Knowledge Economy: Linchpin of ASEAN Integration A View from ...

featureis needed to fully understand the nature of knowledge sharingbehaviour of the academic staff and students to allow us to see thedependencies that exist between other factors affecting knowledgesharing as the current study is not able to do so decisively. As itstands, it is likely that efforts in policy recommendations that attemptto alter instruction or curriculum in educational reform effort thatcould improve knowledge sharing capability in Org B will likely faceskepticism from the academic staff and students unless accompaniedby explanation about how assessment will also be altered or is not abarrier, bearing in mind that the bulk of the A-level examination is setby the external board. This recognition means thinking about howothers can get involved in producing the identities of the participantsand the value they should hold towards knowledge sharing. Thissuggests that a deeper understanding of the topic be explored tobroaden the investigation initiated by this study.All rights reserved, Sage, 1994All rights reserved, Jossey-Bass, 2001It is also interesting to note that most of the staff teaching inOrg C were mostly former students of the institutions. As such theywere feisty loyal to the school because they were brought up by thisschool and they understood what the students had gone through.DISCUSSIONTaking the insights gained from this paper, it is apparent that theacademic staff’s and students’ knowledge sharing practices varieddue to the different arrangements of the workplace/field experiencesettings as well as the differences in the ways participants madesense of their various encounters in these settings. To put them in acontinuum, Org A’s academic staff role can be seen at the extremeend of the continuum. They typically viewed their role as primarilyupholding the standards of PBL rather than realising individualpotential, with learners responsible to a far greater extent for theirown learning. It was found that Org B’s academic staff generally feltthat their primary responsibility lay with their students’ academicwelfare, with them being the guardians who were responsible for“spoon-feeding” their students through the conventional didacticlecture-tutorial approach with “testable” knowledge. This approachnevertheless, encourages the function of disseminating informationand demonstrating methods and therefore, tends to promotelearning by accumulation rather than promoting a collaborativeclimate for knowledge sharing to excel. The academic staff in OrgC meanwhile generally saw their roles as one that shifted fromacademic communicators to that of advisers and mentors, wheretheir tasks were to help their learners achieve the working andlearning goals that they had set out and only secondarily, to act asacademic authorities for their learners.The type of assessment structures of academic staff and thestudents’ perception of knowledge sharing practice were alsoapparent. As was seen from the findings in this study, the “taskcenteredness”and “activity-centeredness” in Org A and C requiredthe participants to draw on other learners’ diverse backgrounds,prior knowledge and networks to solve their problems. This meantthat participants needed to organise the subject matter around thetask of solving the problem and not the discipline. In this manner,significant interdependence promoted active sharing, collaboration,cooperation and coordination. Conversely, although group work waspromoted under the revised curriculum in Org B, given that the largeproportion of the assessment was still largely based on individualevaluation, with academic staff accountable to school’s ranking.This competition appeared to constrain knowledge sharing amongstudents in Org B.LIMITATIONSThis study is not without limitations. Two general caveats are worthmentioning at this point. First, it is worth highlighting that this studysought to obtain the portrayals of the academic staff and studentsin ways that revealed the “insider” rather than some external or objectivevoice. Those were unique views on the context describedand that they were no more and no less than the self-reported viewsof the academic staff and students who were approached for thestudy. Hence, findings from this inquiry cannot be generalised toacademic staff’s or students’ experiences in other institutions. Nevertheless,such understanding can help stimulate thoughts on thebarriers to knowledge sharing in other post-secondary educationalinstitutions with similar characteristics. Second, as this study reliedon self-report data, it may very well be that participants perceivedfactors within their control and those that showed them in a positivelight as being motivators whereas they perceived factors out oftheir control as opposed to factors that showed them in a negativelight as being inhibitors of knowledge sharing.IMPLICATIONSThis study provides some starting points for future research. Theexistence of differences in terms of knowledge sharing behaviour dueto the assessment method employed and its associated teaching andlearning practices across the three institutions, for example, raisesmore questions such as, which type of curriculum is desirable forknowledge sharing, given that the participants’ knowledge sharingpractices have been shown to be entangled by their institutions’representational production of what is most valued (i.e., what theassessment values).As the insights gained showed that knowledge sharing iseffectively a complex social practice, a systemic approach to researchCONCLUSIONIn this paper, I have attempted to present my rendering of the natureof knowledge sharing, grounded in the accounts of academic staffand students from three selected public post-secondary institutionsin Singapore. Documenting the thoughts of these participantsprovides a window into the complex social negotiations in operation inknowledge sharing practices in Singapore’s educational institutions.The insights found from these participants’ account from differinginstitutional types provide a good staging ground of the influenceson using student assessment in promoting/constraining knowledgesharing practices in their institutions. The insights from the studyalso provide a first small step towards understanding why knowledgesharing works for some educational institutional types, but not forothers. This could be useful in informing curriculum designers,planners and developers about the crucial enactment aspects ofthe curriculum and its relations to knowledge sharing practices. 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