The Visual Wiki for the First Step of KMS in Community College

Mohamad Yusrizal Mohamed Yusoff

Kolej Komuniti Pasir Salak Kementerian Pengajian Tinggi

Perak, Malaysia uk_7010@yahoo.com

Jafreezal Jaafar¹ and Ahmad Kamil Mahmood²

Computer Information Science Department Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS

Perak, Malaysia [¹jafreez, ²kamilmh]@petronas.com.my

Abstract—There are various Knowledge Management Systems available currently and designed to support knowledge sharing and learning. This study explores a certain success factors in CMS and how CMS can be a KMS for knowledge transfer and sharing in community college environment. Based on the data from a sample of community college CMS called “Amalan Pengurusan Ilmu di Kolej Komuniti”, our analysis indicates that CMS success (in terms of the qualitative analysis) is related to the local community support of knowledge sharing and learning. The researchers found that visual wiki (CMS) is possible to be created and used as simple or first step towards KMS for the community college environment.

I. INTRODUCTION

Knowledge Management seems to be relatively difficult to define precisely due to the complexity and difficulty inherent in understanding and comprehending the concept itself. KM encompasses both technological and human aspects – psychological, social, cultural and organizational. People are the most important dynamic resource in such a multidimensional process [18]. Knowledge management is the discipline that helps spread knowledge of individuals or groups across organizations in ways that directly affect performance[22]. Knowledge management is an audit of "intellectual assets" that highlights unique sources, critical functions and potential bottlenecks, which hinder knowledge flows to the point of use. It protects intellectual assets from decay, seeks opportunities to enhance decisions, services and products through adding intelligence, increasing value and providing flexibility. Knowledge management and learning, has been recognized by academics and practitioners as important to achieving success and improvement in projects [1]. Knowledge management in general is a process to ensure that the intellectual capabilities of an organization are shared, maintained and institutionalized [14].

Knowledge management projects usually have one out of three different main purposes; identify and emphasize knowledge, develop or emphasize a knowledge-intensive culture within the organization, or build an infrastructure for knowledge including both IT and personal connections. In

order to achieve these purposes, knowledge management includes different processes which could be compromised into four processes; creating, storing/retrieving, transferring, and applying knowledge[5][14].

Knowledge Management System (KMS) is becoming a trend nowadays enabling employees of any organization to access the organization’s sources of information and solutions[10]. A KMS must then be a system that uses KM tools to achieve its specific goal of capturing, codifying and disseminating knowledge[9]. Knowledge Management System (KMS) is a system for managing knowledge in organizations, supporting creation, capture, and storage and sharing of expertise in the form of information[22]. Knowledge management systems are IT systems with the purpose to support and enhance knowledge management processes[14]. Knowledge management systems (KMS) refer to a group of information systems that can be applied to manage organizational knowledge. The desire to utilize ICT for knowledge capture has generated a demand to engage knowledge management systems (KMS) to codify, capture, transform, transfer, maintain, and archive data, information, and knowledge.

Many of the KMS components require skilled ‘knowledge workers’ and extensive technology centered solutions e.g., project-specific websites[27]. A KMS generally refers to the technology set in place to capture, disseminate, and retrieve knowledge. A Portal or Intranet could be referred to as a KMS depending on how it was designed [15]. There are two types of knowledge involved in higher education settings: academic knowledge and organizational knowledge. Academic knowledge is the primary purpose of universities and colleges. Organizational knowledge refers to knowledge of the overall business of an institution: its strength and weaknesses, the markets it serves, and the factors critical to organizational success (Coukos-Semmel, 2003) cited [28].

