into five categories: graphic snapshots, spatial database catalogs and libraries, map generators, map browsers, and real-time maps and images. Reviews and discussion of these current online GIS services and selected URL's are provided.     

Bridging the implementation gap: a teacher‐as‐learner approach to teaching and learning policy

A major dilemma facing higher educational institutions around the world is how to achieve quality outcomes for students in an increasingly internationalised and competitive environment. To effect change in teaching and learning, we advocate a teacher‐as‐learner approach to the implementation of teaching and learning policy. Our approach has been influenced by approaches to change management as well as contemporary educational theories, such as constructive alignment and deep and surface approaches to learning. In this paper we use these approaches to evaluate the success of a policy initiative designed to encourage subject coordinators to use a faculty‐endorsed template to embed graduate attributes into their subject outlines. The difficulties experienced by teachers at the disciplinary level in using the subject outline template illustrate how a seemingly positive and well‐intentioned initiative can have a potentially minimal effect on teaching and learning practice and, as a consequence, student learning. We suggest that the Course Experience Questionnaire provides a useful model for evaluating not only teaching but also the management of teaching. As teachers responsible for the implementation of teaching and learning policies, we hope our views will provide a more integrated approach to teaching and learning changes in the higher educational context.     

Decolonising the curriculum: using graduate qualities to embed Indigenous knowledges at the academic cultural interface

The context of this paper is a strategy at a large Australian university that involves embedding a new graduate quality ‘cultural competence’ and lifting the profile of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, experiences and histories. It has been argued that the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is essential for the decolonisation of our higher education institutions. Decolonisation involves removing the barriers that have silenced non-Western voices in our ‘multi-cultural’ higher education system and combatting the epistemic injustices of a system dominated by Western thought. In this paper, we suggest that our university’s suite of graduate qualities can provide a locus for work at the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. While these qualities may be firmly embedded within Western ways of knowing, being and doing, they can nonetheless be used to interrogate and revisit Western disciplinary knowledge construction and pedagogy so as to help bring about institutional change.     

'No goats in the mother city': using Symbolic Objects to help students talk about diversity and change

This paper reports on a first year project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to teaching academic literacy. Students identify and investigate everyday objects that have symbolic meanings in their communities. Objects are seen as catalysts for enabling student narratives to emerge, and are a way of exploring the tensions between convention and change in cultural practices. A project such as this breaks disciplinary frames, working across diverse contexts such as engineering and cultural studies. The aim is to begin to explore some of the complexities around ‘development’ in contexts of diversity and change, globalization and relocalization.     

Multimodal texts in Higher Education and the implications for writing pedagogy

Although studies on writing pedagogy and academic literacies have examined changing genres in tertiary education, there has not necessarily been an emphasis on how a range of modes and media have influenced texts in various disciplines. This paper explores the influence and incorporation of the visual into student texts in Higher Education, looking at the semiotic weighting of modes, conventions and functions of images, visual / verbal linkages and visual composition. These aspects of multimodal texts have implications for the ways in which we teach ‘academic literacies’ practices and writing as multimodal composition to students.