Thanks for all the positive comments about these posts, and especially to Steve Weissman, who contributed this short summary, which has a pleasing conciseness I failed to achieve in the original pieces: ‘… KM is a business practice, e-learning a teaching (learning) technique, online publishing a distribution mechanism. The commonality? The underlying enabling technologies for each are largely the same.’

In my previous post on this subject I addressed the similarities and differences between the worlds of online publishing and knowledge management. In this post I’d like to talk a little about how the worlds of knowledge management and e-learning often collide, before discussing how both relate to online publishing. I recently helped to edit an article on unifying e-learning and knowledge management for a learning and communications company. The article addressed the silo problem within large organisations that divides the two disciplines of Knowledge Management (KM for short) and Training and stops them functioning in useful collaboration. Collaborating usefully is something which, on the face of it, these two disciplines ought to be able to do. After all, both have responsibilities in a similar area: i.e. in what an employee knows, and how that employee can be helped to do a particular job better by knowing new or different things. Continue reading →