This study is conducted based on two questions, firstly What is the role of CMS for Knowledge Transfer in community college and secondly How can CMS support the knowledge transfer and sharing for learning in community college environment. For these purposes this research studies knowledge management in an educational setting for the short course participants or local community to learn information technology skills (web design) in community college. In particular, a knowledge base (weblog) is created to facilitate the knowledge transfer and sharing also learning process from

978-1-4577-1884-7/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

Keywords - CMS, KMS, knowledge transfer, web 2.0

instructor to participants. CMS entitled “Amalan Pengurusan Ilmu” has been described and analyzed to show the possibilities of KMS towards knowledge based system.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW A. Knowledge Transfer and Collaboration Knowledge transfer is a field of knowledge management that transferring knowledge from one set of individuals to another has been a key area of interest for knowledge management researchers. Knowledge collaboration is an enhance activities than knowledge transferring. We can understand that knowledge collaboration is a process to move the right information and knowledge to the right people at the right time through a structured platform in order to achieve the objective [11]. Collaborative research is an important conduit of knowledge transfer between academia and industry, government and business. It can also be a precursor to other knowledge transfer activities such as licensing or spin out. The interaction between academia and external organisations via collaborative research agreements can have important impacts on the transfer of technology from universities to the private sector, which has clear productivity implications for productivity growth[21]. Knowledge transfer is described as happening in direct interaction between and among people as well as in the interaction with knowledge repositories such as databases, knowledge bases, documents, lessons learned, documents of best known practices, manuals, and procedures either in digital form or in hard copies. The people called as “knowledge workers” create these “repositories”.[3] Transferring knowledge across global boundaries has become an important competitive advantage for organizations seeking success[11]. Knowledge transfer (KT), for purposes of this study, can be viewed as a simple communications model with four major components: message (knowledge), source (source of knowledge), receiver (recipient of knowledge), and channel (organizational context). The source can be either person-to-person transfer of knowledge, or, as in this study, a technology-based delivery of knowledge. These components combine and interact in various processes to produce value to the organization (outcome). These outcomes can be new products, more efficient business processes, or more satisfied customers.[24]the knowledge transfer plays a big part in a learning organization. The knowledge transfer process has five components: source context, recipient context, knowledge context, relational context and Possible benefits from a Knowledge Management System situational context[20]. knowledge transfer and learning consists of tacit knowledge

and explicit knowledge[37]. Knowledge transfer is another important knowledge management process where knowledge is transferred between individuals, groups, explicit sources, and the organization itself. KMS can increase the possibility for knowledge being transferred to the right location and that it is applicable [14].

E-learning can be perceived as a key enabler to Knowledge Management and Knowledge Transfer within Higher Education sector (Owens, 2002) cited [13]. The successful introduction and implementation of e-learning into existing and new units at higher education institutions (HEIs) can be heavily influenced by the institution’s ability and effectiveness in delivering knowledge-based products and managing any number of strategic issues that may need to be addressed as part of the successful development of Knowledge Transfer though e-learning products. B. Web 2.0 technology and content management System(CMS) This section goes through the emergence of web 2.0 which has created new ways of interacting, by using collaborative and social technologies such as Blogs, Wiki’s, RSS and Mashups. These are all relatively novel technologies and theory on its effect on knowledge management is in its early stages[ 4]. The purpose of our empirical studies was to evaluate whether informal knowledge sharing using weblogs and wikis could be a content producing alternative for information elements and new experiences, hence reducing the effort involved. These studies comprised the monitoring of ten external weblogs, and the fostering of a Content Management System (CMS) including weblog and wiki facilities in a company Intranet [6]. Other technology-based media are content management systems for large websites for multiple downloads; learning content management systems for e-learning; and other systems based on the international SCORM standard. Additional technology-based media for knowledge sharing includes simple HTML websites, e-mail, web-logging and Internet based video-conferencing. With more than 12 years in development, business e-mail is the oldest and still by far the most used media to share codified knowledge in the form of messages, documents and files[2]. A well known authoring tool for E-Quiz games is the open source content management system Moodle (see Moodle, 2007) [ 19].In the last years new, user-friendly web tools have appeared which moreover are often interconnected in such a way that communication and collaboration can take place. Such ‘social software’ – blogs and content management systems, wikis, message boards – is embedded in a wider concept, the ‘web 2.0’. This is a model whereby peers contribute to the development of tools, content and

