week 6. Reflection on Knowledge sharing in Higher Ed

Today, I found a paper about networked information/knowledge in higher education settings. Kumar et al. (2024) analyzed how people in higher education shared knowledge using ICT after reviewing the literature. They explain it with three sections:
- Teaching and learning: Students and educators used cloud-based platforms and social media to learn collaboratively and share knowledge. However, the more shared materials students gathered, the lower their performance was, and the more they tended to avoid challenging tasks, as they thought they had learned something even by downloading them. 
- University governance: ICT did not really enhance shared knowledge. It depended on leadership and the organizational culture.
- Research: ICT helped global collaboration.
In this research, the takeaway is that the educational effects really depend on how learners use the materials or tools, not the materials themselves. It reminds me of my college days, when almost every student shared materials from senior students to prepare for. I had some, but they did not work very well for my learning process, so I created the new materials myself. Some of my friends revised or recreated the shared material to study, while others just memorized it or read it a few times. The exam results did not reflect how many materials we had. Someone who recreated or revised the materials received a good grade, while the one who focused on gathering the materials and just read them a few times did not. What mattered was not the shared material; rather, it was how we used it, which could be extended to EdTechs (Salomon, 2016)


References
- Kumar, N., Cook, E. J., Fayda‐Kinik, F. S., & Maisuradze, L. (2024). ICTs influence on knowledge sharing in higher education: A pre‐AI systematic literature review. European Journal of Education, 59(4), e12803.
- Salomon, G. (2016). It’s not just the tool but the educational rationale that counts⁠. In E. Elstad (Ed.), Educational Technology and Polycontextual Bridging (pp. 149-161). Rotterdam: SensePublishers.

Comments

  1. thnJune 18, 2026 at 8:07 PM

    I really like your observation and takeaway that learning is ultimately an active process of engaging with materials deeply and using them to develop further thinking. Your point also resonates with current discussions about technology and digitalization in education, which is a major topic in Germany. Many educators emphasize that digital competence is just as important as access to technology. Simply providing laptops and computers is not enough, although even that remains a challenge in many schools due to limited funding.
    (Side note: Collecting materials and assuming that this alone is enough to learn something felt very relatable. It reminds me of my ever-growing collection of interesting research papers that I intend to read someday... hopefully sooner rather than later! 😄)

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