Using Conceptual Mapping to Help Retain Tribal Knowledge

Abstract

he served as ISU's Dean of the College of Technology. He has been an educator for over fourty years and has taught at the secondary, technical institute, community college, and university levels.Dr. Foster earned his Doctor of Education degree from the University of Illinois in Technology Education with secondary emphasis in Counseling Psychology. His research and writing are in the areas of learning theory, organizational and personal change, educational technology from a cognitive psychology perspective, instructional design, and total quality management.Dr. Foster has numerous publications and is a regular presenter at state, national, and international conferences. In addition, he is a reviewer for the Human Resource Development Review, the Human Resource Development Quarterly, and the Journal for Technology Education.In addition to his academic pursuits, Dr. Foster is President of Foster and Associate, through which he consults regularly in business and industry in the areas of training, facilitation, strategic planning, quality, team dynamics, organizational change, and technical problem solving.Dr. Foster is a certified flight instructor, and a master woodworker. He is an avid reader and regularly writes (sometimes even publishes) poetry. He is married with two children (a son and daughter) and two grandsons. Paper ID #16923 many years in logistics, sales, and the financial services industry prior to entering academia. Mr. Dean has authored numerous publications while presenting regularly at national and international conferences. In addition to research and teaching, he functions as the entrepreneurial lead for the current project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). In this role, Mr. Dean assists the research team by offering entrepreneurial consultation, and served as the spokesperson for the group's presentations at the NSF sponsored Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps L) program last summer in Washington D.C. As a result, the research team was able to successfully demonstrate that the diagnostic skills training program developed during the original NSF grant could be viable and sustainable as a business training service for private industry.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Retaining tribal knowledge using conceptual mapping Abstract Documenting and sharing important information learned in industrial practices can often lead to significant payoffs such as reducing operational cost or improving system performance. This information, often referred to as "tribal knowledge", is widely admitted by professional people to be of great value, and yet has not been systematically archived by most companies. In this paper, we present a conceptual mapping based approach for retaining tribal knowledge. We first demonstrate the theoretical framework for this approach that is applied to developing training modules to improve engineering and technology students troubleshooting skills. A case study of using conceptual mapping to capture domain expertise in controlling and monitoring ...

Application of a Computerized Method for Evaluating Systems-Level Thinking

“…Prior work by Shahhosseini served as a foundation for machine-based diagram evaluation [43][44][45][46]. Software was developed to compare two node-and-link diagrams and produce an overall similarity rating.…”

Effect of Rising Cost and Worker Shortage on Industry

“…Workers are leaving companies either to save themselves from COVID-19 or to find higher-wage jobs (NPR, 2021). This has created a vacuum of workers who had tribal knowledge about specific products or services in a particular company (Lin et. al, 2016).…”

“…Qualified workers are necessary for a better productivity rate (Freivalds and Niebel, 2013). One of the classical operations management strategies is the so-called learning curve strategy/experience curve strategy, where it is recognized that the production costs decline as workers gain more experience with the requirements of a particular process or the process is improved over time (Nahmias, 2009;Newnan et al, 2020). This justifies the necessity to train new workers at the earliest, and with proper tools (Freivalds and Niebel, 2013).…”

“…In addition, workers are leaving companies in order to find jobs with higher wages. Thus companies are losing workers who had tribal knowledge (Lin et al, 2016), and new workers are not filling in all the vacancies. This is also causing the disruption in supply chain.…”