communities, all taking place on the Internet. Such technologies are designed to simplify online publishing, simultaneously creating a network of both content and authors. [12]. Wikis are web-based, self-organising content management systems where users participate in authoring content. Anyone on the Internet can edit existing pages and add new documents to most wikis, i.e., every reader can instantly become an author. The basic idea of this concept is that content is read and edited by a large number of users. Therefore errors are found and corrected and eventually, the information on the web-site becomes complete and accurate.[17] Many interactive systems, especially different content management systems (CMS), draw heavily on the metaphor of documents in the way they manage knowledge. [16] A content management system (CMS) is a software system used to create, edit, manage, distribute and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. CMSs are typically used for storing, indexing and searching text and multimedia content. CMSs are very useful for websites where the content is designed and developed by more than one person or department, or where maintenance is carried out by non-technical staff. There are many benefits to deploying a CMS, including: streamlined development process, quicker turnaround time for new pages, greater consistency, greater capacity for expansion, and reduced site maintenance costs. The operation of a CMS involves content creation, content management, and content publishing. Content creation provides a development framework, mostly web-based, that allows non-technical people to create new pages or update content, without having to know any HTML. Content management involves saving a page into a central CMS repository, that allows all page versions and changes to be saved, maintains access rights, and ensures integration with relevant information technology applications. Content publishing publishes the content by allowing the appearance and page layout of the site to be applied automatically to one or more sites. Content publishing also deals with the automatic publication of a single source into different formats (e.g. PDF, Word, XML, etc.) [7] C. Social Software And Social Networking Social software is the type of ICT used for transferring informal and tacit knowledge. Social software can be defined as “networked tools that support and encourage individuals to learn together while retaining individual control over their time, space, presence, activity, identity and relationship” (Anderson, 2005) cited [26]. Since the beginning of the development of internet technology, social software has been made available especially for knowledge transfer, exchange

and collaboration between distributed teams (Weiss, 2005)cited [26]. Social software appears to be the type of ICT that is able to support inter-organisational collaboration in social relationships. Social software, including tools such as wikis and blogs that are essential parts of the Web 2.0 development, facilitate dialog and flexible communication. Wikis and blogs are both online diaries. RSS feeds and social bookmarking. Whereas the first three technologies include collaborative features, social bookmarking is a webpage representing only a collection of personal bookmarks (links to other web pages), which are accessible by other people and do not offer collaborative features. Blogs allow entries to be viewed in chronological order whereas wikis focus on presenting structured key themes of contributions[25]. A social Network is a set of people (and/or organizations, and/or other social entities), connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working, and/or information exchange (Jamali & Abdolhassani, 2006) cited [23]. An online platform with social networking features allows for easy maintenance of relationships. Social networking services provide individuals a space for maintaining their relationships with friends and acquaintances, for chatting with them, and for sharing information. Most social networks allow users not only to display information about their friends, but also about second degree friends (friends of friends). Hence social networking services include a set of tools that facilitate communication and information exchange among users. Blogging functionality and file sharing are two common features that can be found in many systems. Moreover, instant messaging or chat features are offered for direct, synchronous communication among users[17] . Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study, and live around them. D. Weblog or Blog Weblogs or ‘Blogs’ are personal Websites consisting of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. They read like a diary or journal, but with the most recent entry at the top[5]. Weblogs are also referred to as blogs. Weblog is an effective channel of communication to share specific type of information to targeted audience. It can contain text, images, videos and links to other sources. Content in Weblogs is easy to read as the content is posted in reverse-chronological order, and most of the Weblogs have efficient search capabilities to search content.

Weblog or blog is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of ideas, commentary,

descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Weblogs are personal “diary-like-format” websites enabled by easy-to-use tools and open for everyone to read. There is a growing cluster of knowledge weblogs used by professional as personal knowledge repositories, learning journals, or networking instruments. Used in this context, weblogs not only addresses the personal needs of a knowledge worker but also creates an opportunity for others to benefit from having emergent ideas and personal notes captured in public spaces instead of private collections. For a company employee weblogs provide a unique opportunity to access usually invisible trails of development and flows of ideas.[8]

The difficulty of defining weblogs has something to do with the fact that they could have different goals, uses, or writing styles with only one thing in common: format. There are different weblogs in relate to their writers; such as group blogs, family blogs, community blogs, corporate blogs and etc. Most weblogs are written by individuals that known as webloggers or bloggers, although group weblogs can be found as well[29].

