Computer Supported Co-operative Work and Knowledge Management

History / context for these pages

These pages were originally produced as on-line content for a short series of lectures to undergraduates at Sogn og Fjordane University College in Norway. The theme of the lectures was an exploration of the links between Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW) and Knowledge Management (KM).

Overview of the material

In each of the pages below you will find the material needed to support one, one hour lecture. Each page contains (a) some explanatory text (b) some related material from books and journals and (c) some links to related material on web pages or in on line documents. You are not required to real all of the material on each page although you should read the explanatory text (point (a)) and the recommended material contained in the next section before the lectures. The additional material (points (b) and (c)) is primarily intended for those students who wish to look at these topics in greater depth.

If you wish to research these topics in their your time, you might wish to use the MIS links page as a starting point for this.

Overview

The following texts should provide you with a general overview of the key themes of these lectures:

• CSCW: History and Focus
  This paper provides an overview of CSCW and groupware. It ties the emergence of CSCW in the 1980s to the growing interest of product developers in supporting networked groups and the emergence of common interests with those working in the fields of management information systems, the social sciences and other disciplines.

• The Duality of Knowledge
  This paper should give a overview of the differing views of what the "knowledge" that is managed in Knowledge Management can be. It will also introduce the terms hard and soft knowledge that will be used in the lectures and touch upon the notion of a Community of Practice.

Lectures

The links below will take you directly to the lecture concerned. Alternatively, you can follow each lecture in sequence by using the links at the top and bottom of each page.

• (1) Knowledge Management and Distributed Collaborative Work
  This lecture introduces a particular form of CSCW known as Distributed Collaborative Work (DCW) and its relationship to KM. It identifies two categories of DCW, Hot and Cold DCW and explores two views of Knowledge, Hard and Soft Knowledge. These concepts are used in the following lectures to explore the relationship between KM and DCW in greater detail.

• (2) Knowledge Management and Virtual Teams
  This lecture looks in greater detail at the relationship between Knowledge Management and Virtual Teams. It briefly explores some of the various definition of virtual teams and proposes a working definitions of the term based on the notion of a task group. This is then used to examine how concepts from KM might be used to support such teams.

• (3) Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice
  This lecture looks in greater detail at the relationship between Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice (CoPs). It briefly explores the development of CoPs as a form of KM and discusses some of the problems that these groups pose for DCW. It concludes by introducing the notion of a Network of Practice (NoP), which might prove more appropriate for distributed working.

• (4) Knowledge Management and Telework
  This lecture looks in greater detail at the relationship between Knowledge Management and Telework. The notion of telework in its various forms is examined and two forms of telework (static and mobile) are identified. The relationship between telework and KM is explored in greater detail using a study of copier machine repairers.