Session
Education and Development
Description
In setting the institutional vision for University for Business and Technology in 2001, founder Dr. Edmond Hajrizi sought to educate Kosovo students to become active contributors to the society and in the workplace, within the country, the Balkans region, and beyond. The UBT Knowledge Center initiative extends the founding vision of national development through higher education. Since local knowledge, identity, and learning are necessarily situated, Kosovar students, faculty, staff, and administrators serve as topical experts and international educators from Sweden and the United States serve as design facilitators. Participatory design commenced in April 2017 when international faculty from Sweden and the United States co-taught a graduate level course, Information Systems Analysis, Design, and Modelling, at the Pristina campus. Working with UBT administrators, directors, managers, and librarians, students worked in teams to co-design three essential parts of a holistic Knowledge Center ecosystem: a digital environment to advance local knowledge visibility, an organizational environment to enhance boundary crossing collaboration, and a digital academic library environment to enable discovery of and access to published academic scholarship. Following these ‘learn by doing’ instructional activities, exploratory knowledge management discussions produced a Knowledge Center concept paper in July 2017, with funding from the Fulbright Specialist Program. The white paper recognizes the social context of learning – that knowledge is acquired and understood through action, interaction, and sharing with others. It thereby anticipates the social relationships necessary for information exchange and knowledge creation, oftentimes enabled by technology, for knowledge incubation in the university and beyond. This collaborative design approach anticipates continuing to convene multidisciplinary conversations and to integrate interdisciplinary coursework into realization of the University’s founding knowledge vision which recognizes the critical importance of developing new and more complex ways for connecting people, information, and technology in the university and with the society. In response, the UBT Knowledge Center aims to foster knowledge creation which curates and preserves intellectual, cultural, national, and regional resources for future generations.
Keywords:
knowledge center, higher education, Fulbright Specialist Program
Session Chair
Mary M. Somerville
Session Co-Chair
Karoly Nagy
Proceedings Editor
Edmond Hajrizi
ISBN
978-9951-437-66-0
First Page
5
Last Page
11
Location
Durres, Albania
Start Date
28-10-2017 11:00 AM
End Date
28-10-2017 12:30 PM
DOI
10.33107/ubt-ic.2017.109
Recommended Citation
Hajrizi, Edmond; Somerville, Mary M.; and Mirijamdotter, Anita, "The UBT Knowledge Center: A Collaborative Design Approach" (2017). UBT International Conference. 109.
https://knowledgecenter.ubt-uni.net/conference/2017/all-events/109
Included in
The UBT Knowledge Center: A Collaborative Design Approach
Durres, Albania
In setting the institutional vision for University for Business and Technology in 2001, founder Dr. Edmond Hajrizi sought to educate Kosovo students to become active contributors to the society and in the workplace, within the country, the Balkans region, and beyond. The UBT Knowledge Center initiative extends the founding vision of national development through higher education. Since local knowledge, identity, and learning are necessarily situated, Kosovar students, faculty, staff, and administrators serve as topical experts and international educators from Sweden and the United States serve as design facilitators. Participatory design commenced in April 2017 when international faculty from Sweden and the United States co-taught a graduate level course, Information Systems Analysis, Design, and Modelling, at the Pristina campus. Working with UBT administrators, directors, managers, and librarians, students worked in teams to co-design three essential parts of a holistic Knowledge Center ecosystem: a digital environment to advance local knowledge visibility, an organizational environment to enhance boundary crossing collaboration, and a digital academic library environment to enable discovery of and access to published academic scholarship. Following these ‘learn by doing’ instructional activities, exploratory knowledge management discussions produced a Knowledge Center concept paper in July 2017, with funding from the Fulbright Specialist Program. The white paper recognizes the social context of learning – that knowledge is acquired and understood through action, interaction, and sharing with others. It thereby anticipates the social relationships necessary for information exchange and knowledge creation, oftentimes enabled by technology, for knowledge incubation in the university and beyond. This collaborative design approach anticipates continuing to convene multidisciplinary conversations and to integrate interdisciplinary coursework into realization of the University’s founding knowledge vision which recognizes the critical importance of developing new and more complex ways for connecting people, information, and technology in the university and with the society. In response, the UBT Knowledge Center aims to foster knowledge creation which curates and preserves intellectual, cultural, national, and regional resources for future generations.
Comments
This international collaboration is funded in part by a 2017 Fulbright Specialist Program award from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, United States of America.