Authors
Bill Cope is a Research Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois, where has been a faculty member since 2006. He is also Director of Common Ground Publishing, a company that develops mixed medium print and internet publishing software located in the Research Park at the University of Illinois. He is a former First Assistant Secretary in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs in the Australian Federal Government. His most recent books are edited collections: The Future of the Book in the Digital Age (Oxford: Chandos, 2006) and The Future of the Academic Journal (Oxford: Chandos, 2009). http://wwcope.com
Mary Kalantzis has been Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, since 2006. Before then she was Dean of the Faculty of Education, Language and Community Services at RMIT University in Melbourne, and President of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. With Bill Cope she is co-author or editor of: The Powers of Literacy (University of Pittsburg Press, 1993); Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures (Routledge, 2000); New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Ubiquitous Learning (University of Illinois Press, 2009). http://marykalantzis.com
Liam Magee is a Research Fellow at the Global Cities Research Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne. His research interests include the philosophy of technology, social research methods, and questions of knowledge representation and reasoning inherent in the semantic web. He is currently involved in a multi-disciplinary project exploring the application of semantic technologies to organisational reporting on sustainability.
Joseph M. Firestone is Managing Director and CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director and co-Instructor of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate Program, as well as Director of KMCI’s synchronous, real-time Distance Learning Program. He is also CKO of Executive Information Systems, Inc., a knowledge and information management consultancy.
Joe is author or co-author of more than 500 articles, blog posts, white papers and reports on knowledge management, policy analysis, political science, information technology (distributed knowledge management systems, enterprise knowledge portals, web, enterprise and KM 2.0), adaptive scorecards, risk intelligence, social science methodology and psychometrics. He has also written several books and papers: Knowledge Management and Risk Management: A Business Fable (Ark Group, 2008); Risk Intelligence Metrics: An Adaptive Metrics Center Industry Report (Wilmington, DE: KMCI Online Press, 2006); Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management (Burlington, MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003); Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management (Burlington, MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003); and Excerpt # 1 from The Open Enterprise (Wilmington, DE: KMCI Online Press, 2003); and co-edited ‘Has Knowledge Management Been Done’, special issue of The Learning Organization: An International Journal, 12, no. 2, April, 2005. Joe developed the websites http://www.dkms.com, http://www.kmci.org and http://www.adaptivemetricscenter.com, and the blog ‘All Life is Problem Solving’ at http://radio.weblogs.com/0135950 and http://www.kmci.org/ alllifeisproblemsolving. He has taught political science at graduate and undergraduate levels; he has a BA from Cornell University in government, and MA and PhD degrees in comparative politics and international relations from Michigan State University.
William (Bill) Hall began university in 1957 with a major in physics and subsequently transitioned to biology through biophysics (neurophysiology). As a biologist, Bill’s first interests were in ecosystems and the early evolution of life. His PhD in evolutionary biology (Harvard, 1973) focused on systematics and the evolution and roles of genetic systems in species formation. He also spent two postdoctoral years studying epistemology and scientific revolutions. His physics and biophysics background exposed him to early generation computers.
When he left academia in 1981, Bill purchased his first personal computer, and was fascinated from the outset by the rapid evolution of computers and how these new cognitive tools would change humanity. Between 1981 and 1989 Bill was employed in computer literacy, software and banking industries, and since 1990 until his retirement in 2007 he worked in the defence industry for a major engineering project management company in various documentation and knowledge management roles throughout the life-cycle of Australia’s largest defence contract.
In 2001 Bill started writing a book on technological revolutions in the coevolution of human cognition and tools for extending cognition, but could not make sense of the impacts of cognitive technology (e.g. computing) on social and organisational aspects of cognition. He felt there was a need to rethink organisation theory and the theory of organisational knowledge. To research this problem, in 2002 he returned part time to an academic research environment with an honorary fellowship in Monash University’s Knowledge Management Lab in the Faculty of Information Technology. In 2005 he moved to the University of Melbourne as (Hon.) National Fellow in the Australian Centre for Science, Innovation and Society, where he is also associated with the eScholarship Research Centre and the Engineering Learning Unit. In this last role Bill gives occasional guest lectures on engineering knowledge management.
Bill’s formal publications range from cytogenetics and evolutionary biology (where Cytogenetic and Genome Research has just published Bill’s 35-year retrospective review of around 100 papers by others following on from his PhD thesis) through practical knowledge management in the engineering environment and the theory of living systems, organisations and organisational knowledge management. Understanding and solving socio-technical problems and issues relating to the production and use of scientific and technical knowledge has remained a core thread of his long career within and outside the academic environment.
Gavan McCarthy is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. The position of Director was created in 2007 and builds on McCarthy’s previous academic work as part of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, first with the Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP; 1985–1999), and then with the Australian Science and Technology. During this time he has been at the forefront of the development of national information services and infrastructure to support the history of Australian science, technology, medicine and engineering through the use of the emerging digital technologies.
McCarthy is noted in Australia and overseas for his innovative and research-driven approach to the challenges posed by digital technologies for the support of scholarship and sustainable knowledge. In 1995 his work was recognised internationally, and he has since established a number of enduring collaborative partnerships, the link with Imperial College London being foremost. From 2002 until 2007 he worked as a consultant for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), where he developed a new conceptual approach to the immensely problematic issue of the long-term management of information about radioactive waste. This same epistemic approach to sustainable information infrastructure has led to many successful ARC projects either as a technical partner or more recently as a chief investigator. McCarthy was among the first humanities scholars to receive ARC funding to support information infrastructure development (1992–1994), and has been consistently successful in the years since. The most publicly successful of these projects was the collaborative partnership with the Australian National University (2004–2006) to transform the Australian Dictionary of Biography into an online research resource of world stature.
Richard Vines is Honorary Research Fellow at the eScholarship Research Centre structurally located within the library at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He has worked across a wide range of industries encompassing research and development, community services, wood and forest products, agribusiness, and environmental and international briefing program management. From 2000 until 2004 he was Consultant/Client Services Manager to AusIndustry and the Australian Printing Industries Association within the Enhanced Printing Industries Competitiveness Scheme. For Vines, this experience prised open some deep philosophical and practical questions about print and electronic convergence, some of which are explored in this book.
Subsequent to this Vines consulted and published on aspects of digital media convergence for a number of different clients. In 2008 he helped establish a small advocacy group within the Victorian Council of Social Service in order to focus attention on the problems of media convergence in the Victorian community services sector. Flowing from this advocacy work, the Victorian Office for the Community Sector has commissioned a number of research projects which, in principle, have the potential to lay a foundation for state and national reforms associated with burden reduction, service enhancement and coordination, records, archival and knowledge management practices.