Knowledge Management and Student Services

The connection between the knowledge that a university makes and distributes easily links with the ideas of knowledge management in technical communication. University organizations are often large and decentralized; campus departments make rich case studies for the technical communication researcher to study the university organization with regard to managing knowledge. Of particular interest is how the administrative functions of the university, situated in a knowledge environment, manage their own knowledge individually, organizationally, and structurally.

A Smidgen of Knowledge History
The invention of the assembly line in the early 1900s revolutionized the way that people worked. Workers who used to be individual craftsmen became groups of factory workers, and people transitioned from making individual products to working as a part of a large organization to produce products in large quantities. Knowledge in the Industrial Age was held by the factory owners who understood the big picture of the many tasks while the workers understood their specific job. The Industrial Age moved to the service, or information, economy after World War II. Again, workers transitioned, this time from making products to delivering services. One illustrative example about the transition to the service economy is described in Central Works in Technical Communication, edited by Johnson-Eilola and Selber. It used to be that to bake a cake the baker would purchase the raw ingredients and bake the cake using the knowledge of how to measure and combine the ingredients to make a cake. Once manufacturing began, consumers could buy a cake in a box, follow a few directions without knowing the whole process, and bake a cake. In the service economy, the consumer can go to the grocery store or a bakery and purchase a cake, remaining unaware of the cake-making process. Managing the knowledge in today's organizations can give organizations a competitive edge in providing goods and services to their customers.

Knowledge Management in the Student-as-consumer Environment

In this service economy, also known as the Information Age, students expect value for their money. They want excellence in their education. They want services for their tuition dollars. They want jobs after graduation because they pay “your salary.” How is this intangible service, the transfer of knowledge, measured? Colleges and universities struggle with this idea in a customer-centered environment and define their missions using meaningless words, like excellence. Bill Readings points out in University in Ruins that, “As an integrating principle, excellence has the singular advantage of being entirely meaningless, or to put it more precisely, non-referential” (p. 22). The standard of excellence is not able to be defined consistently; it is not quantifiable in a standard way, yet all of the departments in a university must manage to keep customers, students, happy. In the field of technical communication, this user-centered focus is a goal much like the goal to keep students happy as consumers; after all, either a student or a user of a website, product, or service can take their dollars elsewhere. But as in design and usability work for technical communicators, administrators in colleges and universities face similar tensions between what the customer wants and what the customer needs. What the user says might not be what is best for the user. The same is true for the student.

Students enter formative years of development when they enter college. The experience at colleges and universities are transformative for students, whether they are traditionally aged or adult students. While the developmental needs may differ based on a number of factors, including the age of the student, developmental needs are still there, just the same. The response of a university professional versed in student developmental theories cannot always align with what the student-as-consumer may want.

Student Services Professionals and Knowledge Management

Universities are places where knowledge management is particularly important since higher education is a knowledge factory, of sorts. Universities deal in the creation, production, and distribution of knowledge to students in classrooms, through research, and using co-curricular opportunities for learning outside of tradition academic spaces. It is in these co-curricular spaces, outside of the classroom, where knowledge management is examined. The knowledge work of student services professionals, applying student development theory to practice, is like that of knowledge management in technical communication. Contextual action using information is applied, communicated, shaped, and understood. Toward the goal of holistically educating the student to become knowledgeable in their disciplines and contribute as good citizens to campus and society, student service professionals can investigate knowledge management as a leadership strategy to deliver quality services to students.

Defining Knowledge Management in the Student Services Organizations

With decentralized structures, universities can use knowledge management strategies to deliver seamless services to students. A second benefit to applying knowledge management strategies to student services information is that with student leaders in place and young professionals in front-line positions in organizations, codified information that is well documented and made explicit will preserve the progress that a department has made in serving students. In a student services organization, there are three places where information lives: with the individual, in the department, and in the structure of the organization.

Individual Knowledge

Individual knowledge resides with an individual staff member in a student services organization and is the least stable type of information. If the staff member leaves the organization, knowledge leaves with that person if it not shared with other staff members or written down. Without distributed knowledge in practice or in writing, the staff member’s departure leaves an information gap in the organization. Knowledge management strategies for capturing information from that staff member’s experiences benefits students, remaining staff members, and the university as a whole.

Departmental Knowledge

Situated between individual knowledge and structural knowledge, departmental knowledge is more stable than individual, but less so than structural. Departmental knowledge is shared knowledge that exists in practice. Strong team relationships on the student services staff or in student organizations allow for the transmission of knowledge among the group members. This social sharing of information can be replicated in the event that a staff member or student leaves the organization. Organizational practices survive because the group knows some or most of the knowledge that the departing staff member possessed.

Organizational Knowledge

This is the most stable of the types of knowledge. Organizational knowledge lives in the systems, tools, and artifacts of a student services staffs functions. Documented information made explicit for anyone to use or read characterizes this type of knowledge. In Hughes’ article, “Moving from Information Transfer to Knowledge Creation: A New Value Proposition for Technical Communications,” the author describes system-level knowledge:

Organizational knowledge is knowledge that resides at the enterprise level. It is the knowledge that is embedded in the processes, practices, tools, and repositories within the enterprise. As such, it is the most durable, being the least dependent on the persistence of persons and personalities (p. 279).

