All ETDs from UAB

Advisory Committee Chair

Murat M Tanik

Advisory Committee Members

Varadraj Gurupur

Karthikeyan Lingasubramanian

David E Robbins

B Earl Wells

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

2016

Degree Name by School

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) School of Engineering

Abstract

Knowledge management consists of four key processes, generation, distribution, storage, and application. Today, with the simultaneous growth of World Wide Web and usage of computing devices, including smart phones, tablets, and laptops, knowledge is also being generated and modified by knowledge-contributors, labeled mentors. Output of this process makes its way into various sources, such as wikis, blogs, and Question- and-answer websites. New storage technologies are continuously being evolved in order to efficiently handle huge volumes of this kind of unstructured data. However, distribu-tion of knowledge to knowledge-consumers, labeled mentees, has not been evolved to keep up with the exponential growth in generation and storage. Since all four phases of knowledge management are relatively interdependent, sub-optimal growth in only some of the phases causes an imbalance to the knowledge management effort as a whole. This results in problems like disconnected learning, inadequate knowledge summary, repeti-tion of efforts, and limited recommendations. To address this limitation in knowledge management, we introduced a framework for collaborative knowledge management using distributed mentoring where individual knowledge of all participants is collected into a shared knowledge repository and systematically transformed into visual community knowledge by collaborative efforts of both mentors and mentees. We apply the frame-work in educational, organizational, and online settings. Architectural design to imple-ment the framework along with the results derived from case study of an online commu-nity are presented.

Included in

Engineering Commons

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