When I was a tourguide at Rutgers (part of my undergrad experience), I learned an interesting (though possibly apocryphal) story about how the sidewalks were planned on the Livingston College campus. Apparently, the university deliberately refrained from putting down any sidewalks for the first several years. (For those who don’t know Livingston College, there are no roads inside the campus; hence there are no obvious paths for sidewalks.) Instead, the planners waited to see where students wore tracks in the mud from their frequent comings and goings. They then laid sidewalk in a pattern that closely resembled those student-created paths.
I often think of KM the same way. More often than not, the goal is not so much to figure out how people should or would use knowledge as it is how they do use it. Once we have figured out how people think then we can lay the sidewalk and save them the energy of slogging through the mud every time.
Which brings me to the e-Literate web site. (more…)