Weblogs are a useful tool for knowledge management in higher education according to knowledge management process said in above. Table in blow indicate blog features that useful for knowledge management[29]. Table 1 has shown the simply use of weblog as KM tool:

Table 1 : Weblog as KMS Tool

III. METHODHOLOGY For the study one cms had been chosen in this study, the focus is on the use of visual wiki to foster knowledge management systems (KMS). In December 2010, a KMS based knowledge and information visualization was created and used to let the KM practice systematically in community college using visual wiki. In the prototype of KMS, the people in community college environment are having a chance to share what they know instead of knowledge transfer among them. The prototype entitled “Amalan Pengurusan Ilmu di Kolej Komuniti” and can be accessed with this address http://kmdkk.wikispaces.com/. The followed figures could depict a brief description of the prototype:

Figure 1. Screenshot of the KMS prototype by using visual wiki to represent the CMS.

Figure 2. Edit features for the system users.

Figure 3. Widget to link or import from social network.

Wikispaces were chosen based on a several reasons; firstly CCs are looking for the cheap technology yet useful. Secondly the social network is the trend of the internet using and same

goes to open source technology. Lastly Wikispaces provide a lot of functions that make people in CC environment affordable and familiar with the technology embedded on the system. Wikispaces have a lot of functionality that connected to the well known social web such as Youtube, Myspace, Spacebook, Blogspot and others. As CC is always involved the people from big city even small village, social web and open source, both technologies are favorites among them since they are free, free for money and also free for creativity. For overall the prototype system is confidently will be succeed and not impossible to be implemented as formal system for KMS in CC if we measure and consider the reasons above.

IV. RESULT AND DISCUSSION

A. Participants Feedback Participants used the content of the prototype for their own

interest. Participants feedback regarding the content of the prototype and its use was positive. Several positive feedback comments were received from Participants enrolled in the prototype. One Participants pointed out that “This tool are useful to me because you have a lot of important information in one place instead of searching through pages and pages to get what you want. It saves time and effort as well.” Another Participants said that “Some of the things that I really liked were the fact that you were able to post screen shots giving a clear idea of what the steps were. I also loved the fact that it was possible to add comments in case a question arose.” In addition to the use of these useful posts for assignments, it was interesting that the participants still requested more information and tips from the instructor regarding the project assignments.

Hence, a survey was conducted and a questionnaire is randomly distributed by using the online. The items were divided into four main categories creation, organization, distribution and search. Researchers agreed these elements are crucial for the knowledge and information visualization for the KMS. The survey was responded by 21 candidates as target including the staffs, local communities and alliances. By using rating style, the researchers build the items based on 5 values. The value 2 corresponds to “very little” improvement, 3 to “moderate” and 4 to “high” improvement. The full scale reaches from 1 (“worse”) to 5 (“very high”). The full result has shown by the table 2.

Table 2 : Summary of the survey analysis

creation organization distribution search

Level (Avarage)

4

4

3

3

B. Global Usage

This prototype is also available to any Internet users globally. It has been using by the people since the prototype was developed on December 2010. However, many people in the Malaysian community college world have consistently accessed this prototype to acquire knowledge even in this year 2011. This prototype can be achieved from anywhere over the world as long as they can reach the internet connection. An Internet user posted the comment: “I must choose this channel, thanks.” Thus, it is evident that this prototype effectively provides answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) for people all over the world especially for community college surrounding environment.

V. CONCLUSION A CMS may be perceived as an effective media for

transforming tacit knowledge not only for information technology but others fields of knowledge. To test the validity of the usefulness of using a CMS towards KMS was investigated in this research. Feedback from participants and analyzes of the data regarding the use of the prototype suggest that visual wiki can be an excellent tool that could be effectively used by people in community college when sharing and transferring to any knowledge. It provides an additional online two-way communication channel that is accessible to all Participants at any time they need to reference the contents of the prototype. To full fill the community college (CC) requirement of KM prototype can be a part of the KM system. Logically to control maybe over 24 million of Malaysia population of people to just use CMS as the KMS tool for community college’s environment is such possible.

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