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Tech Report kmi-98-03 Abstract


Managing Persistent Discourse: Organizational Goals and Digital Texts
Techreport ID: kmi-98-03
Date: 1998
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, Simeon Yates, Simon Buckingham Shum and Jane Perrone
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Prior to digital communications media, texts were primarily judged using hidden but assumed institutional practices (e.g., journal peer review processes, editorial mediation). Increasingly, digital communications media can make these previously invisible discursive practices visible in a persistent medium. Doing so transforms these discourses into texts where they are subject to: (1) a reader's interpretation and judgment and (2) explicit manipulation by writers or publishers seeking to influence this interpretative process. In this article, we focus on managed persistent discourse where explicit practices and roles are adopted within an institution to actively manipulate and transform digitally-preserved discourse, with the aim of influencing readers' interpretative processes in ways that reflect organizational goals. We examine in detail two cases political manifestos in the UK and an interactive journal with on-line peer review to illustrate these new roles and practices, and the different organizational goals the managed discourse is used to support.
 
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Knowledge Management is...


Knowledge Management
Creating learning organisations hinges on managing knowledge at many levels. Knowledge can be provided by individuals or it can be created as a collective effort of a group working together towards a common goal, it can be situated as "war stories" or it can be generalised as guidelines, it can be described informally as comments in a natural language, pictures and technical drawings or it can be formalised as mathematical formulae and rules, it can be expressed explicitly or it can be tacit, embedded in the work product. The recipient of knowledge - the learner - can be an individual or a work group, professionals, university students, schoolchildren or informal communities of interest.
Our aim is to capture, analyse and organise knowledge, regardless of its origin and form and make it available to the learner when needed presented with the necessary context and in a form supporting the learning processes.