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'explicit' knowledge across the whole of the UK. In a sample of more than 1300
employees, key benefits were identified as:
· value through saving time
· keeping up to date with current thinking
· innovations
· sharing good practice and avoiding duplication of work
· developing ideas
· carbon footprint reduction and other environmental savings
· induction to new roles and staff development
· relationship building. (IDeA November 2009: 5)
In education, to change teachers', academics' and researchers' professional practice
is not a task to be undertaken lightly, yet the benefits (for countries which can forge
new ways of working) will be significant. Many practitioners and research generators
will be members of professional communities. Improving the knowledge base of such
professional communities may improve professional practice across a whole sector.
Such collaboration would require the development of mutual trust and shared objec-
tives in improving the quality of the knowledge and evidence base.
Conclusions
Web 2.0 technologies and knowledge-management approaches provide opportuni-
ties to develop more effective ways of undertaking educational research, publishing
research and creative opportunities for new ways of working between practitioners,
academics and policy-makers. Using Web 2.0 technologies for online networking
and knowledge management (finding, using, sharing, creating and managing knowl-
edge), teachers could easily access relevant research evidence to inform their practice.
In the UK, depressingly, major national knowledge-management initiatives
undertaken by the numerous education agencies in the UK have resulted in a pleth-
ora of small networks with significant management and development costs, a lack of
sustainability as the networks are linked with time-limited projects, and fragmenta-
tion of energies. Without any coherent, joined-up 'portal' to access such networks,
the result is a fragmentation of what is available and lack of inter-operability. This
means that the potential of e-networking to improve professional practice is not real-
ized. This could be easily redressed by providing a 'one point of entry' approach.
Figure 10.4 referred to earlier provides a minimum specification for an e-
infrastructure to improve the quality of educational research, its relevance and timeli-
ness. To realize this vision requires the allocation of resources, coupled with the devolu-
tion of the management of such an e-infrastructure to professional networks in order to
ensure freedom of speech and open discussion and exchange of ideas. The online Edu-
cation Communities solution (Figures 10.2 and 10.3) shows new ways of working. The
next step in improving the quality, relevance and timeliness of educational research
really does require some central coordination at national levels. Developing individual
country systems, which could be linked up internationally, would require the work of
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