Duncan wrote:

I see my job to be that of a facilitator for learning. I am not a teacher per se. This basically means that the students in my care are expected to be self-motivated learners and I will do everything in my, albeit limited, power to support their learning. This, of course, means that students need to be (self-)motivated. OK, there will aways be some students that take the path of 'least resistance' - especially if they're not interested in the subject(s) that I lecture. Which is often the case! ;-) But I digress.

When I was in college, and from my wife's experiences teaching, only a small percentage of students are genuinely interested in the subject matter.

I don't know how things work over there, but we have a very bizarre phenomenon in the United States wherein at the conclusion of a semester, many students sell back their textbooks in order to get back a small percentage of what they originally paid.

Now, I can understand that maybe that "Rules of Volleyball" text isn't all that compelling, but I still can't fathom what would people to sell back Shakespeare or any of the other fascinating books (I'm interested in the history of American slavery, for example, and am aghast that students regularly sell back the compelling 18th and 19th century first hand accounts written by escaped slaves.)

As for knowledge management, one of the first things I thought about Conversant is how well it would work in an educational context. I know our University has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on much less capable software (in fact at this very moment most classes are still using a proprietary message board system, written specifically for our University, that runs on a VAX mainframe).