Knowledge Management taught like Rashomon

As part of my pursuit of a master’s degree in Library and Information Science, I’m taking a course in Knowledge Management.  The teacher provided an overview of the course, whereby each of us will be blogging about different academic articles we have read about knowledge.  We’ll have to do at least 11 different blog posts, discussing 33 articles of our choice (from a set menu of articles naturally), and so it is very unlikely that any of us will choose the same 3 articles to discuss at the exact same time.  It strikes me that each of use will be discussing our (developing) views on knowledge management from different perspectives.  No one perspective will be right or wrong, they are just perspectives.  If you are a movie buff, you can see the reference to Rashomon.

Rashomon (羅生門 Rashōmon) is a 1950 Japanese period film directed by Akira Kurosawa,  If you missed it, then maybe you saw Jet Li in ‘Hero’.  If you didn’t see either of those, then this post will be more academic than visceral.  

I’m a big geek.  I have a degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and nuclear engineering.  You can’t spell geek without double ‘E’.  Not my saying but I wish it was.    I’m also a huge movie buff.  I like to talk in metaphors using movie scene dialog.  I was reading something my daughter posted about Star Wars and how the scenes about Luke teaching Kylo about the Force.  It was interesting to see this from a bunch of different perspectives in the same movie.

Rashomon tells the story of a murder in a meadow from three different perspectives.  The film never offers an objective truth of what really happened; instead preferring to let the narrators be as reliable (or unreliable) as our own perceptions allow.  In Star Wars, when Luke recalls checking on Kylo while he was sleeping, the lightsaber accidentally (?) activates.  Kylo wakes up and sees Luke and the lightsaber and believes that Luke is going to kill him.  Perfectly believable from Kylo’s point of view.  Luke says he didn’t mean to activate the lightsaber and suppressed the urge to kill Kylo but the damage was done.  A bunch of different perspectives there.

Our (re)telling of the various readings will end up much the same, I think.  None of us will have a perfect point of view.  Sharing them will likely lead to some interesting conversations overall.