Imagine if we could take all the knowledge we come across in a day and store it where it could be easily accessed.
That vision is becoming more real for students as applications such as BrainX offer individuals the possibility of capturing printed or digital content to be retrieved for future review. With BrainX, students can highlight key concepts on a website, in a book, or on a printed document to be stored and organized for later retrieval. The application then helps them review the information and test themselves on the content to prepare for exams.
This form of knowledge organizer is a promising first step toward helping transform personal learning and development with KM. However, there are still many gaps to fill. For example, this particular application does not address tacit knowledge that resides in people's heads or individual experiences. How revolutionary it would be to easily capture and categorize the key concepts from a professor's lecture with the highlights from an associated lab experiment! It also remains to be seen if any application successfully helps students synthesize all the knowledge they accumulate over time and across subjects.
Given the overwhelming amounts of information available today, it would not be surprising if more students move toward some form of personal KM to help them organize their learnings. The more challenging next step for all learners will be to use KM to apply what they are learning.
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