The idea of using Paulo Freire to sniff out why knowledge blogs (or “klogs” as KM geeks call them) make for effective KM practices in the workplace makes my head spin but, oddly enough, it works:
The late Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator wrestling with the problem of how to bring democracy to a colonized and oppressed people who had never in the better part of their cultural memory known anything like democracy. Literacy was not the only problem. Empowerment and responsibility for self-governance had to come from somewhere. Rather than accept traditional models of teaching and learning, Freire saw that those models, such as the “banking model of education,” were actually working against the larger goals of democracy. From these realizations, he developed a Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his most famous work, and also the concept of “critical consciousness” or “conscientiza袯,” the goal of his model of education. This concept involved being an active participant in one’s life, not merely a spectator, making choices rather than oppressed by the illusion of choice. This he saw as a key to an open society (Freire, 1973).
If worker brain power is the warehouse capital of the Information Age, it certainly seems reasonable for a company to develop its own intellectual and knowledge-based assets, also as a way to preserve and document processes and policies developed by employees, the information products of employees, to guard against the loss of these assets should a worker leave the company. Worker intellectual development, continuing education, and collaboration all seem to speak to the value to a company of fostering an active and thinking work force. Intranet klogs, which dialogically explore aspects of one’s work product, team projects, processes, and so on, would seem to be a valuable tool to refine such workplace assets. It would appear, then, that Paulo Freire’s goals and the goals of those creating software to support workplace knowledge management would be in alignment.
Basically, the author is suggesting that Freire’s Marxist power-to-the-people goals are in perfect harmony with creative abrasion, disintermediation, and related practices that help organizations get more access to and use of the knowledge in its workers’ heads. It gives an entirely new meaning to the title “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”
Shhhh. Don’t tell the guys in the corner office.