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About KMi
Wordle: KMi.open.ac.uk
The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was set up in 1995 in recognition of the need for the Open University to be at the forefront of research and development in a convergence of areas that impacted on the OU's very nature: Cognitive and Learning Sciences, Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Technologies, and Multimedia. We chose to call this convergence Knowledge Media.

Knowledge Media is about the processes of generating, understanding and sharing knowledge using several different media, as well as understanding how the use of different media shape these processes.

KMi operates with reference to a number of basic tenets, which define the context in which we formulate and pursue our research objectives:

Strategic Threads

Our research is aligned with a number of broad strategic threads, currently Future Internet, Knowledge Management, Multimedia & Information Systems, Narrative Hypermedia, New Media Systems, Semantic Web & Knowledge Services and Social Software.

Learning

In keeping with a lifelong learning perspective, our research agenda takes a broad definition of learning, embracing distance learning, learning in the classroom, and learning in the workplace.


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Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.