These levels of knowledge management should be considered further in a student services organizational setting. Using ethnographic methods that support a genre-tracing methodology, knowledge management in student services can be investigated at the individual, departmental, and organizational levels to better understand how student services staffs improve services and operations using knowledge management theories and practices.

Follow Up to the Unlikely Mash-Up of HTML5 and Student Affairs

The ideas of HTML5 and student affairs take time to make the connections in my brain, and I found myself thinking of my post from yesterday about how these two topics, HTML5 and student affairs work, continue to connect:

Tech comm and student affairs professionals value accessibility, diversity, and inclusion

Another place where I was able to make connections between HTML5 and the field of student affairs is in the way that the ideals of accessibility, diversity, and inclusion are promoted. In his book about HTML5, Keith advocates the use of graceful degradation in design where needed, but calls for the use of assistive technology wherever possible; to use these techniques as standard pieces of design. At colleges and universities, there are offices and services dedicated to those who require assistive technologies for learning. In the physical and technological classrooms, this is a natural place where the two fields meet.

This idea of access is wider than the use of assistive technologies and writing good code so that users with disabilities can view or hear web pages. Both fields struggle to provide the kind of access that all people need when it comes to diversity and technology, though both value inclusion. In universities, graduation rates are still lower for people of color than for white students, as reported in the Texas Tribune and reprinted in the January 1, 2011 New York Times article, Universities Are Challenged as Demographics Shift. "Nationally, 52 percent of Hispanic students and 58 percent of black students are unable to earn a bachelor’s degree in six years, compared with 40 percent of white students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics." For student affairs professionals, the need to provide services to students is great and offices of diversity and inclusion can include services that are technological in nature. Similarly, the professionals in our university offices that serve our students of color, and beyond just the offices dedicated to the delivery of services, should understand that today's students communicate and learn differently. As my Illinois Institute of Technology college Chris de Kok said today, "Gone are the days of the laptop on the desk from the nineties. People are using mobile devices all over campus to tap into our services. We need to be ready for that level of access."

HTML5 and Student Affairs: An Unlikely Mash-up That Just Might Work

I am reading HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith and I feared that I was at opposite ends of my dissertation mash-up topics of technical communication and student affairs. While I am certain that, in general, technical communication principles and practices can improve performance of student affairs professionals, I struggle with how writing and designing web pages improves service to students as a student affairs professional. Maybe this is one place where my mash-up does not work. On the other hand, here are some thoughts as to why it might:

Both fields value openness and freedom and I can express my leadership style through these principles

Using digital communication tools is imperative for me in my position, and by learning to communicate digitally I can round up, organize, and deliver information in ways that are open and helpful to my staff. The information available to my staff needs to be be malleable, and this is where my professional values as a student affairs professional mesh with values in the open source and technical communication communities. Open source software is a philosophy that frees software documentation and makes it available for users to use, change, and redistribute. The GNU Project defines this freedom: "'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'” Finding the commonality if the professional values helps me share information with my staff and encourage them to use the information, change the information and redistribute the information. One practical application of this is creating a wiki for training for the student employees. While there will be a page or two without writing permissions, emergency procedures for example, the wiki will be open for students and staff to use, create, edit, and change content. It allows us to push information in a more real-time fashion, something that students value.

Taking classes in technical communication has helped me to treat information differently. Information is a resource that is essential for the success of my organization in the McCormick Tribune Campus Center. With over 10,000 events and six-times as many "touches" to events in any part of the event-cycle, I need people and systems that can communicate what they know at critical moments for information delivery in ways that are easily understandable.

Working at a tech school, this knowledge helps me find common ground with students

In my role as a director of a campus center at a a technical institution, my students talk in code all of the time. And it is not just HTML code in which they speak. At a tech school, there are conversations about science-fiction, fantasy, video-gaming, mathematics, music, and many other intellectual pursuits that I am less familiar with, having come from a liberal education background.

By taking classes in writing and designing for the web, I have something in common with my students. This is no small thing in common, either. By taking classes, not only do we have an intellectual platform that we share, but as an administrator, I find that I am in tune with students' schedules even more. Sure my life has always revolved around the academic calendar, but when I am in classes, it does so even more. I am well aware of the stressful times of the semester and can balance that with expectations for staff while still challenging them to balance all that they have committed to.

In general, digital literacy improves my ability to communicate and helps me to do my job

My education in the area of technical communication, it opens new theoretical doors and I am able to view my student affairs position differently. We write considerable amounts in our positions in student affairs. In addition to the many e-mails we write on a daily basis, we write training documents, position descriptions, monthly reports, justification documents, and much more. By investigating theories of design, audience, knowledge management, and usability, I can apply this to what I do in my job. I can be more persuasive and advocate for my area. I can be clearer in my communication. I can relate concepts to my staff in ways that are understandable.

This semester, I will take a class that will help me create web applications. As I read the HTML5 book, I am taking notes about what apps I could create that may help the employees or the users of the student center. Writing digitally can help me improve my services for the students, faculty/staff, and community users of the campus and conference services.