In my application for this Board position, I noted that I had a strong interest in a topic called, broadly, Knowledge Management. While we may have entered a “digital” or “Internet” age, what we really have entered is a “knowledge sharing” age facilitated by our new digital suite of tools.  Though having enjoyed many years of learning, most of what I know I learned from others who were willing to share, without much compensation, just for the love of it.

As a result, unless one happens to be in a field where researching new ideas in deep technical subjects is part of the job, most of us have a thin shell of individually unique knowledge wrapped around a large volume of core knowledge built with the help of our genetic background, our parents, teachers, friends, and coworkers, not to mention the many authors and speakers whom we’ll never know, followed in a long succession of folks behind them.

This is not some incredibly new insight.  It is not original and what follows isn’t either, but it will explain at bit more why I am writing this blog.

We cannot assume that what we know is somehow ours alone to have and hold.  Because we have largely built our lives and ourselves on the shoulders of those who came before us, we have an obligation to be a foundation for others in their process of building on the collective knowledge of society.

This is not to say that we cannot profit from our efforts to leverage knowledge, as many do, but when the subject IS knowledge and, in this case, education, I feel a strong obligation to share with others so that they can learn from what I learn.

Knowledge Management is about collecting, organizing, sharing, and otherwise making more broadly useful the knowledge that each of us has and that we can contribute to a larger goal.  Digital technologies, such as blogs, only facilitate the process; they are not the process.

The curious part of this is that we often do not share our knowledge because we believe it’s somehow our secret sauce, our legacy, our stock in trade, whatever — but some of the most influential people freely share their knowledge with others in the hope that they can raise the level of discussion and progress.  I’d bet few Nobel Prize winners are millionaires, yet collectively they have contributed monumentally to the knowledge and wealth of society, and they have enabled much of the world we know now or will know.  They may not be wealthy, but they DO share their wealth with all of us.

I will never be a Nobel Prize winner, but I hope I am doing my part in building them and other leaders who may someday come to the same realization — that knowledge is most valuable when shared.

So that’s a bit more about why I write this blog.  To close I’ll note that EduBlog Awards publishes an annual list of top-rated bloggers in multiple categories of educational blogging, but guess which category of blogging is missing?  Visit and see.