CPE/CSC 581-S07 Assignment 1: Knowledge Management Tools

In this assignment, your task is to investigate and evaluate one or a family of tools for knowledge management. You can either find a KM tool on your own, or use one from the list of knowledge management tools. This list also has links to reviews by students from previous quarters. Due to the size of the class this quarter, you can work on this assignment individually, or together with one other student.

Your write-up on the tool will be integrated into an overall Web page, so please use the template provided. It is an XML file that closely mirrors the structure below, and contains more information about the specific aspects to be discussed. There is a corresponding Cascading Style Sheet file with simple formatting instructions.

If you have some experience with XML, XSLT and related technologies, you can also help me develop a better way to organize assignments like this in lieu of a tool evaluation. For example, it would be interesting to set up a data base with an online form as front end, or it could be integrated with the Wiki.

Tool Description

What is the purpose of the tool? Who are the intended users?

Addition of Knowledge

Organization of Knowledge

Visualization of Knowledge

Knowledge Retrieval

Usage of Knowledge

Knowledge and Collaboration

Knowledge and Organizational Memory

Other Issues

Grading Guidelines

This assignment contributes up to 25 points to the overall assignments score. The score will be determined by the following criteria:

• knowledge of subject matter (does the author demonstrate a good grasp of the topic)
• evidence, (does the author present facts, examples, or other material that supports the arguments, and are the sources cited)
• complexity of the tool investigated, (what is the scope of functionality available through the tool)
• thoroughness of the evaluation, (are all relevant features of the tool examined)
• accuracy (is the material presented correct, consistent, and complete)
• organization and readability of the write-up, (is the paper well organized and easy to follow)
• presentation and appearance (is the appearence of the paper of professional quality, e.g. without spelling or grammatical errors)

For a high score, your evaluation should probably be at least three pages long.

Topic Selection

If possible, I would prefer to avoid evaluations of the same tool by multiple people, or at the least coordinate their work so that they cover different aspects. To do this, please create a thread on the respective Blackboard forum. Whoever creates the thread for a topic first "owns" that topic, so it can be beneficial to make your selection early. Since evaluations from previous quarters will be at least two years old, you can also select a topic that somebody else did back then.

Submission

The deadline for this assignment is two weeks after the distribution. It should be submitted via the Blackboard "Discussion Board" feature; I will set up a discussion forum for it. Please submit your document in the XML format specified in the assignment description. As the name of the file, please use the tool name followed by your last name, so something like "Tool-Kurfess.xml". If you want to, you can also generate an HTML version from the XML file, and post that as well. An easy way to do that is to view your XML file in a Web browser that can handle XML (Firefox is the one I use), and save it as an HTML file.

Please note that submissions to the discussion forum are accessible to all participants in the class. I am doing this on purpose so that students can find out what topics other students find interesting. This may also present an ethical problem: Some may be tempted to get inspiration or more from material already submitted. You can minimize potential problems by submitting your assignment only a short time before the deadline. And of course I am assuming that all the participants in this class behave in an ethical and professional manner.